Sophia Bush decided to share her side of her brief marriage to Chad Michael Murray in her upcoming memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine.
“The thing that’s a little hard to swallow when you share your life and your writing makes you a famous writer,” Bush, 44, said on the Wednesday, October 21, episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “People are like, ‘Wow, book changed my life.’ When you’re already famous and people have opinions about you and you share your story, people are like, ‘Can’t get over it.’”
She continued, “It’s a really weird dichotomy where you’re, sort of, not supposed to say anything. If you’re a person who’s done the work to heal from anything, who’s journeyed through your life attempting to be aware, who wants to be accountable, who wants to grow, who goes to therapy, you have thoughts about how things that happened to you shaped you. When I said I don’t want to write about it at all, my editor was like, ‘I hate to break it to you: Google exists.’”
Bush and Murray, 45, were married for only five months in 2005, finalizing their divorce the next year. (Bush secretly wed Ashlyn Harris in 2025, while Murray said “I do” with Sarah Roemer in 2014.)
“What felt important to me [to include in the book] was to say, ‘We were kids.’ We’re older. We’re all adults. We’re all parents. No harm, no foul,” Bush said, referring to Murray and Roemer’s three children, as well as her stepkids from Harris’ first marriage. “[I] wish you well. Praise the adult you are. Hope it’s mutual.”
Bush and Murray famously met on set of The WB’s One Tree Hill, where they played Brooke and Lucas, respectively. Their offscreen romance, however, soon sparked a rift between Bush and costar Hilarie Burton Morgan.
“They had worked together on another show, [which] wasn’t a great experience,” Bush recalled on Wednesday of Burton Morgan’s warning about dating Murray. “It was good advice, and I just didn’t have the wherewithal or the experience [to understand]. There was a while where my friends used to joke, ‘Look up gullible in the dictionary and you’ll see her face.’”
According to Bush, she used to believe the onscreen besties “stopped being two peas in a pod” because of Murray.
“Obviously, years later, when all of us started to try to unpack our experiences with our boss [Mark Schwahn], I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is why communication is so important because I felt so much shame,’” Bush said, claiming that Schwahn, 60, had told each woman different falsehoods about one another. “She was right [about Chad] … about who he was then. I know the trolls are going to have a field day, like, it’s all good. And so, for me, the distance was [because] I didn’t listen, she was right and that was it. I didn’t trust her.”
Bush and Burton Morgan, 44, were eventually able to “repair” their friendship after coming together when the cast publicly accused Schwann of harassment in 2017. (The OTH showrunner has never publicly addressed the allegations.)
Amid her distance from Burton Morgan, Bush continued pursuing her romance with Murray. She noted on the podcast how the origins of their relationship “felt like a fairy tale,” which took a turn on their wedding day.
“I’m covered in a rash from head to toe, maybe that’s a red flag, and not an allergic reaction,” she acknowledged. “It’s taken me a long time to learn that because the thing that has been the most praised in my work [is] I can do a 110-hour workweek. … That is the greatest asset in my line of work. That is what makes you a shell of a human in your personal life.”
And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress will be released Tuesday, October 27.
