Michael Simon/startraksphoto.com Sophia Bush is opening up about her personal and professional experiences in a candid conversation with Dax Shepard.
The One Tree Hill alum is a guest on the latest episode of Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, during which she's asked about her marriage to her former co-star. Chad Michael Murray is never mentioned by name in the episode, but Bush does tell Shepard why she doesn't like to discuss that period in her life.
"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 s--t with your lives, they wanna talk to you about the dumb thing you did in college basically," Bush explains. "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."
Bush goes on to explain what it was like working on the set of One Tree Hill with her ex following their split.
"There was no space to self-reflect," Bush says, adding that producers were "really deeply inappropriate" to both her and Murray after their breakup.
"They ran like TV ads about it, it was really ugly," she shares. "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 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. It wasn't OK."
"It was opportunistic and ugly," Bush adds. "When you run a show, you're like a parent, you're supposed to protect your flock, and it was the opposite of that. And I imagine that was hard for him as well, you know? It was a very ugly situation on their part. I think they kind of lived for the drama."
You can listen to the entire interview with Bush and Shepard HERE.