An up-and-down romance. Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray fell quickly for one another after meeting in 2003 on the set of The CW’s One Tree Hill.
“She’s wonderful, she’s kind, she’s intelligent, and she makes me happy,” the Cinderella Story actor said during an interview with MTV about Bush.
The duo, who married in 2005 after a whirlwind romance, didn’t get to celebrate their love for long, as he almost immediately began doing press for House of Wax.
“Trust me, I do not want to be spending my honeymoon on a junket,” he told The Buffalo News during the junket for the movie, which took place six days after the pair tied the knot. “This is the last place I want to be, but we’ll find our time together. Right now, we’ve got some work to get done.”
The New York native also gushed over his then-wife. “All I’ll say is that it was the best day of my life. It was absolutely phenomenal. She was gorgeous. It was perfect,” he said of their California wedding. “She’s it. She makes me a better man.”
Unfortunately, the actors’ romance fizzled out rather quickly, and the twosome split up just five months after tying the knot. They continued to work together for years on One Tree Hill — something that wasn’t an easy task.
“At the end of the day, we’re grownups,” the Hitcher star said during a 2014 episode of What Happens Live With Andy Cohen. “I actually think it’s interesting that when people split in a way that’s unpleasant, they usually just go on quite literally hating each other — or the person in my situation hates the other person, whatever — but when you have to work with somebody for another half a decade, you kind of have to deal with it. Because for me, at the end of the day, my job is my priority. … So I think at the end of it, it really let me just let go of it.”
It also wasn’t easy to continue on the show in that atmosphere, as Bush later detailed on Dax Shepard‘s “Armchair Expert” podcast. The Love, Victor star noted that producers were “really deeply inappropriate” to both of the actors after their split.
“There was no space to self-reflect. … They ran, like, TV ads about it, it was really ugly. They made a practice of taking advantage of people’s personal lives,” the False Positive star said in 2018. “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 story lines. It wasn’t OK.”
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