If there is one character that singlehandedly informed my entire personality as a teenager, it’s Brooke Davis on One Tree Hill. No, I wasn’t getting in the backseat of cars naked, nor was I getting matching tattoos with men I’ve known three seconds – but was I attempting to become the strong, creative, generous and inspiring woman Brooke Davis embodied as seasons went by? Yes I certainly was.
It turns out though, none of those character developments would’ve happened for Brooke without then 21-year-old, Sophia Bush. In an interview with podcast ‘Chicks in the Office’, Sophia opened up about her experience on set, noting that she often fought with producers about the scenes where Brooke would pop up naked in the back seat of random guys cars.
‘We had some fights about that,’ she said. ‘One of the things I really wear like a badge of honour is that my bosses were like “It’s just so much easier to stop fighting with you about this so we’re just going to start steering this woman in a direction that will make you call us less about how it’s inappropriate to behave this way”’
Pushing back on certain scenes and dialogues, Sophia went on to say the women in the show were often forced to behave as if they were in ‘some gross older man’s fantasy’.
‘My girlfriends from One Tree Hill and I talk about that all the time,’ Sophia continued. ‘We're like, girls don't talk to each other the way we had to talk to each other on that show, and also don't behave the way we had to behave on that show…Come on! That was, like, some gross older man's fantasy. And it was icky.’
Now aged 38, Sophia has begun detailing more and more about what it was like becoming a young Hollywood icon so early in her life. The compelling interview saw the actor speak about being fetishized as a teen, how scary that time in her life was and how the female cast were often surrounded by adults attempting to manipulate and control them.
It’s becoming a common theme of 2021, seeing our favourite teen icons share what working on these legendary noughties shows was really like. From the stars of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Joss Whedon to Mischa Barton explaining the real reason she left The OC, it seems the veil is well and truly lifting on the young Hollywood scene so many of us idolised growing up.
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