Sophia Bush Shares Update on One Tree Hill Cast Friendships

“We got a real gift in each other,” she added. “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.”

Although Bush and Burton have maintained a strong friendship over the years—even co-hosting their Drama Queens podcast from 2021 to 2024—her bond with Lenz was more complex. 

“She left in 2009, and when she did, there was a Peyton-shaped hole in Wilmington for me,” Bush wrote of Burton’s exit after season six in her new memoir And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes From a Life in Progress. “Something felt so off balance without her there. Joy and I carried on both on- and off-screen, but our relationship was a bit more complicated.”

Lenz’s experience as a member of The Big House Family for more than a decade—which she described in her memoir Dinner For Vampires as a cult—was a major factor in that tension.

“We cared about each other, but we saw the world very differently in those years, and those differences often put us at odds,” Bush continued. “She was deeply involved with a Christian group many of us feared was a cult (which did, in fact, turn out to be a cult—she wrote a whole book about it!), and there were times when I felt hurt by the ideas and beliefs she parroted.”

“I struggled to understand her and couldn’t fathom how her group could justify using religion as a weapon,” the Grey’s Anatomy actress admitted. “I understand now, from the place she was in then, how much she struggled to understand me too.”

Although she noted that those differences “got in the way,” the duo’s relationship began to blossom again after Lenz stepped away from the group in 2012.

“We were able to sit with each other even when it was hard. To talk about differences for hours and across years,” she wrote. “To understand we were both trying to navigate and grapple with belief systems, identities, and questions much bigger than our young selves knew how. We would come together, and then we’d take breaks.”

Nonetheless, Bush and Lenz did the best they could with the relationship they had.

“Despite how crazy we drove each other sometimes,” Bush noted, “we’d make time to have dinner, go on a beach walk, or see a play.”

Now for a closer look at more beloved celebrity BFFs, keep reading.