If you’re from a certain era, you’ll remember where you were when it emerged that Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson had split. The fact that Seth and Summer, aka the best couple in The OC (sorry-not-sorry, Marissa and Ryan), were dating in real-life as well was a total joy to fans of the show — until they were no more.
With Brody winning hearts once more opposite Kristen Bell as the cute rabbi in Netflix hit Nobody Wants This, all those emotions have come flooding back — complete with some whimsical West Coast indie playing in our minds, naturally. So let’s look back at what Brody, now 44, and Bilson, 43, once were.
How it Began
They say you should never date your co-stars, but did these two listen? Not a chance.
Brody and Bilson had actually met before the show, when he was casually dating an unidentified friend of hers — but she’s since admitted that she thought he was “kind of a d–k”, although “cute and funny”.
But once they had started working together in 2003 (when Bilson was 22 and Brody was 23), sharing an undeniable chemistry as unlikely on-screen couple Seth and Summer, things quickly progressed, with Bilson revealing that she started questioning her feelings for her co-star when they shot their first on-screen kiss, just six episodes into season 1 of the show. “I remember after shooting the scene where I kiss him, like, I remember thinking, ‘Do I like Adam?’” she said on the Welcome to The OC, Bitches! podcast in 2021. “And I remember thinking after work, because I feel like it was the last scene I shot that day, being, like, “Wait, do I like Adam? That’s when those wheels started turning.”
Soon, the pair were an established couple, moving in together and getting a pet pitbull terrier together, which they named Penny Lane. Cute.
How Long it Lasted
These two sadly didn’t quite make it to the end of The OC, breaking up in 2006. In fact, by the time we saw Seth and Summer getting married on TV in season four, the pair had already split, after around three years of dating — and four seasons of the show.
Sounds awkward? It was!
“We broke up at the very end so there wasn’t much [for us to film] after the breakup,” she revealed on the Armchair Expert podcast in 2021. “We did get married after we broke up. That’s always fun! They totally did that on purpose. That was the only scene left to shoot, was the wedding. They’re like, ‘You broke up? Let’s give you a wedding.’”
How it Ended
The pair have never spoken about the exact reasons for the split, other than Bilson insisting “We still got along really well”, but at the time Brody had become disillusioned with working on the show even before the split.
The actor has since admitted that he didn’t behave very enthusiastically on set, which must have been tricky for the ever-perky Bilson. “I started to be creatively less interested,” Brody admits in the official tell-all book, Welcome To The OC: An Oral History. “I blame myself for a lack of professionalism, and a disrespect to the work.”
Creator Josh Schwartz says that Brody was so “lethargic” on set as they shot the later seasons of the show that they had to write his personality change into the plot. “Brody just changed his delivery, his investment in it,” said Schwartz. “His style shifted to such a degree that we felt like we needed to account for it creatively. That’s where ‘Kaitlin 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.’”
Bilson admits it was tough being a supportive girlfriend at the time. “How do you balance that?” she said in the book. “Because you want to be supportive of the person you’re with. But also I’m a firm believer in always being grateful, and gratitude comes first. And I think there were probably times where that went by the wayside. You grow up, you look back, and you can realize when you’re young, you might behave in certain ways you wish you hadn’t.”
There was another little bump in the road for the couple when, on the show, Seth was involved in a love triangle with Anna, played by Samaire Armstong, and Bilson felt that the actress got a little too cozy with her man. “When Seth is in the bedroom with Anna and she goes to kiss him, I see Samaire, like, slip tongue!” she said in 2021, after rewatching the scenes. “I’m watching it and she slipped the tongue and I get transported back to 18 years ago and I get a little jealous! And I’m like, ‘What are you doing slipping tongue in his mouth?’ It was like the real-life triangle playing out as I’m watching it. I saw the tongue and I was like, ‘There’s no tongue in television!’. I feel like it definitely played out a little bit in real life for a minute. Not really, really, but I remember the tension with Samaire and I, a little bit.”
And if she’s still talking about it two decades later, it must have really stung.
What They Said About Each Other
Much like her famous character, Bilson has always loved to talk! When the pair were dating, she told Teen People how happy she was. “We always have a lot to talk about and we tell each other everything,” she said. “I feel like I have everything now — the dog, the house, the job, and him. I can’t ask for anything more.”
What They Say Now
Bilson still loves to talk! Over the years, the actress has spoken in magazine interviews and on various nostalgic podcasts about their relationship, and it sounds like she mostly has happy memories. “Because of what the show was and how young we all were, going through it with someone experiencing the same thing and having that kind of support was really awesome,” she told Nylon in 2021. “I’m actually grateful that I did have it.”
Brody, too, looks back at the time fondly. “It was my pleasure and it was such a joy,” he told Bilson when they chatted together on the Welcome To The OC, Bitches! podcast in 2021. “In the pilot, you made it your own instantly and everyone fell in love with you. I felt like we were sparring so well together so fast.”
In the same year, Bilson spoke about the relationship on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast (yes, the guy who’s married to Kristen Bell, who Brody appears opposite in Nobody Wants This. Hollywood is a small world!). “I had so much, and still do, love and respect for Adam,” she said. “We went through so much together, being so young and everything with the show. And I’m so happy for him with his family and his beautiful wife and kids and everything.”
She added that she credits the relationship with preventing her from getting sucked into the wild celebrity party scene — in what appears to be a reference to her co-star Mischa Barton. “I wasn’t at the clubs, falling out of the cars panty-less,” she said. “It was a little different for me. I was in a relationship during the show, which I think helped keep me at home, playing board games and watching really great TV like Jeopardy! We did go out, but it was just a different thing. There was stability and I did grow up kind of fast, did all the stuff a little early.”
Bilson also credits Brody with improving her acting skills. “You taught me how to act well,” she said on Welcome To The OC, Bitches! “You made it so, like, comfortable to just go for it and not be afraid. Everything you did in working with you really made me have the confidence to kinda, like, do whatever I wanted and go for it. I just wanna say thank you.”
More cheekily, Brody also revealed in a Reddit Ask Me Anything chat in 2014 that his ex was an amazing kisser. “One of the all time greats!” he said. With his top notch kissing skills getting a lot of attention in Nobody Wants This, it sounds like he might owe Bilson a thank you too.
Key Relationship Takeaways
Their characters Seth and Summer tied the knot in the final episodes of The OC, and it wasn’t too long before Brody and Bilson started settling down too — sadly for fans, it just wasn’t with each other. Brody started dating Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester in 2013 (Seth Cohen and Blair Waldorf isn’t a twist anyone saw coming!), and the pair have now been married for a decade and have two young children.
Bilson, meanwhile, has a 9 year old daughter, Briar, with actor Hayden Christensen, who she dated for 10 years. The pair split in 2017, but now happily co-parent. Bilson’s next high-profile relationship was with actor and comedian Bill Hader, in 2020, but it was short-lived: the pair were together for around six months, but struggled to keep it going during the pandemic. She later joked that she missed his “big d–k”!
On the Call Me Daddy podcast in 2022, the actress said that she’s noticed something that some of her exes have in common. “This is a generalization,” she said. “I think I’ve dated quite a few actors, and I do think that some of them, not all, have very self-involved tendencies.” She later emphasized that she didn’t mean Christensen.
Whatever went down between Brody and Bilson when they split, we’re so glad that their ultimately ill-fated relationship hasn’t tarnished the brilliance of Seth and Summer. These two were clearly hugely important to each other at a pivotal point in their lives, and are able to look back on the time with happy memories. After all, you just know that if Bilson had any bad feeling toward Brody, she’d probably be pretty open about it!
