Sophia Bush says her “One Tree Hill” co-star Hilarie Burton tried to stop her from getting involved with Chad Michael Murray years before the actors’ short-lived marriage, which began with an oceanfront wedding in Santa Monica, California, in April 2005.
Bush, 44, made the admission on Wednesday’s episode of Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast. She said Burton had worked with Murray on another project before “One Tree Hill” and that the experience hadn’t been a good one. According to Bush, Burton told her directly: “Do not date him.”
“You know, it was good advice,” Bush said, adding that at the time she “just didn’t have the wherewithal or the experience” to listen.
Bush and Murray were both 23 when they married in Santa Monica in April 2005. The marriage lasted just five months before the couple separated, and their divorce was finalized in December 2006. Cheating rumors followed the split, a topic Bush addresses in her upcoming memoir, “And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress.”
“My friends used to joke, like ‘look up gullible in the dictionary and you’ll see my face,'” Bush said on the podcast.
Cooper asked whether the relationship with Murray had strained Bush’s friendship with Burton. Bush said that for years she assumed it had.
“For years, I thought that’s why we stopped being two peas in a pod,” Bush said, recalling that she “felt so much shame.” “She was right… about who he was then.”
Bush joked that “trolls” would seize on the comments but said the relationship between her and Burton is fine now. “I didn’t listen. She was right,” she said of the distance that grew between them.
Bush also told Cooper she has since become friends with women she believes Murray cheated on her with during their relationship. “I wrote about some of the friendships I made with women who I think the world would probably think I would never speak to, that I really cherish,” she said. “And frankly, when I look at the landscape, I’m like badass, badass, badass, badass. You did have great taste, bro, and like, congrats, you crushed. I’m like, ‘I get it.’ I’m just like, ‘Damn.’ Like, in a lineup, I’d take any one of us.”
She said those friendships work now because everyone involved is “completely different people from who we were” back then.
Representatives for Murray and Burton did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Page Six on Wednesday evening.
Bush has addressed the marriage before. In a 2021 podcast interview, she said she holds no “ill will” toward Murray but has avoided discussing him publicly. “I’m not allowed to because I’ve tried to poke fun at being a dumb kid and whenever I’ve done that, it gets twisted into [that] I’m talking s–t about somebody who I don’t even know anymore, who’s clearly a grown-up,” she said at the time.
Murray later married Sarah Roemer in 2015; the couple have three children together. Bush married soccer player Ashlyn Harris after divorcing Grant Hughes in 2023.
