The O.C. Star Adam Brody Has One Major Regret About His Role As Seth Cohen

Adam Brody has at least one big regret from his time playing Seth Cohen on the teen primetime soap "The O.C." — and it has to do with his on-set behavior.

Brody, who played the lovable California-based comic book geek (with inexplicably chiseled features) for the show's four seasons, made this admission in Alan Sepinwall's new oral history "Welcome to The O.C." Per Variety, the book includes a confession from Brody that though he was respectful towards everyone on set, by the time the show hit Season 3, he started to lose interest, and he wasn't particularly subtle about it. 

"I would never scream or yell at anyone, or say anything f***ing mean," Brody qualified. "But I think I very much let my distaste for the later episodes be known. I didn't mask that at all and I'm sure I openly mocked it a bit. So I'm not proud of that."

"I started to be creatively less interested," the actor said. "I blame myself for a lack of professionalism, and a disrespect to the work. In terms of engagement as a whole, I'll just say that they're different shows, Season 1 and [the later seasons]. Had the quality been the quality of Season 1, I'm sure I would have been a lot more engaged... The quality of it and my engagement went hand in hand."

Adam Brody's self-assessment is apparently spot-on — and it spawned a plotline to explain why Seth, who normally had a pretty high energy level, seemed lackluster all of a sudden. Josh Schwartz, who created the series alongside Stephanie Savage, said that the highly unpopular plotline where Seth is constantly smoking marijuana — which came about during Season 3 as the show's teen characters were applying to college — was used to sidestep the fact that Brody seemed totally bored with the show.

"Brody just changed his delivery, his investment in it," Schwartz told Alan Sepinwall in the book. "His style shifted to such a degree that we felt like we needed to account for it creatively. That's where 'Kaitlin [Cooper, played by Willa Holland] gets Seth hooked on pot' took root. We were like, 'Well, how do we explain his lethargy on-screen? And at least if we can write that he's stoned, then we're not trying to write around it.'"

According to other people on the show, Adam Brody wasn't the only one exhausted by the time Season 3 arrived. This does make sense; "The O.C." averaged nearly 30 episodes per season, which, by today's metric, is an absolutely wild number. Melinda Clarke, who played the haughty socialite Julie Cooper throughout the series, told Alan Sepinwall that none of the "kids" — referring to Brody and his younger co-stars Ben McKenzie, Rachel Bilson, and Mischa Barton — were particularly invested in the 3rd season. 

"We were very aware in Season 3 of how disliked the scripts were, especially by the kids," she said, specifically mentioning that all of them (save for Barton) were playing much younger characters in their 20s. "Adam and Ben were like, 'We're grown men and we're playing in high school still.' They didn't really ever talk to me personally about it, but that was the general understanding on set."

"By the time we got to Season 3, we were all burned out," Josh Schwartz confirmed. "We'd made so many episodes so quickly, and I think it wasn't a happy set for long stretches of it. Quite frankly, everybody was over it at that point. ... It had been a great ride, but it had been a volatile ride." Schwartz wasn't wrong; the show was on its last legs. After Barton's Marissa Cooper infamously died in a fiery car accident in Season 3, the show only ran for one more season and concluded once that wrapped up.

Adam Brody left his tenure as Seth Cohen behind back in 2007, but he's continued working steadily since then. Aside from raising two children with his wife Leighton Meester — who played the lead role of Blair Waldorf on "Gossip Girl," another beloved teen primetime soap created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage — Brody has appeared in several notable projects. These include cult films like "Jennifer's Body," successful horror flicks like "Ready or Not," and the "Shazam!" franchise, where he plays the adult version of Freddy Freeman (portrayed by Jack Dylan Grazer as a kid). Most notably, he played another character named Seth — albeit a very different one — in the prestige Hulu drama "Fleischman is in Trouble," starring alongside huge names like Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, and Lizzy Caplan. "They're very different characters," Brody told Annabel Nugent at The Independent UK in an interview earlier this year.

So would he ever don another Death Cab for Cutie band tee and play Seth Cohen again? Maybe, but probably not. In March of this year, he was asked about a possible reboot, and he was pretty clear about what it would take to get him back to the wealthy hamlet of Newport Beach. "If there was a reason, like a really inspired idea? Yes," he told E! "Other than that, probably not. No. And by 'inspired idea,' I mean lots and lots of money."

"The O.C." is available to stream on Hulu now.