Given that Ian Somerhalder led two of the most talked-about TV series of the 2000s — The Vampire Diaries and Lost — it’s easy to assume money worries would be the last thing on his mind.
But the actor, who stepped away from acting in 2019, has said he and wife Nikki Reed were hit with enormous financial pressure after a business push went badly wrong, leaving them facing an eight-figure deficit.
“I retired from acting seven years ago,” Somerhalder told E! News at the Beverage Forum in Manhattan Beach, California, on Tuesday, April 28. “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.”
He acknowledged that digging out from that situation was extremely difficult, and emphasized that Reed played a major role in helping them stabilize their finances again.
“But Nikki and I did it,” he added. “You know, she really negotiated us out of this deal but we sold houses, paintings, cars, watches, everything.”
This isn’t the only time Somerhalder has highlighted Reed’s involvement in turning things around. He previously praised her in an Instagram post, writing: “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.
“She devoted her life to getting me out of that mess and it almost killed her along the way.”
According to Somerhalder, much of their trouble traced back to a business venture that unraveled after fraudulent activity.
Before he began dating the Twilight actor, Somerhalder had launched a clean energy company, pouring a significant share of his TV income into the project while he was still working on The Vampire Diaries.
He also said that beyond investing his own money, he took on major commitments connected to financing.
Despite his optimism about the company’s potential, he said the situation deteriorated ‘due to greed and fraud within that company and fraudulent activities from our biggest customer.’
He added that an industry downturn at the time — including instability in oil and gas — undercut the company’s outlook, leaving him unable to fulfill obligations he had agreed to with lenders.
Looking back, Somerhalder said he ‘should have been retiring off of one of the biggest TV shows in the world’ rather than ‘starting companies that were not gonna pay me possibly ever.’