'One Tree Hill' Stars Address Season 5 Time Jump a Decade After the Series Ended
Sophia Bush, Bethany Joy Lenz and Hilarie Burton share their thoughts.
Ten years after One Tree Hill wrapped up its ninth and final season, Sophia Bush, Bethany Joy Lenz and Hilarie Burton finally address the time jump that occurred in Season 5 of the beloved show.
Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for One Tree Hill.
If you recall, Season 4 ended with the series’ characters saying goodbye to one important chapter in their lives: high school. In Season 5, we got to see a more mature version of Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray), Nathan Scott (James Lafferty), Peyton Swayer (Burton), Brooke Davis (Bush) and Haley James Scott (Lenz) as the show fast-forwarded nearly five years, skipping their college years.
“We were really entering an era where you almost never knew a group of friends that all went to the same college,” Bush told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s just not a thing that happens. Things were different and it felt like we got to shed this old, impractical mold, which I know is funny for people who did a show where a dog ate a heart to say, ‘Well that wouldn’t happen.’”
Meanwhile, Burton said the time jump allowed the characters to explore “the conflicting emotions of being a person in your young twenties and thinking you’re a grown up, but you’re not really a grown up. We were all living that in real life.”
As for Lenz, who was married to Lafferty’s character, whom she welcomed a son with on the show, said skipping those years allowed her to explore a “complicated space” considering Haley was a young mother. “We both got to do something that we hadn’t really been able to do on the show — up until that time,” she explained. “So for an actor, it was really exciting.”
