James Lafferty Was Ready to Walk Away from Acting Before Booking “One Tree Hill”: ‘My Last Shot’ (Exclusive)

After what he described as a "super nerve-wracking" audition process, the actor went on to star as Nathan Scott from 2003 to 2012

Before suiting up as one of the Tree Hill Ravens on One Tree Hill, James Lafferty thought his journey as a child actor had reached its end.

Lafferty, 38, who played Nathan Scott on the drama from 2003 to 2012, remembers how it felt to land the role after growing up acting.

“For me it was sort of the culmination of my entire childhood in the acting game,” he tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I started when I was really young and I was auditioning by the time I was 10 and working my way up through smaller roles to get the opportunity to do something like this.”

Lafferty says he recalls going to the Warner Bros. offices and seeing photos of the cast of Dawson’s Creek displayed on their walls and thinking, "Oh man, it'd be so cool to be up there someday."

“When I got the audition for One Tree Hill — when I got the script it was originally called Ravens — and the role was a basketball player and he had an edge to him,” Lafferty remembers. “And it was just an opportunity to do all these things that I would've just absolutely loved to do at that time in my life.”

Lafferty, who was 17 at the time of his audition, says he and his mom stayed in a hotel in Burbank during the “super nerve-wracking” audition process.

Related: James Lafferty Talks About Getting Ready for That American Eagle Photo Shoot: 'Shave in All the Right Places' (Exclusive)

“It was my last shot at it,” he says. “I was just going to go to college if I didn't get this role, and I was going to go to Long Beach State and just do that for a while, and it ended up being the one that actually caught.”

He adds, “It felt like fate.”

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Lafferty says that although he considered Nathan to be a “villain” when he first read the script, he felt “completely comfortable with that because he was so well-written as a villain.”

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“You could immediately recognize that he was the way that he was for a reason because of the way that his father is,” he says of his character’s father, Dan Scott, played by Paul Johansson. “And so for me, it was just an opportunity to play a really complex character that was going through a lot, and it was manifesting itself in negative ways.”

He adds, “But I remember very early on the writers telling me, ‘He's not always going to be a villain. He's going to make a turn.’ And I was like, ‘I'm fine, either way. This is fun.’ ”

More than 10 years after the show ended, Lafferty is now working to find a streaming home for the series he co-wrote with OTH costar Stephen Colletti, Everyone Is Doing Great, which he describes as “a comedy about the cast of a teen drama starting their lives over in the shadow of their early success.”

Related: The Cast of 'One Tree Hill': Where Are They Now?

While the show’s first season is available for purchase on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, Lafferty is hoping to get that season along with the now-complete season 2 more accessible on a streamer.

“That's really what I'm looking forward to the most is knowing where the show is going to land,” he says of what's ahead for him. “I think we're going to know that by the end of the summer, and I just can't wait to go into the fall knowing that the world finally gets to see this thing that we made.”

Season 1 of Everyone is Doing Great is available to purchase on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.

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