Sophia Bush may have just gotten married, but she’s reflecting on a past, high-profile relationship on the Drama Queens podcast.
Specifically, her marriage and divorce from One Tree Hill co-star, Chad Michael Murray.
While chatting with her former co-stars, Bethany Joy Lenz and Hilarie Burton—who are all too familiar with what went down between Biush and Murray—the actress opened up about the hardships of having to work on set after the couple divorced in 2006. They got engaged in 2004 and married in 2005.
In fact, Bush said it was even more difficult because their characters, Brooke Davis and Lucas Scott, started dating around the same time their relationship was hitting a rough patch that it would never bounce back from.
“Not for nothing, you were going through a breakup with the person that you were playing a romance opposite of,” Joy Lenz said.
“And regardless of what all those circumstances were, that’s incredibly difficult — emotionally to be able to be vulnerable and be there in that moment. There’s lots of actors who have done that — who’ve done movies and TV shows and things, they date their costar or whatever, it doesn’t work out. But the fact that you were able to just be that raw and open and vulnerable, it’s a real credit to you as an artist. You put your art in front of everybody and just were like, ‘Look, this is it. I’m just sharing my heart and here we are’. I thought it was really beautiful,” she said.
Bush gave a very mature answer, explaining that regardless of what was going on in her personal life, she prioritized the show and the character that resonated with so many young women.
“People can call it whatever they want. They can say it’s strength, they can say it’s pride, they can say its professionalism — you can put a positive or a negative skew on I, but I was always going to put Brooke Davis ahead of everybody and everything else. Nothing mattered to me but being honest for her,” she explained.
The actress, who recently wed Grant Hughes in a stunning and poignant Oklahoma wedding, previously refused to speak about her marriage to Murray as she didn’t want her career to be defined by a relationship.
“I refuse to let that one relationship define me, which is why I’ve done my best to avoid discussing it for 10 years,” she began, while acknowledging that it was a “massive event” in her life.
She added: “The trauma of it was amplified by how public it became, which was incredibly foreign and bizarre to a girl who’d been just another college kid 24 months before her life blew up.”
Bush remained on OTH for the show’s full nine-season duration, which wrapped in 2012. Meanwhile, Murray exited the teen drama in season 6. He has since started a family with Crackle co-star Sarah Roemer. The duo married in 2015 and share two children.