We adore seeing Sophia Bush star as Erin Lindsay in Chicago PD, but plenty of fans still know her best as Brooke Davis in the hit teen drama One Tree Hill, which followed the lives of a group of high school students. During her time on the show, Sophia tied the knot with her co-star, Chad Michael Murray, with the pair divorcing after just five months. So what happened, and what has Sophia said about it since?
The pair first became engaged in May 2004 before tying the knot one year later in 2005. They sadly split five months later, with Sophia filing for an annulment under ‘fraud’ which was denied, and later filing for a divorce, which was finalised in 2006.
At the time, she said: “It devastates me now that I have been reduced to a Hollywood statistic – another joke marriage. I never expected to be married more than once...because I knew what I was getting into and will always believe in love.”
Although her annulment under ‘fraud’ has never been publicly discussed, in an interview with Andy Cohen, she said that she didn’t necessarily want to marry Chad, explaining: “Everybody’s been 22 and stupid. [The marriage] was not a thing I actually really wanted to do.” She later tweeted that the comments had been to poke fun at herself, but Chad’s current wife, Sarah Roemer, also joked about it on Instagram. Sharing a meme, she captioned it: “Wait a second … my producers also made me marry Chad Michael Murray!”
Chad’s rep also shared a statement to People which read: “Chad conducts himself in a completely professional manner and would never marry for any reason but love. 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.”
Opening up about the situation in 2014 on What What Happens: Live, she said: “We were two stupid kids who had no business being in a relationship in the first place. To all the other co-stars who've worked it out, more power to you.”
Speaking on the Armchair Expert, she added: “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 wanna talk to you about like, when you’re fully-fledged adults who’ve done really amazing [expletive] with your lives, they wanna talk to you about the dumb thing you did in college basically.”
Alluding to the response to her interview with Andy Cohen, the star said that she often tries not to talk about the situation, explaining to the Inside of You podcast: “I’ve tried to poke fun at being a dumb kid and whenever I’ve done that, it gets twisted into I’m talking [expletive] about somebody who I don’t even know anymore, who’s clearly a grown-up.
“I think you have to, like, laugh at who you used to be, but when people ask me about history that involves someone else … it’s not worth my time. It’s not a place where I harbor ill will or anything… I was a very naïve 21-year-old kid, and that's all there is to it.”
When asked about him in another chat, she quipped: “That's such an interesting question. But my mother once said to me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, not to say anything at all.”
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She also chatted on the Drama Queens podcast with her One Tree Hill co-stars, Bethany Joy Lenz and Hilarie Burton, about the situation. Bethany told her: “You were going through a breakup with the person that you were playing a romance opposite of. And regardless of what all those circumstances were, that’s incredibly difficult emotionally to be able to be vulnerable and be there in that moment.”
Sophia replied: “People can call it whatever they want. They can say it’s strength, they can say it’s pride, they can say it’s professionalism. You can put a positive or a negative skew on it. But I was always going to put Brooke Davis ahead of everybody and everything else. Nothing mattered to me but being honest for her.”
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