Sophia Bush is revealing just how much she earned on One Tree Hill.
The actress, 43, played Brooke Davis for nine seasons from 2003 to 2012, but despite appearing on a hit primetime show on network television, she only recently started getting paid her worth.
“I’m really gonna bum you out,” Bush said when asked about how much money she made on the teen drama during an interview on the “Networth and Chill With Your Rich BFF” podcast on Wednesday, November 12.
Bush told host Vivian Tu that she didn’t have a lot of leverage to negotiate her salary when she signed up for the show because she was still fresh out of college.
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“You get hired, and especially as a young person, you don’t have a quote. And if you’ve not been a regular on something before, you have literally no quote,” she explained. “So when I started on that show, pretty much everyone was coming from something. Hilarie [Burton] had been a VJ, [Bethany] Joy [Lenz] had been on soap operas. I had been the philanthropy chair of my sorority at USC.”
“The difference in pay scale was wild,” Bush continued. “Once I paid 10% to my managers, 10% to my agents, 5% to my lawyers, paid a publicist fee, paid my taxes and then paid the $3,000 a month that my two-bedroom apartment in Wilmington cost me, I was taking home about $3,000 an episode.”
The Grey’s Anatomy star said there was little room for renegotiation because of the length of the contract she initially signed.
“When you sign a TV contract, you sign a contract for six years. They can cancel your show at any time, but you can’t leave or ask for a raise because you’re on a six-year deal,” said the actress.
Bush also revealed that she and the rest of the One Tree Hill cast don’t make any extra income from the show regaining popularity in the streaming age.
“What you really hope works for you in TV, even if you’re not making a lot of money at the time, is, well, [hopefully] we’ll get syndicated and we’ll get residuals. Except when we signed to do that wonderful show that we all loved, there was no streaming,” she said. “Our show is [now] syndicated on streaming, which means the studio that owns the show makes all the residuals, and we don’t.”
“Look, it is what it is. That’s the breaks. Still a champagne problem,” she added, expressing gratitude for still being able to make a living as an actor.
Bush — whose other credits include Chicago P.D. and the short-lived medical drama Good Sam — said that after 20 years in the business, she is now able to get pay parity with her male costars.
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“It’s always a hustle,” she said. “It took me 20 years in this industry, doing 15 straight years of network TV without taking a year off … literally, year 20 was the first time I got paid equally to my male costar.”
“It was a fight. And no shock to anyone who knows me, I won. I was like, ‘We’re not doing this anymore,’” she added.
