Sophia Bush found it “so hard to handle” fame as a young person.
Sophia Bush
The 38-year-old actress began playing Brooke Davis in ‘One Tree Hill’ in 2003 when she was 21, and has said she found life in the public eye “traumatising” because she was expected to be “perfect” even though she was still growing up.
Sophia admitted filming the show – which ran from 2003 until 2012 – in Wilmington, North Carolina, shielded the cast from too much paparazzi attention, but she still endured some tough times in the spotlight.
Speaking on her new podcast, ‘Drama Queens’, she said: “Even the aspects that we did experience were really traumatising for me. It was so hard to handle, this notion that everyone wants you to fail so they can make fun of you but also you’re meant to be perfect but no one knows how to be perfect, let alone an adult because we were 20 years old. We were children.”
Sophia will watch every episode of the hit CW series for her podcast, which she started alongside her co-stars Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz, who played Peyton Sawyer and Haley James respectively.
And although they’re sure re-watching the show will be “healing in a lot of ways”, the trio are also “nervous” to see their younger selves.
Hilarie said: “I have not seen anything since I left, and I never saw the last three seasons. Frankly, I’m nervous about rewatching because, it’s like, I know it’s gonna be painful to watch myself learn how to act on camera.”
While Bethany added: “There’s so many parts of myself that I also have invested a lot in therapy, I’ve done a lot of work as life kicks you’re a**. When I think about the sort of superiority complexes that I had back then … I look back at my younger self and I cringe at a lot of those moments. I’m still learning to forgive myself for just being humans and growing and learning, but when I think back and I know I inserted a lot of that into Haley. So when I watch her, I always cringe.”
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