One Tree Hill’s Paul Johansson Struggled With Depression During Show

Paul Johansson is getting candid about how his role on One Tree Hill took a toll on his mental health.

“It was awful,” Johansson, 59, shared on the Tuesday, December 19 episode of the “Trying to Figure It Out With Ally Petitti” podcast. “I was deeply depressed and I was drinking.”

Johansson starred as the infamous villain Dan Scott in the teen drama series, which began airing on The WB in 2003. In the show, his character is the biological father of Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray) and Nathan Scott (James Lafferty) and the master manipulator of their small town.

The actor shared that he was “drinking a couple bottles of wine a night” by himself, adding that “it was really tough” for “about six or seven years.” Johansson also revealed that people would move seats on airplanes “to get away” from him.

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“It was just a time when I think I was absorbing the energy of the people that were looking at me and seeing me and seeing me as something that’s bad,” he recalled, adding that he’s “sensitive” and “vulnerable to criticism.”

He noted that the way “to get out of it,” was that the show “had to end.” When OTH eventually did come to a close in 2012, Johansson confessed he was “actually grateful.”

“I needed to get out and get other characters and feel other things, but then I was getting bad guy roles again because of that show,” he said. “It put me in a box.”

When podcast host Ally Petitti asked if he was provided with any support from the show, he replied: “It’s a really, really simple question. Never, nothing, zero.”

This isn’t the first time that Johansson has opened up about his time with the OTH. After costar Bethany Joy Lenz called the set “divided” at times, Johansson exclusively told Us Weekly that he never experienced that.

“I think I was more isolated from that,” he told Us in August 2019. “I think people were more careful around me, because I was a different generation. I’m a big dog, you know what I mean? So I don’t think that would have gone on under my watch, had I seen any of it. I didn’t see anything on the set, but sets can become pretty familiar with each other. Boundaries can get a little bit blurry. You’ve got to check yourselves and help each other.”

Johansson noted that “it was a super close set,” and they “really all loved each other.”

“I didn’t know about that — if there were any separations in that regard,” he said. “I don’t think as an older character, I was involved in all that stuff.”

He continued: “What I do believe is that we have a tremendously powerful female contingent that really drove our show. My feeling is that that show is a female powerhouse-driven show and that we followed the girls much more than they ever followed us. Like, our leaders were Joy, Sophia [Bush] and Hilarie [Burton Morgan]. They were our leaders in many ways and setting a lot of examples.”