Ian Somerhalder

The Model Who Didn't Want to Be Just a Hanger

Ian Somerhalder didn't start out wanting to be an actor. By age ten he was already posing for brands like Calvin Klein and Versace in Milan and Paris because his mother pushed him into that world of flashbulbs. The money helped at home, and his face worked on camera. But the boy from Louisiana wanted more than to be a pretty face in an underwear catalog.

In 1997 he landed a small role in the series The Big Easy. It was his first real contact with a camera that wasn't looking for a static pose. Three years later he starred in Young Americans, a spin-off of Dawson's Creek that barely lasted eight episodes on air. That was a blow for someone used to luxury brands fighting over his image.

Television is a business of interchangeable faces.

Before making art-house films, he got his start in forgettable productions. In 2002 he appeared in The Rules of Attraction, playing a bisexual young man in a movie that aimed to be transgressive but fell short. Somerhalder realized then that his looks were a double-edged sword in Hollywood.

The Island and the Designer Fangs

Global recognition came to him in 2004 with Lost. He played Boone Carlyle, a character who seemed destined to last but ended up being the first to die traumatically on the island. The writers told him the news weeks before filming the final scene. Somerhalder left Hawaii with bittersweet feelings and a severance payment.

Damon Salvatore was his lottery-winning ticket.

In 2009 he signed on for The Vampire Diaries. He wasn't the story's good-guy lead but the cynical, violent brother who drank bourbon and snapped necks without blinking. Fans preferred his darkness to the boring heroism of his on-screen brother. The show ran for eight seasons and brought in multimillion-dollar profits for the CW network over nearly a decade.

And the bet paid off commercially. During filming in Atlanta, he became one of the best-paid actors on cable television. But the physical toll of shooting 22 episodes a year took its price. In 2017, the series ended, and the actor decided he would not play a vampire again unless he had full control of the project.

The Alcohol Business and Voluntary Retirement

In 2019 he tried to repeat the supernatural formula with V-Wars on Netflix. This time he worked as an actor and executive producer, managing budgets of five million dollars per episode. The platform canceled the series after just one season for failing to meet minimum audience targets in its first month of release.

But Somerhalder already had his mind somewhere else.

In 2021 he launched the Brother's Bond Bourbon brand with his castmate Paul Wesley. It wasn't a romantic decision or a celebrity whim. They analyzed the premium spirits market and spotted a legal gap for mass distribution in the United States. The alcohol business turned out to be more profitable than auditions in Los Angeles.

From his farm in California, he now runs his environmental foundation and his investments in regenerative agriculture companies. In 2023, his bourbon brand sold 100,000 cases in the United States. The actor hasn't stepped onto a film set since his last series was canceled in 2020.