Unfortunately, people are still asking Sophia Bush about her relationship with her former One Tree Hill co-star Chad Michael Murray — a subject she’s made clear she doesn’t like discussing. The most recent conversation took place on Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, when he asked her about falling in love with Murray.
“Are we really going to discuss this one?” Bush responded. “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—t 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.”
Bush added that there “was no space to self-reflect” after the two broke up. To make matters worse, OTH producers were apparently “really deeply inappropriate” to the both of them.
“They ran, like, TV ads about it, it was really ugly,” Bush said. “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.”
She 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.”
Though Bush rarely discusses her relationship with Murray, earlier this year, she told Andy Cohen that getting married was not something she “actually really wanted to do” and that she didn’t want to “let everybody down.”
On Monday’s podcast with Shepard, Bush also discussed her time — and why she left — NBC’s Chicago P.D., where she played Detective Erin Lindsay.
“I quit because, what I’ve learned is I’ve been so programmed to be a good girl and to be a workhorse and be a tugboat that I have always prioritized tugging the ship for the crew, for the show, for the group, ahead of my own health,” Bush said. “The reality was that my body was, like, falling apart, because I was really, really unhappy.”
She added that she “inhabited that role of ‘pull the tugboat'” to the point where she prioritized protecting everyone’s jobs over her own happiness and health.
“… just because I’m unhappy or being mistreated or I’m being abused at work, I’m not gonna f—k this job up for all these people. And what about the camera guy whose two daughters I love and this is how he pays their rent? It becomes such a big thing,” Bush explained.
Apparently, her bosses even told her that if she were to “raise a ruckus,” she’d cost “everyone their job.”
But eventually, she had enough. When it came time for the fourth season, Bush said she told her bosses “Okay, you can put me in the position of going quietly of my own accord or you can put me in the position of suing the network to get me out of my deal and I’ll write an op-ed for the New York Times and tell them why.”
Props to her!