Chad Michael Murray: ‘I was a baby’ when I married Sophia Bush at 23
Chad Michael Murray knows he wasn’t ready to be a husband when he was with Sophia Bush.
The “One Tree Hill” alum, 42, looked back on his 2005 marriage to his former co-star that ended badly after only five months.
“I was a baby,” Murray told the Cut in an interview published Tuesday.
He continued: “I didn’t know up, down, left, right. You move out there and you go, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do now? Get married? That’s exciting!’ “
Murray and Bush, 41, met on the set of “One Tree Hill,” where they played Lucas Scott and Brooke Davis, respectively.
The actors dated for two years before they got married in 2005, when he was 23 and she was 22 — and they got divorced later that same year.
In early 2006, Bush filed for an annulment, citing fraud, but her request was denied. Their divorce was finalized in December 2006.
Last year, the exes’ relationship ended up in the headlines again when Erin Foster claimed that Murray cheated on her with Bush in the early 2000s.
Murray responded to the accusations to E! News: “It’s not one of those things that I want to go down the road of because there’s just never a winner. I feel blessed to be where I am right now.”
“I have more regrets in my life than I care to think about, but I don’t live in the past,” the “Freaky Friday” star added. “I try to move forward every single day and just go, ‘I got air in my lung, life in my step, the will to move forward and the sun’s gonna rise on a beautiful tomorrow.’”
Bush, for her part, has rarely spoken about her divorce from Murray, with a few exceptions.
In 2018, she told Andy Cohen that the marriage was “not a thing I actually really wanted to do” and explained how she felt pressured into saying “I do.”
“Because how do you let everybody down? And how do you, what’s the fight?” she said. “And when you have bosses telling you that you’re the only person who gets a person to work on time and 200 people either get to either see their kids at night or they don’t because our days start on time?”
Murray responded to Bush’s comments about their marriage and called them “ludicrous.”
“Chad conducts himself in a completely professional manner and would never marry for any reason but love,” the rep said in a statement to People at the time. “He has completely moved on and doesn’t feel the need to engage in this type of behavior.”
Years later, Bush did an interview on “Smallville” alum Michael Rosenbaum’s podcast and explained why she won’t talk about Murray.
“Im not allowed to because I’ve tried to poke fun at being a dumb kid and whenever I’ve done that, it gets twisted into I’m talking s – – t about somebody who I don’t even know anymore, who’s clearly a grown-up,” she said on the podcast in 2021.
The “John Tucker Must Die” actress also said, “I think you have to, like, laugh at who you used to be, but when people ask me about history that involves someone else … it’s not worth my time. It’s not a place where I harbor ill will or anything.”
Murray is now married to fellow actor Sarah Roemer, and they have three kids together.
Bush, meanwhile, is dating professional soccer player Ashlyn Harris following her divorce from Grant Hughes. The exes were married from June 2022 until Bush filed for divorce in August 2023.
