Blood Brothers. Amy Rickman
who was a wealthy landowner in England with the surname Hull. He had an affair, and when the woman fell pregnant he didn’t want to deal with the consequences. Instead he decided to pay off one of his immigrant workers to marry the mistress and take the baby far away. The worker’s last name was ‘Somerhalder’ and the rest is history.
Ian’s parents divorced when he was fourteen and he lived with his mum. Edna was a very spiritual person, who sent her children to Catholic school and gave them herbal medicinal remedies when they got sick before giving them Western pharmaceuticals, part of the legacy of Ian’s Native-American grandmother. Edna is very health-conscious and taught her kids proper nutrition and how to eat healthily and organically; these were the values she instilled in her son from an early age and he has continued to follow them. According to him, his mother ‘made my baby food and had me on blue-green algae probably since I was in third grade. I never had sugar, I never got to have white bread or any white-flour products.’ Indeed, his only indulgence was a slice of chocolate cake on his birthday. Even now he maintains healthy eating standards such as drinking between three and ten cups of green tea every day, his favourite being Jasmine Pearl tea.
Like any kid, Ian sometimes yearned for the treats that his classmates got to have. One day at elementary school, during lunch hour, he looked down at his über-healthy sandwich (said to be grilled vegetables on marble rye bread), compared it to his friend’s lunch of peanut butter-and-jelly smeared between two layers of white bread, and felt a twinge of envy so he asked for a trade. He would never make that mistake again. The sugar-and-preservative laden lunch made him sick to his stomach. ‘I can’t eat fast food… I haven’t eaten McDonald’s in ten years. I eat fish every day,’ he explains.
Even more than eating healthily, Ian’s mum also taught her family to live healthily and encouraged Ian and his siblings to go out and enjoy the great outdoors. His favourite toy was a red BB gun (a kind of air gun) that he would take out among the marshes and fields around his house to play games. He must’ve gotten up to lots of high jinks with that gun as he wouldn’t give one to his own children: ‘I grew up in the country and would I give a child (I mean a six-to nine-year-old) a gun? Absolutely, without a doubt, hell no!’
The rich cultural history surrounding New Orleans also enabled the energetic Ian to release some energy as he used to participate in reenactments of the American Civil War, where he would dress up in eighteenth-century costume and run around a fake battlefield. Little did he know this would be the perfect practice for a role to come!
Ian also found fuel in his father’s stories. Robert Somerhalder had served in the military during the Vietnam War but it wasn’t his tales of warfare that Ian found appealing, but the adventure and travel in South-East Asia that his father had experienced. It made Ian realise the world was so much bigger than Louisiana and he wanted to travel and see it all: ‘I’ve had these feelings since I was a kid… Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to travel to new cities, new hotel rooms – I should have been a damn rock star.’
Ian’s ambition and thirst for life steadily grew as he experienced more and more: ‘I had a great [childhood]. We had horses and motorcycles and boats, but I always wanted more – a bigger horse or a faster bike or whatever,’ he recalls. Being greedy was not a value that Edna wanted to encourage and besides, the family didn’t have the money to give Ian all he wanted; instead, his mother wanted him to learn that the only way to achieve your goals and get what you want is through hard work. Edna suggested that Ian get a job as a model, so he could work and earn some money. She knew some people in the business and Ian was keen: ‘I said, “Sure, sign me up!”’ His mother then scrimped and saved so they could rent an apartment in New York for three summers. It worked, though, as Ian landed a three-year contract with Ford Modeling Agency in New York, ‘and I was making more money an hour than people with PhDs.’ He was only ten years old at the time.
And so it was that in the summertime, when most kids went to camp or were away on holiday, Ian went to New York to model, with his mum as his manager. Almost immediately he started to get bookings for big-name clients, his first being for Ralph Lauren: he modelled their kids’ range, becoming one of the company’s ‘little polo boys’. As he told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show: ‘It was a blast, it was so fun.’ Other modelling jobs quickly followed, for Calvin Klein, American Eagle Outfitters, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Versace. The experience was to change him for life: ‘I was exposed to a lot of interesting things, talented photographers and cool intellectuals, and New York City got into my blood. It was a juxtaposition of New York and this quiet, rural area of Louisiana my family lived in. It changes your outlook on childhood – you grow up really fast.’
In fact, Ian was so successful as a model that by the time he turned thirteen and started at junior high, he was already pretty burned out of the fashion world. He took some time off to focus on his studies, sports and his friends back home. Like many successful teens who balanced school with modelling (and soon, acting), he often felt ostracised at high school and wasn’t part of any particular group. He didn’t let it bother him though, as he knew he was destined for great things beyond school. And so to make the most of his time there, he joined the high school’s drama society and focused on working towards his dream. ‘I was just “me” in high school,’ says Ian on his website. ‘If anything, [and it’s] my motto still, … I didn’t care what others thought/think of me, to be honest. I was doing the whole modeling thing at that point and caught tons of shit because of it. If you do what you love (music, art, sports, writing, academics, etc.), who cares what or whom is deemed as “rejected” you know? As long as you aren’t hurting anyone and obeying your parents for the most part, as well as obeying the law for the most part, who cares who is “rejected”! I was a reject at times, sure – we all are!’
Ian’s hiatus from the big city worked for a little while, but it seemed as if New York wouldn’t leave him alone. The agencies, designers and photographers all wanted him back – and this time as an adult star. The week after he turned sixteen, he left his Louisiana home to live permanently in New York and pursue his modelling career. This meant going through a complicated process called ‘emancipation’ – where a minor (i.e. someone under the age of eighteen) leaves home in order to pursue a business or occupation without the involvement or approval of their parents. ‘I left home a week after I turned sixteen and started working,’ Ian told Tribune. ‘My parents trusted me. There’s a whole emancipation process where you can live on your own – we just had this understanding that it was OK. Now I look back and go, “Wow – sixteen!” But when you have agents who make sure you’re driven around the city, you’re protected; you have someone to watch out for you.’
And this time it wasn’t just going to be New York for Ian: he had a new manager, a woman he considered his surrogate mother called Brenda Netzberger, and with Brenda and Ford Models (and later DNA Models), he travelled all over the world – from New York and Los Angeles to Paris, London, Barcelona and Milan. For Ian, it felt like a dream come true and he quickly realised that one of his passions was travelling and exploring – he loved being opened up to new cultures.
Living in Europe was an incredible growing-up experience for Ian and he soon found himself immersed in a world he didn’t always understand: ‘I went off the rails and down the side of the mountain. I went nuts for a while, but I soon grew out of it,’ he told Metro. ‘Kids in Europe go crazy at a slower pace than kids in America. There are things that are accepted in Europe that aren’t in America: you can drink at 16 in Europe, kids have a good time, but it’s not like in the States when you have to wait until you’re 21, end up pounding a case of beer in one night and end up in hospital – kids don’t need to do that in Europe.’
More big fashion names continued to fall over themselves to hire him and Versace was his first massive campaign: ‘Versace was my first campaign as an adult (meaning it was after modelling when I was ten to thirteen) at sixteen. It was shot in Massachusetts with Bruce Weber and basically kicked off, what I guess for lack of better words, this “journey” if you will. It was that week or so that would introduce me to the individuals whom I would be seeing, travelling with, partying with and doing some very crazy, not-so-legal activities in the company of over the coming years.’
Modelling