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In ELLE.com’s series Office Hours, we ask people in powerful positions to take us through their first jobs, worst jobs, and everything in between. This month, we spoke to Sophia Bush, the actor and producer who first entered the zeitgeist when she starred as Brooke Davis on the hit CW drama One Tree Hill. It’s now been more than 20 years since the TV show premiered, but the fandom is going strong: Bush co-hosts a One Tree Hill rewatch podcast, Drama Queens, where former castmates discuss the behind-the-scenes highs and lows (in 2017, the show’s cast and crew accused the creator of sexual harassment), and a reboot is currently in development. “People will be like, ‘I grew up with that show,’” Bush tells ELLE.com. “I’m like, ‘I literally grew up on that show.’” Outside of Hollywood, the multi-hyphenate has also become a fierce activist and a passionate investor; just last March, Bush and her best friend and partner, Nia Batts, announced their investment in Chiyo, which delivers nutritional meals to women during pregnancy and postpartum. “We’re really trying to remind people that not all women who invest run impact funds, but that impact is absolutely part of everything we do,” she says. Below, Bush shares how she hopes to change “the way we think about finance,” the biggest lessons she learned working on One Tree Hill, and why she ditched her dreams of becoming a heart surgeon.
My first job
Working for my photographer dad. As a kid, I did every crap job. My dad was like, “Don’t think, because you’re the boss’s kid, that you’re going to get special treatment.” I was on trash duty and cleaning coffee machines. I was repainting the studio floor. Eventually, I graduated to running film from the studio over to this incredible photo lab, which happened to be across the street. He really made me work my way up the ladder, but when I got to run film, I felt very cool. I was like, “Oh, this is what the actual photo assistants do.” I felt like a big kid.
My worst job
Oh my God, I never want to work retail again. I did that in college. I worked at a very large department store, and it was beautiful. But not being able to keep things organized—and being so particular and wanting all the sizes to be just right and everything to be folded perfectly—it felt very Sisyphean. You finish something, you turn around, you turn back, and it’s a mess again, and you have to start over. It was torture for my brain.
How I realized I wanted to be an actor
It was really out of left field. I always wanted to be a heart surgeon. When I was a senior in high school and told my parents I wanted to get a BFA in theater, they weren’t thrilled, understandably so. But I had started doing plays, first as an arts requirement in junior high, and I loved the community of it. I realized that a play or film is essentially just a great book come to life. It’s such a quick way to create empathy, community, curiosity, and once I really got into that nerdiness of it, the potential of storytelling, I couldn’t let it go. I think because my dad’s an artist in his own way, [making it as an actor] felt more plausible—also probably because I was 18 and insane. Now, my perspective is very different, because I know more. That’s the great thing about being young and naive is that you just decide to throw yourself into something and go for it.
Why revisiting One Tree Hill is healing
I think if you’d asked any of us years ago [about doing a reboot], we would’ve been like, never. Then something happened once we started the podcast, and we started to go back and walk those roads again. Everybody wanted to talk about where they think their characters would be and what they had been dreaming up in all the years since. If we’re able to bring all the good ideas of this enormous community to the screen again, I think it’ll be amazing.
From the inception of the podcast to having serious conversations when the studio approached us about bringing the show back, we realized that we are getting to re-parent those younger versions of ourselves [who made One Tree Hill]. We are getting to visit the young women who were scared and powerless and unsure and insecure. We get to heal ourselves and, should the show come to fruition, hopefully give some younger people much better experiences than we had the first time around, which feels pretty special.
The biggest career lessons I learned on One Tree Hill
It taught me the importance of good communication and good leadership. It definitely changed the way I look at who I work with and who I work for. It also taught me a lot about power, because as young women on that show, we didn’t have any. Now, I look for opportunities to create more equitable power in any room. So, collective bargaining; frank conversations about salaries; if I get invited into a room, asking who I can bring with me. If you can begin to shift how you use your relative power and try to create more of it, workplaces get better. I know that’s true for my best friend [and partner Nia Batts] and I, working in venture [capital]. We spent 15 years angel investing alongside each other and realized there are not a lot of investors who look like us. When we invest in life sciences or biotech, we will often be the only investors who ask, for example, what applications drugs might have on ovarian cancer or some other women’s health problem. Sometimes people are shocked, because nobody’s asked, and we’ll say, “Well, how many women have you met with?”
When we start to look at the lack of power that many women have on sets in Hollywood, when we start to look at [the lack of] medical research funding going to women’s health—no matter what bucket you decide to explore, you will see the ways we get left behind. And if you follow the thread, it’s usually because we’re not in the decision-making seats where power is held. So as a producer, as an investor, as a friend, as a daughter, I’m constantly trying to figure out how to create more power for all of us.
Ashlyn Harris and Sophia Bush onstage at the Human Rights Campaign Greater New York Dinner on February 1.
How I decided to invest in Chiyo
When Nia was pregnant with her son, we really started to look at the landscape of what maternal mortality looks like, of what mothers are going through. Fewer than 20 percent of medical schools require any kind of course on nutrition, which means our health care providers are so ill-equipped to address one of the most fundamental aspects of women’s health, particularly during and after pregnancy. The gap in training is really concerning, because 90 percent of women struggle to obtain the essential nutrients they need while they’re trying to conceive and while they’re recovering.
When we met Irene [Liu, founder of Chiyo], we started to learn about her work and how we can be supporting mothers and families in this holistic way that’s also so education-based. For us, it’s very reflective of the way that we look at what we want to invest in and support: Investors in Chiyo are going to do well, but they’re also hopefully going to change the world for the better. It’s not a charity thing. It’s not a side hustle. It’s changing the way we think about finance and the way investment decisions get made. Chiyo has delivered 80,000 meals to families since launching. To help make affordable nutrition care accessible to all women feels important to us, because maternal care should be a human right. It’s not supposed to be a privilege.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.