Sophia Bush vows to be 'there' for One Tree Hill co-stars
Sophia Bush has opened up about her relationship with Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz.
Sophia Bush will always be "there" for her One Tree Hill co-stars - despite their differences.
The 44-year-old actress starred alongside Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz in One Tree Hill, the hit teen drama series, for many years, and even though they've clashed at times, Sophia insists she'll always be happy to help them when they really need her.
Sophia told People: "I mean, we’ve all known each other for, now longer than we were alive when we didn’t, and they’re some of the longest relationships of my life.
"One thing I really value is that no matter what anyone’s going through, we wait for each other.
"I think that’s really important when you have friction or ease, that no matter what, you’re there, whether it’s easy or hard. That’s something I really do appreciate about all of us."
Sophia explained that the sentiment "extends to the whole collective of women" from One Tree Hill.
She said: "We got a real gift in each other.
"But it’s not a TV episode gift, it’s a real-life gift, and that comes with real-life stuff. It’s a lot of love that I have and that I know we all do for a long time."
Meanwhile, Sophia recently claimed that she was "pitted against" other women early in her career.
The actress revealed that she reached out to her former One Tree Hill co-stars individually before releasing her memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress, because she didn't want to create any friction with them.
She told Bustle: "We’ve got an incredible group chat, but I chose to have individual conversations with every single person and individual dissemination of pages and things because I didn’t want anybody to feel swayed by the group."
Sophia was determined to protect the relationships she'd built with her former co-stars.
She said: "When I started working on TV in the early aughts, the machinery loved to input women and chew them up and spit them out.
"The benefit to the machine itself is to cast you, the woman, in a role that they can then clickbait to death, but that’s not who you are.
"The hours are crazy. If you have a not particularly great boss, like we all didn’t, you’ll be taught to compete instead of collaborate. You’ll be pitted against each other and then won’t understand why suddenly everything feels weird. And you can’t talk about it because you can’t have a fight with your friends at work. So then it buries and it festers and it just cements."
