Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz Say It Was 'Really Weird' That One Tree Hill Never Addressed Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton's Exit

Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz say they wish their costars Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton's time on One Tree Hill could have ended a different way — and they claim that "personal beef" was the reason for their exit.

Speaking about how Murray, now 43, and Burton, 42, exited the hit CW teen drama series after season 6 in 2009, Drama Queens podcast hosts Bush, 42, and Lenz, 43, said they were left confused about why their costars' characters were written off the show.

Reading a question from a viewer, Lenz said: " 'I wish we could have seen Haley reading a letter from Lucas just to hear what was going on in their lives. We don’t hear from Lucas until the last season. What would y’all imagine Lucas, Peyton and Sawyer are up to?' "

In the series created by Mark Schwahn, Murray and Burton starred as love interests, Lucas and Peyton, who marry and welcome a daughter in season 6. At the end of the season, the characters are shown moving out of town — but as Bush and Lenz point out, their exit isn't thoroughly explained.

“I don't even remember where they moved,” Lenz, who played the character Haley for the full nine-season run of the series, asked. "Where did they go?"

"I feel like I remember a West Coast thing or that they wanted to travel while he wrote his next novel," Bush, who played Brooke from 2003 to 2012, added. "This is the problem, they didn’t give us enough to make [sense] of where our friends went."

Bush also claimed that the unassuming actors' exit from the series was mentioned to "the powers that be" back in 2006, but a decision to write Murray and Burton out of the show had already been made.

"I know we brought this up with the powers that be at the time, but I feel like it was more of personal beef than anything that made sense for our characters, which is unfortunate," Bush said. "I used to ask and be like, 'Why can't Brooke be getting text messages from Peyton? Why can't you see them texting? Like why am I not getting photo updates of this baby? It feels really weird.' "

"He, our creator ... was hoping the audience would just forget about them," the pair continued. "Which seems so stupid, because it's a choice rooted in ego and it's like, dude, you wrote those characters."

Lenz also added that she felt it was strange for the pair to be written out so suddenly when so much of the show's "world was built around" the characters and their love story.

"It's like trying to prove that the show could go on without them and it did, but it could have made more sense," Lenz said. "And [it] would have been more nice to just have their presence still around in some way."

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Burton has previously denied that she and Murray quit One Tree Hill and said they were both "treated badly" as their time on the series came to an end.

"I'm not sure where your info is coming from, but Chad had nothing to do with my leaving," the actress wrote on X back in 2021. "We were both treated badly, and he defended me. I so appreciate your support, but I just wanted to clarify that Chad was my teammate. My bosses were the s----."

"... I just correct [the rumors] because I care about our OTH fam and don't want anyone carrying around false baggage," she added. "Thank you for caring!! Xo."

Murray, Burton, Bush, and Lenz, along with James Lafferty and Paul Johansson, all starred in the North Carolina-set drama when it premiered in 2003.