Sophia Bush Reveals She Wasn't 'Sexy Enough' for Brooke Davis — Then 'Too Much'

Sophia Bush's first audition for the role that defined her career ended with a blunt verdict from executives: "We love her, but we aren't sure she's . . . sexy enough?" The actress recounts the exchange in her upcoming memoir, "And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes From a Life in Progress," published Oct. 27.

Bush starred as Brooke Davis on "One Tree Hill" for nine seasons, from 2003 to 2012. Getting there took three auditions, two wardrobe makeovers and one executive producer's profane diagnosis of the show's original problem. "All these fucking characters are so fucking depressing," producer Joe Davola told her, in his words, about the early scripts. "They make you want to fucking kill yourself." Brooke Davis, Bush explains, was created as the fix — a character with "a little bit of sass, a little bit of joy."

How the show got its comic relief

"One Tree Hill" began as a feature film script called "Ravens." It was shot in the same North Carolina city that had hosted "Dawson's Creek" and followed four teenagers — Peyton Sawyer, Lucas Scott, Nathan Scott and Haley James — through dead parents, abandonment, financial struggles and what Bush calls "narcissistic abuse." The network picked up the pilot but, according to Bush, wanted an offset to all that brooding. So a fiery new character was written in. Her original name was Tara.

Bush hadn't even seen herself in the project at first. Sent the sides for Peyton during initial casting, she laughed and told her manager: "I am not punk rock!" She pursued an ABC family show instead, booked it, filmed the pilot — and watched it not get picked up. When the call came to read for the new girl in Tree Hill, she figured, why not.

The 'happy medium' problem

The audition saga that follows reads like a case study in how Hollywood calibrated young women's appearances in the early 2000s. Bush arrived at Warner Bros. Studios in a short white tennis-style skirt, pink chunky heels with rainbows and a fitted pink t-shirt. She made the room laugh. The feedback questioned whether she was sexy enough.

So she swung hard the other way for round two: military miniskirt, gold-heeled stilettos, a low-cut dark tank top, smudgy eyeliner. The response? "This is too much. We want high school sexy, not college sexy."

Bush, then roughly three years out of a school uniform, writes that she was at a loss. Wasn't dressing characters what wardrobe departments were for? What does this change for the reader? It's a rare, itemized record of an impossible brief — the unnamed target a casting woman eventually described to her as "the happy medium": sexy but not too sexy, cute but not so cute it wasn't sexy, advanced but not college-advanced.

For the network test, Bush brought an entire L.L.Bean boat and tote of outfit options. The casting woman met her in the hallway and assembled the winning look: a red Henley with two buttons open, a wide-pleated khaki cheer skirt and very 2000s canvas red-and-white sneaker heels. "This is perfect. Spot on!" the woman told her.

The girl with all the luggage

The memoir excerpt closes on a detail "One Tree Hill" fans will savor. Seated in the hallway among the other girls testing that day was Bethany Joy Lenz — auditioning for a recast of Haley after, Bush notes, she herself had read for Brooke and wasn't a fit. The two barely spoke; everyone was running lines. When they met later, Lenz told Bush she remembered wondering who "the girl with all the luggage" was.

Both, of course, got the parts and stayed for all nine seasons. Bush's memoir, covering her upbringing, career, activism and relationships, arrives Oct. 27 — the first time, she says, she has told the full story beyond the headlines.