The Tree Hill Ravens are that much closer to flying together again.
One Tree Hill star Sophia Bush shared an update on the upcoming sequel series she’s been working on with cast members Hilarie Burton and Danneel Ackles, admitting that despite a few setbacks after the news leaked the trio have made a lot of progress in getting the show off the ground.
“It’s unfortunate when development news leaks early that was a bit of a bummer for us because we wanted to get it across the finish line and then have a party,” Sophia—who starred as Brooke Davis—told Access Hollywood on Dec. 4. “I will say that the process is really incredible, the fans have kept that show alive and they have asked for it for so long and the studio came to us about it.”
In August, multiple outlets reported that Sophia, Hilarie and Danneel were set to executive produce a sequel series that would take place 20 years after the original show’s finale.
And the timing was perfect for Sophia, who wouldn’t have done it anytime sooner.
“I think 10 years ago I would have said ‘not on your life,’” the 42-year-old admitted. “And now I realize the opportunity to have not only a comfort show, but a home base matters to people. So, we’re beginning to figure out how we might tell these stories and reunite our whole rag tag bunch. It feels really, really amazing and if it happens, I think you’ll be very pleased.”
One Tree Hill, which from 2003 to 2012, also featured an ensemble cast over the course of its nine seasons including Chad Michael Murray James Lafferty, Bethany Joy Lenz, Stephen Colletti and Paul Johansson.
While jury is still out on who else will be popping up on the continuation, Jana Kramer, who appeared on the last two seasons as Alex Dupre, admitted she’s already been in contact with her former costars about returning.
"I talked to Sophia about it," Jana recently told E! News. "They're gonna get their footing of the show but I think they're open to bringing back characters."
And OG cast member Chad—who played Lucas Scott—rooting for more time in Tree Hill, NC, even if it doesn’t include him.
“I want that show to happen,” the Freaky Friday alum told E! News in November, before admitting of his character, “I don't know what will happen with me.”
Regardless of if his character appears in the reboot or not, Chad—who was previously married to costar Sophia—admitted he’s happy to celebrate that part of his life.
“This experience that I've gotten like the privilege of being able to experience over the course of the last 24 years is incredible,” he gushed of the One Tree Hill fandom. “And so for each and every person that grew up on this show and it affected them and it changed their heart just a little bit and their mind and just set the tone for their youth, I hope it happens.”
Keep reading to find out all of One Tree Hill's biggest secrets…
1. Creator Mark Schwahn initially wrote the project as a movie called Ravens and it took four years for Warner Bros. TV executives to convince him to turn it into a series.
2. Believing the original name to be too sports-centric, the show's title came from the U2 song "One Tree Hill" off their Joshua Tree album. Each episode of the series was named after a song from various artists, ranging from Dashboard Confessional to R.E.M.
3. After reading for the part of Ryan on The O.C., Chad Michael Murray turned it down to star as Lucas, the brooding writer and basketball player. Though producers initially envisioned him as Nathan after his bad boy turns on Gilmore Girls and Dawson's Creek, Murray related to Lucas—as his mother left his family when he was young—and pushed to be cast in the role.
4. Bethany Joy Lenz auditioned for Haley and Brooke, but didn't really want to play the latter, admitting to reading it the same way she read the former. The final series regular to be cast, Lenz dyed her blonde hair dark and straightened her natural curls to differentiate herself from Hilarie Burton, who played Peyton.
5. James Lafferty, then 17, had more experience playing basketball than acting and knew he had his work cut out for him to land the part of Nathan. "I don't think I was an initial choice," Lafferty said in a behind-the-scenes featurette, revealing he had to audition six times.
He wasn't wrong. Noted executive producer Joe Davola, "When James went into casting he was a dark horse to get the job."
6. While she wasn't in the pilot, Sophia Bush made her debut as Brooke in the second episode and went on to appear every week after, even stepping behind the camera to direct three times.
7. One year after meeting on set, Murray and Bush got engaged in 2004 and wed less than a year later. Five months later, news broke that Bush filed for an annulment citing fraud, which was denied but she and Murray divorced.
As for what it was like to still work with her ex on One Tree Hill?
"There was no space to self-reflect," Bush said on an episode of Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, adding OTH producers were "really deeply inappropriate" to her and Murray after their breakup.
"They ran TV ads about it, it was really ugly," she added. "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."
However, Bush has no interest in bad-mouthing Murrary—or talking about him at all really.
"I've tried to poke fun at being a dumb kid. And whenever I've done that, it gets twisted into I'm talking s--t about somebody who I don't even know anymore, who's clearly a grown-up," she explained on a 2021 episode of Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum. "I think you have to 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."
As she put it, "I was a very naive 21-year-old kid and that's all there is to it."
Murray has shared similar sentiments.
“I was a baby. I didn’t know up, down, left, right,” he told The Cut in May 2024. “You move out there and you go, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do now? Get married? That’s exciting!’”
8. Bush would later date Lafferty in 2008 before striking up a romance with Austin Nichols, who played her husband Julian on OTH. The couple called it quits in 2012, the same year the series ended.
9. There was one successful on-set match: Lisa Goldstein, who played Millie in the later seasons, married Brendan Kirsch, the show's basketball coordinator, in 2011.
10. During an episode of her podcast Drama Queens, which she co-hosts with Bush and Lenz, Burton revealed her husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan was almost her colleague on OTH.
"You know when I met Jeff, he was like, 'Oh I auditioned for that show,'" she said, revealing he had read for the part of Keith, Lucas' father figure, a role that went to Craig Sheffer. "'And I was like, wait, what?'"
11. Burton and Morgan would instead get introduced by her co-star Danneel Ackles, whose husband Jensen Ackles formed a close connection with The Walking Dead star after Morgan played his father on Supernatural.
12. In a shocking open letter published November 2017, 18 cast and crew members levied sexual harassment accusations against Schwahn, hinting about the dark atmosphere that existed on set
In her 2020 memoir The Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock, and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm, Burton wrote of Schwahn, "In my particular fairy tale there had been a villain who pitted female actors against one another, pushed us to do gratuitous sex scenes that always left me feeling ill and ashamed, told young female actors to stick their chests out, put his hands on all of us, and pushed himself on me, forcing unwanted kisses."
13. Additionally, Bush spoke out about her experience during a June 2021 appearance on the Chicks in the Office podcast, claiming that she and her One Tree Hill co-stars—who she didn't identify—were being controlled and manipulated by unspecified adults on set.
"We had grown-ups who we trusted, who now we understand were being really controlling and manipulative—who didn't want us to be close 'cause they thought we would band together and ask for more money," Bush alleged. "It's just so weird and those were just things we were not aware of at the time."
Schwahn has not publicly addressed the allegations.
14. After six seasons, Murray and Burton exited the series in 2009. But the seeds for Burton's departure were planted much earlier, she revealed in her memoir.
After her dear friend Scott Kirkpatrick was killed while serving in Iraq in the summer of 2007, her life "took a turn," she wrote, his death snapping her "priorities and goals back into focus."
"I had spent the previous few years wandering, never really finding my place, but I wanted more," she explained. "I wanted a family. I wanted a home that could be a refuge and a blank canvas that would allow me to daydream, to take risks, to try and fail and try again. I wanted to push myself every day. I wanted to make every moment intentional. Wake up intentionally. Work intentionally. Eat intentionally. And rest intentionally." So she quit, began writing a novel and booked a one-way ticket to Paris.
15. At the time, however, Schwahn told a group of fans in Paris that their departures were due to a contract dispute, according to The Los Angeles Times. "I know they've been offered great things, and hopefully they'll decide to come back," he said. "If they don't that's always a possibility...[the show] has made it through some of the riskier moves we've done."
Murray also spoke out to the show's viewers, saying in a video, "They're not bringing me back next year...because they want to save money. Start blogging and being pissed off." While Burton never returned, Murray made an appearance in the final season.
16. In a bold move, One Tree Hill staged a time-jump in season six, choosing to forgo the college years to catch up with the characters as adults.
"When you look back and see similar shows to ours try to make that jump from high school into the next chapter of these characters' lives," Lafferty told E! News in 2015, "it's sort of awkward and clunky and it doesn't work that well."
17. Country singer Jana Kramer joined OTH for its final three seasons and revealed on her podcast Whine Down that one unnamed cast member "made it hell" for everyone else on the series, alleging she was not allowed to be friends with Lafferty.
"When I was on the show...there was just some, not cattiness, but just, 'You can't talk to this person if you're friends with this person,'" she said in a 2021 episode. "So I wasn't very close to James because of certain situations on the set at the time."
18. In 2010, cast member Antwon Tanner was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in a scam to sell stolen Social Security Numbers across state lines. The actor, who played Antwon "Skills" Taylor, pled guilty after getting caught in a sting operation trying to peddle 16 phony Social Security Numbers and three counterfeit cards in 2009.
19. In 2024's Dinner For Vampires—in which Lenz wrote about her "life on a cult TV show while also in an actual cult"—the actress noted she initially "wasn't eqipped to get too close to Sophia."
“Frequently favored and constantly underestimated in life because of her beauty, Sophia worked obsessively at proving her value—a character trait that made her perfect to play Brooke Davis but clashed with my own insecurities and militant beliefs about how one should go about proving their value,” Lenz wrote. “I missed the irony that I was doing exactly the same thing, only I was using religion as my benchmark."
However, she regrets this judgment.
"My budding friendship with sweet Sophia became a casualty of this," Lenz added, "and instead of sitting shiva for my ego, I really f--king wish I could turn back time, walk into her trailer, and give her a long, hard hug.”
They later became pals, and Bush has spoken about her bond with Lenz and Burton.
"Our friendship and all of the things that it was influenced by that we didn’t know about when we were young and the ways that we’ve always returned to each other to unpack the good, the bad, the ugly and the very best of our lives as friends, we have that feral, primal, familial love for each other where we’ve been to hell and back and had so many times where we’d laughed so hard we’ve wound up in tears and we’re so ferociously protective of each other," she once told People. "In my adult life, I go, 'This is what real sisterhood is.'"
20. But in 2024, fans started to wonder where Lenz and Burton stood. Eagle-eyed TikTokers noticed the two weren't following each other on Instagram and that Burton had reposted a quote that read, "I don't think imitation is the highest form of flattery. I think it's just annoying," leading to speculation that she could be referencing the covers of her and Lenz's memoirs. That same year, Burton announced that Robert Buckley would be replacing her as co-host of her podcast with Lenz and Bush Drama Queens.
In October that year, Lenz addressed the Burton feud rumors.
“I love Hilarie, I have always and will always,” she said on Call Her Daddy, “and I don’t have any problem with her. There have been some bizarre misunderstanding that I really hope we can figure out one day. But I love that girl.”