Ian Somerhalder recently opened up about a difficult chapter in his life, revealing in an interview with E! News that stepping away from acting came after a major financial setback. After retiring from his television career, the actor found himself dealing with debt in the eight-figure range—over $10 million—forcing him and his family to rebuild from scratch. He admitted that this “financial upheaval” played a big role in his decision to leave behind a highly successful run in the industry.
Somerhalder first rose to fame as Boone Carlyle on Lost and later became a global star for his role as Damon Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries, where he appeared across all eight seasons. Despite the massive success, he ultimately chose a different path.
“I retired from acting seven years ago,” Somerhalder recently told E! News’ while attending Manhattan Beach’s Beverage Forum. “I left an insanely lucrative career in television after financial upheaval from building a business that I didn’t build properly. And due to fraud, it put my wife and I into an eight-figure hole. Eight figures is a hard hole to climb out of. But Nikki [Reed] and I did it. You know, she really negotiated us out of this deal but we sold houses, paintings, cars, watches, everything.”
Looking back, he acknowledged the risks he took during that time. “I should’ve been retiring off of one of the biggest TV shows in the world [instead of] starting companies that were not gonna pay me possibly ever,” the actor added.
Somerhalder has been married to Nikki Reed since 2015, and he credits her for helping him navigate the crisis. In a past Instagram post, he described how she stepped in during what he called a “true nightmare” while he was juggling business ventures and his acting commitments.
“This woman here decided that she didn’t want to see her husband ruin his body/mind/spirit and pulled up her bootstraps and got down in the trenches assembling a team to get to the negotiating table to find a way out,” he wrote on at the time. “She devoted her life to getting me out of that mess and it almost killed her along the way. I am where I am BECAUSE of this woman.”
After his Netflix series V Wars was canceled in 2020, Somerhalder officially stepped away from acting. In a later interview with People, he shared that returning to Hollywood is unlikely, describing that phase of his life as being “in the rearview mirror.”
“I remember sitting with my management talking about this, saying, ‘Hey, this is the only thing I’ve ever known that’s ever sustained my family, and I’m walking away from it,’ at this sort of peak,” Somerhalder remembered about his decision to stop acting. “I say this in all humility, in all respect, but I would much rather do this than go spend two months in some city, shooting a TV show away from my family or transporting my family back and forth. Once you reach a certain level, you’re like, ‘Okay, I want to focus on family and the future of farming and food and energy and the big things.’ I don’t need to chase awards and anything that would make me feel better about myself.”
Media professional and journalist based in British Columbia, Canada. Founder of Studiox Film & TV Corporation, focusing on multicultural news, interviews, and community storytelling across Canada.
