The actress is teaming up with her former co-stars for a new podcast called 'Drama Queens.'
Sophia Bush is down to return to Tree Hill! ET's Katie Krause spoke with the 38-year-old former One Tree Hill star, who revealed that she hasn't ruled out the possibility of rebooting the beloved teen series.
"I mean, I can't spill all of our secrets, but I'd say never say never," she said.
Bush starred on the teen series from 2003 to 2012 as cheerleader-turned-successful fashion designer Brooke Davis. While Bush said she "can't say" if she and other cast members are in talks for a reboot, she did note of the possibility of her reprising her character. "I mean, she's the coolest."
Though Bush was mostly mum about OTH's potential reboot, fans are getting a reunion of sorts, as she and co-stars Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz are teaming up for a new rewatch podcast, Drama Queens. Burton, who left the show after season six, played Peyton Sawyer, while Lenz starred as Haley James.
"We've been talking about it forever and the fans really are just so incredible and they keep the love for the show pumping at you full speed," she said. "We have been approached about reboots and things and it's always so hectic to try to figure out. I mean, there were, like, a million of us on our show. It's complicated."
Throughout quarantine, Bush was busy working on her podcast, Work in Progress, in which she interviews thought leaders and activists. At night, she'd decompress by rewatching some of her favorite shows, including Sex and the City and Friends. This is where the idea for Drama Queens was born.
"I noticed that on social media, all these people were saying they were [rewatching] One Tree Hill... And I was like, 'Is this our moment?... Should we do this now?'" Bush recalled. "So I called Hilarie and I said, 'You tell me if this is crazy, but you left first, so I'm asking you first. What do you think?' She was like, 'Yeah, I'm in. Call Joy.' I was like, 'All right, I'm adding her in.' I called Joy and we were just like, 'Yeah, let's do this.'"
Quarantine turned out to be the perfect time to start such a venture, as it helped the women realize "that even if we couldn't physically be together, we could do something like this."
The podcast marks the first time the actresses are watching the show since its 2003 debut, and they're learning plenty along the way.
"Fans have asked us so many times when we get together... 'What was your favorite episode? What was it like to do this scene and this?' We kind of look at each other and we always feel so bad. We're like, 'Guys, we don't remember,'" Bush explained. "There's 187 episodes of the show, which is crazy... We used to film between 12 and 18 hours a day. I [calculated] the averages of time and then looked at how many days we shot the episodes. At the most conservative estimates, we spent 35,000 hours filming nine seasons of our show, so there's just stuff we don't remember."
Now, Bush, Burton and Lenz get to have the "really cool" experience of watching OTH "the way the fans have" for the first time.
"We're starting at the beginning, not having seen the pilot since it aired in 2003. It's so good," she said. "We just watched the second episode and all of us were crying at the end. We were like, 'Wait, it really holds. It really works.' We just haven't experienced it like that [before]."
As they experience the show as fans for the first time, the women are excited to welcome on their fellow cast members to do the same.
"I can't wait," Bush said of having her former co-stars on the podcast as guests. "It's going to be a parade of all our favorite humans. It's going to be great."
The OTH cast, which includes James Lafferty and Chad Michael Murray, was likewise excited about the podcast when the women spilled the news on a group text.
"We have a group text that literally everyone who's ever been on the show is on... Every single person from our show," Bush explained. "And so when we decided that we were going to do this, long before we announced it, we told everybody what was up, what our plans were, and just said, 'Look, we obviously want to have each and every one of you on. If you don't want to come on, that's totally OK. No hard feelings. But if you do, we can't wait to audibly hug you.'"
"Everyone has just been so excited. Everybody's pumped," she continued. "That feels really great that we're all at this stage where we just have more knowledge. We have more experience, we have more joy, and it feels really nice to all be able to support each other in what we're up to."
While the women and other OTH cast members have previously opened up about their negative experiences on the set of the teen drama, Bush said that the podcast "feels joyful."
"I think we're lucky in that we're all years out from this. We've had a lot of the conversations that are really hard, really emotional, really required the support of our whole ecosystem of women who are on that show," she said. "We've done that. We're not here to put our trauma on display and we're certainly not here to put people on the spot. We're not hiding anything. We're pretty no-holds-barred."
"We're bold women who are very blunt and frank, but we're all, I think, so fortunate to be in these positions where we've had each other," Bush continued. "We've been able to do our processing. And, at this point, I'm sure there are some men we worked for who were very scared and they probably should be, but if you didn't want to get called out for it, you probably shouldn't have behaved that way."
Bush added that the experience of making the podcast "doesn't feel like picking at a scab," but rather, "feels like a reclamation."
"We're taking back what was ours. We're taking back the thing we made. We're taking back our 35,000 hours," she said. "No boss who came to town from time to time or person who was a creep on a specific day or during a specific incident, they don't own that. We own it. It feels really, really fun to be creating something out of our work."
In addition to her new podcast, Bush is set to star on Good Sam, a new medical drama that she could not be more excited about.
"It's one of the best scripts I've read in years. It's charming and it's witty and it's smart and it's unapologetic and it's emotional. It gives people permission to really think about things, and feel things, and be on a ride," she teased. "I think it has some of the same kind of secret sauce that probably has made One Tree Hill last for so long. When characters are just really good and the writing is sharp it feels like catching lightning in a bottle, really."
Before the premiere of Good Sam, though, Bush is looking forward to the release of her new film, False Positive, in which she stars alongside Ilana Glazer, Pierce Brosnan, and Justin Theroux.
"This is a true psychological horror. It puts you in the position where you really don't know if the characters are seeing things or if they're really experiencing things," she said of the flick. "It creates just a general feeling of dis-ease. I remember when Ilana sent me the script, reading through it, I just got more and more uncomfortable. By the end, my mind was blown."
Drama Queens will debut Monday, June 21, wherever you get your podcasts, while False Positive premieres Friday, June 25, on Hulu.
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