Taylor Handley Reflects on ‘The O.C.’ Infamy, ‘Texas Chainsaw,’ and How ‘Hidden Palms’ Should’ve Been a Hit

It’s been more than 20 years since Oliver Trask arrived to become one of TV’s most enduringly menacing characters ever on The O.C., but Taylor Handley isn’t yet tired of hearing about how effective his work in the role was: “It’s always cool to hear about that character and that it stood the test of time,” he told TV Insider while discussing Sunday’s newest episode of Mayor of Kingstown. “What it tells me is that I did my job the right way.”

Fans of teen dramas of the mid-aughts will almost universally point to Oliver as one of the most love-to-hate characters of the era because he was a bossy rich brat who also had some very deep emotional wounds that he tried to salve by stealing Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton) away to play house in his penthouse. It was Handley’s captivating performance that sewed together those disparate parts of his personality and made the character tragic and threatening at the same time.

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Soon after, Handley had a shot at headlining his own show with a similar appeal: Hidden Palms. Premiering in 2007, the Kevin Williamson series centered on his troubled teen character Johnny Miller, who was the picture-perfect kid until tragedy struck, and the resulting depression sent him into a tailspin. While recovering, he found himself forced to start a new life in the dizzying glow of Palm Springs, where not everyone is what they seem.

The cast of the series was stacked — alongside Handley, it featured Amber Heard, Michael Cassidy, Sharon Lawrence, Tessa Thompson, Leslie Jordan, and more. Despite its on-paper potential, though, the timing was exactly wrong. When The WB, its parent network, merged with UPN to create The CW, Hidden Palms became a casualty.

“I loved that show. And it just so happened to fit in between Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries. We were that close to really having something there,” Handley remembered. “I don’t know what Season 2 had in store, but I know with Kevin Williamson at the helm, it would have been nothing short of amazing.”

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One trend he did successfully help to launch was two decades of gritty horror reboots and retcon prequels. Before Saw and Hostel took ownership of the so-called trend of “torture porn,” producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form — now mainstays of the horror genre — decided to revitalize The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise with the gritter, more evocative lensing of the 21st century, and when that proved to be a major hit, they took it a step further and stepped back in time for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, an origin story for the hungry, hungry Hewitt family. For horror nerds, the impact of that two-part series cannot be overstated, as it resulted in years of reimaginations across multiple franchises.

“When they did the first Texas Chainsaw reboot, it felt so fresh. And it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re getting into a new phase of horror cinema,'” Handley remembered. “I was such a big fan of that, and I had a couple of friends work on that. And getting to work with the Platinum Dunes boys, Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, it was kind of the biggest start of their careers, too. We still remain great friends.”

Of the filming experience, Handley shared one detail some fans might not know, explaining, “It was physically taxing. I mean, we were really strung up for hours at a time with sticky fake blood, not only in the heat of Texas but also because Austin gets really cold in November, too. So one day you’re shooting in, you know, 85 to 90-degree weather, you’re in short sleeves, and you got all this blood all over you for 14 hours of the day. And then the next day, you’ve got to shoot the continuation of that scene, and it’s like 40 degrees.”

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