Sob.
Any millennial will remember Chad Michael Murray and Sophia Bush’s heartbreaking divorce, separating just five months after their 2005 marriage, calling an end to one of our favourite onscreen couples from the noughties, One Tree Hill‘s Lucas and Brooke.
But it wasn’t their age that led to their short-lived marriage, with Sophia being 22 and Chad being just 23 when they tied the knot. Instead it was their relationship, with Sophia, now 35, revealing in an interview earlier this year that she felt pressured into marrying her ex husband.
‘It was not a thing I actually really wanted to do,’ Sophia explained of marrying Chad, in an interview with Andy Cohen on Sirius CM Radio Andy, going on to explain why she went through with it. ‘Because how do you let everybody down?’ she explained. ‘When you have bosses telling you that you’re the only person who gets a person to work on time and 200 people either get to see their kids at night or they don’t because our days start on time?’
Chad shouted down the claims as ‘ludicrous’, with his new wife Sarah Roemer getting involved, but now Sophia has spoken out once more about their relationship, this time opening up about the ‘ugly’ aftermath.
During a recent episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, the split came up in conversation - something that Sophia was clearly hesitant to discuss.
‘Are we really going to discuss this one?’ She asked. '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 to talk to you about like, when you're fully-fledged adults who've done really amazing shit 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 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.’
She continued: ‘What’s complex about this issue for me is the person 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 don’t speak my ex’s name, I’m not talking about anybody else’s experience but my own, and what it was blown up into, and what it was made into … It was made into this story that everybody serviced for his opinion, and not for mine. All I’m doing is talking about my experience.’
Going on to talk about the aftermath of their split, Sophia explained: ‘[The producers] were really deeply inappropriate to both of us about it. They ran like 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 deeply personal things that were happening in their lives. They would wind up in storylines. It wasn’t OK. I imagine that was hard for [Chad] as well. It was a very ugly situation, on their part.’
Well that’s that.
