‘One Tree Hill’ star Paul Johansson was ‘deeply depressed’ while filming the show: ‘I needed to get out’

nypost.com:

tyrannical father of Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray) and Nathan Scott (James Lafferty), on the beloved series, which ran from 2003 to 2012.Johansson revealed on a recent episode of the “Trying To Figure It Out With Ally Petitti” podcast that he suffered from depression and alcoholism.“It was awful,” he confessed. “I was deeply depressed and I was drinking.”The Canadian-born actor spent “about six or seven years … drinking a couple bottles of wine a night” by himself.“It was really tough,” he sighed. “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.”Johansson even revealed that fans would “get away” from him on airplanes due to his erratic behavior.The “Van Helsing” star noted that he was “grateful” when the show finally concluded, as the only way to “get out” of his funk was that the drama “had to end.”“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 asked the “really, really simple question” if he got any support from the series’ crew and the rest of its cast, he claimed: “Never, nothing, zero.”Several members of the “One Tree Hill” cast have spoken out in recent years about the alleged abuse they suffered at the hands of the show’s creator, Mark Schwahn.In 2017, stars Hilarie Burton (who played Peyton Sayer), Sophia Bush (Brooke Davis) and Bethany Joy Lenz (Haley James Scott), as well as 17 other women accused the filmmaker of sexual harassment on the set.Burton, 41, told Page Six in June that sharing her story of abuse was “freeing.”“Honesty is always better, it sets you free,” Burton said.