"They ran TV ads about it. It was really ugly."
Sophia Bush is opening up about the "really ugly" aftereffects of her split from Chad Michael Murray.
In the latest episode of Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, the 36-year-old actress talked about life on the One Tree Hill set after her 2005 separation -- and subsequent divorce -- from her co-star.
"They were actually really deeply inappropriate to both of us about it," Bush claimed of the producers on the CW show that ran from 2003 to 2012. "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," Bush added. "It wasn’t OK. It just, like, wasn't OK."
Bush continued to call out the producers, saying their apparent predilection to using actors' personal lives as fodder for plot 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," she said. "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.”
As for how she got into the five-month long marriage in the first place, Bush called herself "a really naive kid."
"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,” she said.
After the split, though, “There was no space to self-reflect. 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**king professional person anyone has ever seen.”
Prior to opening up about her divorce, Bush seemed hesitant to speak on the subject.
“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 sh*t with your lives, they wanna talk to you about the dumb thing you did in college, basically,” Bush said. “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.”
Her uncertainty with discussing the issue goes back to a June interview when she said that marrying Murray "was not a thing I actually really wanted to do."
“What’s complex about this issue for me is that the person who I was 21 and stupid with is also an actor. And I got asked about this on a radio show back in the summer and I talked about my experience. I said, like, 'When you're a kid and you realize you're making a mistake and you feel pressured and all this stuff,'" Bush told Shepard. "And I talked about this only from my perspective. I don't speak my ex's name. I'm not talking about anyone else's experience but my own and what it was blown up into and what it was made into, I'm very trepidacious speaking about it because... and again the irony is that it was made into this story that everyone serviced for his opinion and not for mine. All I'm doing is talking about my experience!"
At the time, in a statement to ET, Murray's rep called Bush's statement "ludicrous."
"Chad conducts himself in a completely professional manner and would never marry for any reason but love," Murray's rep said. “Thirteen years since his divorce from Sophia, he has a very happy family life with his wife and children. He has completely moved on and doesn’t feel the need to engage in this type of behavior."
Watch the video below for more on Bush:
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