Ian Somerhalder revealed that he and wife Nikki Reed sank their teeth into crushing debt and found a way to bounce back — but not without putting in some serious work.
“I retired from acting seven years ago,” the Vampire Diaries alum, 47, 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.”
Somerhalder admitted that the debt was “a hard hole to climb out of,” going on to reveal that Reed’s help was essential to him getting back on track.
“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.”
Prior to getting in a relationship with the Twilight actress, 37, Somerhalder built a clean energy company while starring as Damon on The Vampire Diaries, revealing in May 2021 that it was a business venture he invested into “heavily” while making “huge personal guarantees to banks.” (The Vampire Diaries ran for eight seasons from 2009 to 2017.)
Somerhalder — now dad to 8-year-old daughter Bodhi and a 2-year-old son with Reed — said that things went awry “due to greed and fraud within that company and fraudulent activities from our biggest customer.”
He noted the temporary collapse of the oil and gas industry at the time was the final straw that broke hs financial back. The former small screen star said in his new interview that “it all came crashing down” after he made promises to lenders he couldn’t keep.
In hindsight, Somerhalder said he “should have been retiring off of one of the biggest TV shows in the world” instead of “starting companies that were not gonna pay me possibly ever.”
Somerhalder previously credited Reed for her unwavering support.
“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,” he gushed in an Instagram post. “She devoted her life to getting me out of that mess and it almost killed her along the way.”
The couple recently celebrated their 11-year wedding anniversary. They tied the knot on April 26, 2015.
