Sophia Bush Says She Endured 'Every Kind of Abuse' on Show Due to Older Man
The One Tree Hill veteran made the claims during an episode of Monica Lewinsky's podcast Reclaiming that was released Tuesday.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Kim Raver on Steering 'Grey's Anatomy's' First Open Marriage and Directing That Almost Sex Scene
Sophia Bush's Role on 'Grey's Anatomy' Revealed
Sophia Bush Joins 'Grey's Anatomy' Season 21 in Recurring Role
While Bush did not name the show, she gave several context clues (such as the date she left the series) so that one might assume she was talking about her years on NBC's hit procedural Chicago P.D., where she played Detective Erin Lindsay. She left the show after 84 episodes and has previously described it as a grueling experience.
'I was in this great place [after One Tree Hill], and I was ready for what was next,' Bush said. 'And I did this comedy that I loved … for CBS. Then I went to work on this other show that was on my bucket list and then I had this whole other trauma. I had a workplace ongoing trauma revolving around an unending situation with someone old enough to be my father. And I was like, what is happening?'
Lewinsky then asked if Bush was referring to an inappropriate relationship that was professional or romantic, and whether she meant emotional abuse or some other kind.
'Professional — and every kind of abusive,' Bush said. 'When I look back at it, I had the opportunity after two years to go. And I did the thing I learned to do and said, 'I will not have my integrity diminished by someone else's behavior. I will be unflappable. I will come to work and do my job and I couldn't.'
Continued Bush: 'The next two years were like physical hell for me. And to go through spontaneous illness, wake up covered in hives, to have a really crazy weight fluctuations, to watching my hair fall out, to struggle with insomnia, to have crippling anxiety as an extrovert who loves people, to be hit with anxiety in a way that I could barely be out of the house. If people touched me in public, I would jump out of my skin. I couldn't talk to strangers anymore. I couldn't be looked at anymore … I had to go to work ready for war all the time. I had to learn how to block a scene in order not to be touched.'
Bush said she left the series in April 2017, right before the rise of the #MeToo movement. That October, she says she received an apologetic phone call from 'an executive.'
'I got a call from an executive apologizing for what they had done and not done,' she said. 'And [the executive] said, 'We're very aware that we just made it out of that unscathed.' And I was like, 'Glad you did. I'm in so much therapy. I even diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But I'm thrilled you guys didn't get dragged through the press, that's great.'
Bush noted that she's told specific details of her experience to others and then 'watched the horror on their face,' which helped her realize, 'Oh, I'm not crazy. I was just in an environment where no one wanted to hear it because it was a threat to the machine.'
Bush previously said on the Armchair Expert podcast, specifically of her years on Chicago P.D., 'Nearing my tenure there, I was probably difficult to be around because I was in so much pain and I felt so ignored. I feel like I was standing butt naked, bruised and bleeding in the middle of Times Square, screaming at the top of my lungs and not a single person stopped to ask if they could help me.'
NBC had no immediate comment. Bush has been back on broadcast television this season with a recurring guest role on ABC's Grey's Anatomy.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series
22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History
A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
What Will Stephen Colbert Do After ‘Late Show' Ends? He Has Options
It's the old — and not very funny — joke: Where does a 1,000-pound gorilla sit? Answer: Wherever he wants. More from The Hollywood Reporter David Ellison Met With FCC Chairman in Push to Finalize Approval for Paramount Deal Writers Guild Calls for Investigation After 'Late Show' Cancellation, Citing Bribery Concerns CBS' Colbert Axe and Late-Night's Slow Death The Late Show host Stephen Colbert may not quite be the 1,000-pound gorilla of the modern interview format (that would be Joe Rogan), but he certainly carries a lot of weight. When you're the highest-rated late-night host on broadcast television and one of the most recognizable people in media, plus have a loyal audience that has grown addicted to watching you five nights a week for years … you have a significant value in the marketplace, even if CBS is showing you the door. Colbert may not be able to sit anywhere he wants when his series ends, but he's definitely going to have a few seats to choose from. In some sense, the 61-year-old's relative lack of future-proofing preparedness for this upheaval is his own fault. Despite coming to CBS from the once-edgy realm of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and his own The Colbert Report, the host's tenure on broadcast has been marked by his embrace of a highly traditional talk show format. On NBC, Jimmy Fallon has long produced digital shorts, making potentially viral content for online users. On ABC, Jimmy Kimmel made himself into a network utility player — hosting awards shows, game shows and delivering a set each year at the New York upfronts. Conan O'Brien — having previously been fired from a broadcast talk show — wisely and pre-emptively launched his hit podcast three years before TBS pulled the plug on his cable network talk show in 2021. Colbert — and this isn't meant as a slight — seemed to simply enjoy doing the job as a talk show host in the studio every night to the best of his ability. Given that his ratings were better than his rivals, why would he have done anything different? One could easily imagine Colbert being reassured by network executives over the years: Just keep doing what you're doing. After all, if you're consistently winning your time slot, and staying out of trouble, that's all you've ever needed to do on television since … well, since the dawn of television. Your business has a real problem if you can't win by winning (The New York Times reports ad revenue for late night has dropped by half in the last seven years and, last month, broadcast fell below 20 percent of all TV viewing for first time). With CBS deciding to cancel The Late Show — not ditch the show's highly paid current host, but retire the format — the network has basically undercut the speeches that all broadcast presidents and ad sales executives give each year at the upfronts: That broadcast remains strong, that it's still relevant and still matters. Colbert arguably has better options than the network giving him the boot. He is a talent and talent can draw an audience. While CBS now has … what? A hole that needs to be filled. So what happens now? Not at CBS, but for Colbert? David Letterman launched an elevated interview show on Netflix. Jon Stewart did his own twist on The Daily Show for Apple TV+ and launched a podcast before returning to The Daily Show. And O'Brien not only launched a podcast, but a whole podcast network, which he sold to SiriusXM for a tidy $150 million, and on the side makes a travel show for HBO Max. The easiest option for Colbert would be if another company — perhaps a deep-pocketed streamer — wants to pay him to keep doing something rather similar to what he's already doing for a chance at getting his 2.4 million viewers a night. The bigger hurdle, one imagines, is finding a company that's both down for this and doesn't mind potentially irking the Trump administration in the process (especially given that Disney, Apple and Amazon have seemed inclined to bend the knee, not just CBS parent Paramount). Another road is if Colbert decides to launch his own talk or interview show — whether a podcast or on YouTube. The average age of a Colbert viewer is 68, which perhaps says more about CBS' audience than it does Colbert's, but it also makes it a bit tougher to imagine Colbert hustling viewers to 'smash that like and subscribe button' on YouTube alongside MrBeast. 'My big thesis here is that what you're seeing is the slow destruction of the traditional Hollywood pipeline, and you're going to see a lot less big shots, and a lot more individuals taking a shot,' Gavin Purcell, the former showrunner for NBC's Tonight Show, and host of the AI For Humans podcast, told THR. 'Distribution is easy now. That's the thing that's really interesting. What's hard is attention. And the thing that Colbert and that team still do a great job of is commanding attention.' There's also the unforeseeable possibility that Colbert might get signed onto some entirely new format somewhere and rise, phoenix-like, as part of a brand new thing. While he might be the most traditional of the broadcast hosts, in some respects, the man has certainly done major pivots before. The Colbert Report, after all, was Colbert pretending to be an entirely different person. The wild-card outcome is that Colbert decides — after rolling out Trump jokes for a decade — to get in the political game himself. While Colbert lives in New Jersey, he's from South Carolina, and one of the state's Senate seats is open next year. Colbert has joked about the idea of running for office over the years, but when asked directly about whether he'd be interested, he tends to deflect the question. Back in 2007, when Larry King asked if he'd ever considering running for president, Colbert replied, 'Obviously, every boy has thought of it. And when you look at a field [of candidates] like this, you know …' Finally, there's an option that's perhaps even less likely than Colbert running for office: That he retires and stays retired. The thing about broadcast late-night hosts is all have made more than enough money to never work again, and yet they still get lulled back into some variation of the job, regardless of their age. They rarely quit a show, and, if pushed out, they eventually get another similar gig. Even Letterman — who seems like the sort of man who would retire — only managed to stay home for less than three years before popping back up on Netflix. There is, perhaps, something about the kind of person who is well suited for the late-night grind that is also the type of person who doesn't ever want to entirely walk away. You know who didn't come back, however? Johnny Carson. The Tonight Show host — generally considered greatest late-night host ever — retired in 1992 and never hosted again. As he told Esquire in 2002, 'You've got to know when to get the hell off the stage.' But if Spotify was around in the '90s and told Carson he could earn $30 million by working from home, interviewing whomever he wanted and could say whatever he wanted … the man might have been tempted. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Jimmy Fallon Addresses Colbert Cancellation: 'I Don't Like What's Going on One Bit'
'I am your host,' The Tonight Show's Jimmy Fallon said as he kicked off Monday night's show. 'Well, at least for tonight,' the comedian added, obviously referencing the recent cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Fallon quickly told the crowd he didn't like it. More from The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Colbert's Late-Night Allies and Famous Friends Make Cameos on 'The Late Show' After Cancellation Jon Stewart Rages Over Colbert Cancellation In F-Bomb Filled Speech Donald Trump Won't Absolutely Love That He May Have Just Handed an Emmy to Stephen Colbert 'I don't like what's going on one bit. These are crazy times,' he added, joking that his father called him to say he was not a 'Kimmel guy.' He noted that 'everyone' was talking about CBS' decision to end The Late Show. Last week, Colbert and CBS announced the long-running late night show will come to an end after the 2025-26 season. The show has been running since 1993. 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will end its historic run in May 2026 at the end of the broadcast season,' Paramount co-CEO and CBS president and CEO George Cheeks, CBS Entertainment head Amy Reisenbach and CBS Studios president David Stapf said in a statement. 'We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire The Late Show franchise at that time. We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television.' The cancellation comes as CBS' parent company, Paramount Global, hopes to close a merger with Skydance in the near future. The company also recently settled a lawsuit filed last year by Donald Trump (before he was elected to a second term as president), which Colbert himself criticized early last week. 'This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,' the statement from Paramount and CBS announcing the Late Show cancellation assured. 'It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.' Fallon said in his Monday broadcast that many were planning to boycott the network over the decision. 'CBS could lose millions of viewers, plus tens of hundreds watching on Paramount+,' Fallon joked in the monologue. The Tonight Show host spent time praising Colbert for 10 years of smart work and many Emmys. He also reacted the morning after the news broke last week with a statement saying, 'I'm just as shocked as everyone. Stephen is one of the sharpest, funniest hosts to ever do it. I really thought I'd ride this out with him for years to come.' Fallon was among a slew of famous faces showing solidarity with Colbert during a Coldplay kiss cam parody skit on his Monday night show, alongside Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper, Adam Sandler, Christopher McDonald, Last Week Tonight's John Oliver, Late Night's Seth Meyers and The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. Colbert started Monday night's episode with a lively monologue about the cancellation, promising that the 'gloves are off' and that he'd be honest about how he feels about Trump, who took to social media to share his reaction to the news. 'I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,' Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. 'His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! [Fox News late night host] Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.' The Writers Guild of America, the union representing the Late Show's writers, called for New York to investigate Paramount's cancellation of the show. 'Cancelations are part of the business, but a corporation terminating a show in bad faith due to explicit or implicit political pressure is dangerous and unacceptable in a democratic society,' the union said in statement. 'Paramount's decision comes against a backdrop of relentless attacks on a free press by President Trump, through lawsuits against CBS and ABC, threatened litigation of media organizations with critical coverage and the unconscionable defunding of PBS and NPR.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Critic's Notebook: Ozzy Osbourne Created the Template for Reality TV Celebrity Reinvention, From Flavor Flav to Donald Trump
Back in 2022, Fox's The Masked Singer revealed that the Jack in the Box was actually former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — a figure once known, however speciously, for unifying his city in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, but more recently for a string of high-profile humiliations linked to his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. At the time, I wrote about reality TV's history of image laundering, particularly when it came to disgraced and semi-disgraced conservative politicos, from Omarosa Manigault Newman to Anthony Scaramucci (Celebrity Big Brother), Sean Spicer (Dancing With the Stars) to Sarah Palin (The Masked Singer) and more. More from The Hollywood Reporter Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler Mourn Death of Black Sabbath Co-Founder Ozzy Osbourne: "Lost Our Brother" House Republicans Vote to Rename Kennedy Center Opera House After Melania Trump Elton John, Jack White, Jason Momoa Pay Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne: "A True Legend" Image laundering isn't necessarily the thing reality TV does most frequently; its primary appeal still stems from its ability to turn ordinary people into quick-burning stars, stretching back to landmarks like Candid Camera or The Gong Show. But it's a venerable subgenre, based on the principle that unscripted programming can reveal truth that supersedes preexisting evidence: 'What you thought you saw, what you thought you understood, wasn't real. THIS is real. You can tell because 'reality' is part of the programming listing.' The ultimate canary in the coal mine of what became the dominant programming wave of the '00s was, of course, Ozzy Osbourne, who died on Tuesday, July 22, at 76. Prior to the March 5, 2002, launch of MTV's The Osbournes, Ozzy Osbourne would have been considered more likely to bite the head off of that canary. If you grew up in the '70s or '80s, Osbourne was a figure whose dark aura bordered on mythological. Nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, the Black Sabbath frontman projected savage intensity with an occult edge. The music felt almost secondary to apocryphal stories tangential to the music. Black Sabbath was so dark, so unholy, that the band's songs inspired murders and self-harm. You didn't need to know a single Black Sabbath song to be able to reference Osbourne's drug- and alcohol-fueled antics, which included fights, various arrests and, yes, a tendency to bite the heads off various winged creatures, from doves to bats. Ozzy Osbourne was a BAD man, cultivating and curating that badness — at least if you believe that Osbourne was, at the time, capable of image curation. More than anything, he seemed to be out of control, which conveniently was a theme of more than a few Black Sabbath songs. The Osbournes, which utilized a jazzy cover of Osbourne's solo smash 'Crazy Train' as its theme song, took Ozzy Osbourne's image, well-earned across multiple generations of fans, and flipped it on its head. What if, the show posited, one of the fiercest rockers to ever evoke Aleister Crowley and all things Satanic was just a fuddy-duddy father, a mumbling 50-something with an epic past but a present dominated by a loving-yet-controlling wife (Sharon) and two kids (Kelly and Jack, since daughter Aimee refused to appear) who had no interest in kowtowing to their easily distracted dad just because he was once globally notorious. The Ozzy Osbourne of The Osbournes wasn't entirely neutered, but he was a near-parody shell of the man who was once banned from the Alamo for urination. He was constantly swearing and frequently stoned, but much of the show, at least initially, was governed by the principle that nearly every aspect of ordinary family life instantly becomes funnier when the family in question is fronted by the Prince of Darkness. It was The Addams Family writ real. Your father can't figure out the remote control for a new TV? Funny. Your father is Ozzy Osbourne? Hilarious. Your dog needs therapy? Funny. Ozzy Osbourne's dog needs therapy? Hilarious. A father-son fishing trip runs amok? Funny. Ozzy Osbourne is the father and the former dove-biter's biggest catch is a bird? Hilarious. Maybe if you were deeply invested in the authenticity of Black Sabbath and that incarnation of Ozzy, The Osbournes was a betrayal, turning mayhem into minstrelsy. But in acknowledging the artificiality and performativity of Ozzy's terrifying persona, The Osbournes seemed to be protesting 'This is real' — even as what we watched on TV came across as equally contrived. Sure, this doddering middle-aged version of Ozzy Osbourne was every bit as much a persona as the earlier guy. But enough in The Osbournes cut through the contrivances of a genre that was still finding its voice that it built a synthetic credibility. Maybe some scenes and interactions were right on the edge of scripted, and maybe Ozzy's primal form was that of a hammy lover of the spotlight. But if Sharon's cancer was real and Ozzy's ATV accident was real, maybe it all was real. The Osbournes ushered in what was already either a fourth or fifth act of Osbourne's career and life. It became acceptable to view him as lovable, family-friendly, an elder statesman in a musical classification that had similarly gentrified. He and his entire family became habitués of reality television. The co-writer of 'War Pigs' did a duet with Miss Piggy. With The Osbournes as its most persuasive proof-of-concept, reality TV became dominated by this sort of celebrity normalizing, this sort of celebrity rehab. Without The Osbournes, we don't get Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey parlaying their respective ditzy blond and amiable himbo stereotypes into semi-scripted comedy in Newlyweds. Without The Osbournes, the term 'surreal' would still evoke Magritte and Breton and Dalí, rather than the romance between Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen. Without The Osbournes, I'm not sure who Timothée Chalamet would be dating, whether David Schwimmer repeatedly saying 'Juice' in American Crime Story would still be funny, or why anybody would have voted for Caitlyn Jenner to be governor of California. Giuliani probably would never have gotten to be the Jack in the Box. It could be argued, probably correctly, that without Ozzy Osbourne and his extreme MTV-sponsored makeover, Donald Trump never would have had the opportunity to cosplay as a still-relevant, still-successful businessman on The Apprentice. Was Donald Trump circa 2003 more relevant than Ozzy Osbourne circa 2000? Probably, but the stuffed-crust pitchman, frequent Howard Stern guest and second-rate 'as himself' film and television guest star was probably equally far from the presidency. If The Osbournes served as an eraser or recontextualizer for all of Ozzy Osbourne's '70s and '80s misadventures, forcing us to reevaluate the man we thought Ozzy was, The Apprentice was a time machine, restoring the luster of The Art of the Deal and convincing many Americans that the authority conveyed by Mark Burnett's editing actually reflected the man Donald Trump still was. There may be some big ripples there. The Osbournes changed the way we saw Ozzy Osbourne, changed the way we saw reality television and, apparently, it's still changing the way we see reality. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise Solve the daily Crossword
