Sophia Bush Opens Up About One Tree Hill Producers Exploiting Her Chad Michael Murray Breakup

Published on December 11, 2018.

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For quite some time former One Tree Hill stars Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray never talked about their whirlwind relationship and marriage that ended in divorce all while they starred on the hit teen drama, but recently Bush has shed some light on what it was like to continue working together after an “ugly” split.

The 36-year-old actress recently saw down with Dax Shepard for an episode of his Armchair Expert podcast where she reflected on her relationship with Murray and revealed that producers on One Tree Hill exploited their breakup for the show.

While she never mentioned Murray by name, it was clear who she was talking about as she explained, “The reason that 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 to talk to you about like, when you’re fully-fledged adults who’ve done really amazing s— with your lives, they wanna talk to you about the dumb thing you did in college basically.”

She continued, ““Which doesn’t make sense to me, ’cause like, 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.”

What’s complex about this issue for me is that the person who I was 21 and stupid with is also an actor,” said Bush, who admitted that she was “a really naive kid.”

She added, ““Being a super nerdy kid and suddenly you’re on TV and all this stuff is happening and one of the cool people you work with thinks you’re awesome, there’s really base brain stuff there. I think that for me, it took me a long time to do the kind of inventory you’re talking about in the after effect. And I continued to be in a place of work with my ex.”

Bush said that the two had to work together professionally for the sake of the show, and while they were convincing on-screen it doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard for the two off-screen. “There was no space to self-reflect,” Bush told Shepard of the breakup. “There was like, ‘This is my integrity, this is my job, I will not falter for one second or one minute ever on this set. I will be the most f—— professional person anyone has ever seen.”

She went on to explain that while she and Murray attempted to maintain professional it was the producers who were “really deeply inappropriate to both of us” about the breakup while on set. “They ran TV ads about it. It was really ugly.”

“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, like 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 okay,” she shared. “It was opportunistic and ugly and 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. It was a very ugly situation on their part. I think they kind of lived for the drama,” she added.

Bush’s recent comments come only months after she opened up about her marriage to Murray on Andy Cohen’s radio show which caused a brief feud between herself and her ex-husband who did not appreciate her talking about the relationship.

After meeting on the set of One Tree Hill, Bush and Murray quickly began dating in 2003 before getting engaged in May 2004. They wed less than a year later in April 2005 but separated after only five months of marriage and their divorce was finalized in 2006.