Vampire Diaries alumni Ian Somerhalder details how he overcame 8-Figure debt

After starring in two of the biggest TV shows of the 00’s, The Vampire Diaries and Lost, you could be forgiven for thinking that Ian Somerhalder would be the last person that had to worry about crippling debts.

Yet the seasoned actor, who retired from the profession in 2019, had to do precisely that, when he and his wife Nikki Reed were saddled with an eight-figure debt, after their business ventures didn’t quite pan out.

“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.”

And that hole was particularly ‘hard to climb out of’, admitted the star, but he credited wife Nikki for having been instrumental in 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.”

Somerhalder credits his wife Nikki for helping him through the financial minefield (Paul Archuleta/Getty Images)

It isn’t the first time, Somerhalder has spoken about his wife’s role in getting his life back together either, as her previously gushed in an Instagram post: “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.”

Much of the couple’s financial woes stemmed from a disastrous business venture that saw the couple fall victim to fraud.

Prior to getting in a relationship with the Twilight actress, Somerhalder built a clean energy company and invested a huge portion of his earnings into the business while still working on The Vampire Diaries.

Additionally, as well as a huge personal investment, he also made several ‘huge personal guarantees to banks’.

The couple faced an eight figure debt after a business move went awry (JC Olivera/Getty Images)

Yet despite his high hopes and sincere desire to make the business successful, he said things soon went awry ‘due to greed and fraud within that company and fraudulent activities from our biggest customer.’

The temporary collapse of the oil and gas industry at the time also wreaked havoc on the business’ prospects, and ultimately meant he had made promises to lenders that he couldn’t actually meet.

Reflecting on the experience now, 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.’