Sophia Bush: 'One Tree Hill' producers were 'really deeply inappropriate' after Chad Michael Murray split
Sophia Bush‘s time on One Tree Hill was filled ups and downs. Many of them played out in the public eye, including her short-lived marriage to co-star Chad Michael Murray, something she doesn’t really like rehashing.
The 36-year-old actress was a guest on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast and was asked about falling in love with her co-star.
“Are we really going to discuss this one?” Bush quipped. “The reason why I don’t talk about it, A. is because everyone’s been 21 and stupid, but if you’re in our job, for some reason, people want talk to you about, like, when you’re fully fledged adults who’ve done really amazing s*** with your lives, they want to talk to you about the dumb thing you did in college, basically. Which doesn’t make sense to me, ’cause in any other realm, if a CEO is having a meeting, no one’s gonna ask about the time they went to a kegger in college.”
Murray, 37, and Bush started dating in 2003 and got engaged the following year. They said “I do” in April 2005 and separated five months later. The actor’s wandering eye was reportedly to blame, although neither star publicly confirmed the whispers.
“There was no space to self-reflect,” Bush told Shepard, adding that OTH producers were “really deeply inappropriate” to both her and Murray after their split.
“They ran, like, TV ads about it, it was really ugly,” she recalled. “They made practice of taking advantage of people’s personal lives, and not just for me and for my ex, for other actors on the show who would share as you do when you get close to people. Deeply personal things that were happening in their lives and they would wind up in storylines. It wasn’t OK.”
Bush continued, “It was opportunistic and ugly. When you run a show, you’re like a parent, you’re supposed to protect your flock, and it was the opposite of that. And I imagine that was hard for him as well, you know? It was a very ugly situation on their part. I think they kind of lived for the drama.”
Earlier this year, Bush opened up to Andy Cohen, calling the marriage “not a thing I actually really wanted to do.” She implied that her CW bosses pressured her into the relationship.
“Because how do you let everybody down?” she replied when Cohen asked why she went through with the nuptials in the first place. “And how do you — what’s the fight, 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 see their kids at night or they don’t because our days start on time.”
Through a publicist, Murray called the insinuation ludicrous.
“Chad conducts himself in a completely professional manner and would never marry for any reason but love,” His rep said in a statement. “Thirteen years since his divorce from Sophia, he has a very happy family life with his wife and children. He has completely moved on and doesn’t feel the need to engage in this type of behavior.”
Murray has yet to weigh in on Bush’s recent sound bites.
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