Bethany Pleasure Lenz is making some startling, behind-the-scenes revelations about “One Tree Hill,” the beloved teen collection that gave her a breakout position.
In her new memoir, “Dinner for Vampires,” Lenz credited “One Tree Hill” with having “saved my life” throughout her years as a member of an insular Christian group known as the Massive Home Household. Nevertheless, the actor additionally accused the present’s creator of intentionally writing storylines for her character, Haley James Scott, that made her personally uncomfortable.
“The more my personal beliefs and preferences interfered with the creator’s demands, the more he started writing things into the storylines that I assume were an attempt to humiliate or antagonize me,” she wrote, in line with excerpts from the e-book shared by Entertainment Weekly. “Like making other characters call Haley ‘fat.’ Or having Haley ‘overreact’ to her high school boyfriend watching porn.”
Lenz took particular difficulty with the porn storyline, which appeared in a 2004 episode titled “The Leaving Song” that aired through the present’s first season. The dialogue written for Haley, the actor recalled, was “degrading and doing a disservice to the young women who looked up to me.”
After a “big battle” on the present’s set, Lenz mentioned she determined to rewrite a few of Haley’s traces herself.
Mindy Small by way of Getty Photographs
“It caused confusion and aggravation for the director, the other actors, the script supervisor, and the producers,” she wrote. “I felt awful. But I didn’t know what else to do.”
As Entertainment Weekly famous, Lenz doesn’t determine the creator of “One Tree Hill” by title. The collection was created by Mark Schwahn, whose credit additionally embrace “Nashville” and “The Royals.”
Representatives for The CW, which broadcasted “One Tree Hill,” didn’t instantly reply to HuffPost’s request for touch upon Lenz’s claims.
“One Tree Hill” aired on The CW from 2003 to 2012. 5 years later, Lenz and co-stars Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton had been amongst 18 girls who supported former “One Tree Hill” author Audrey Wauchope after she accused Schwahn of emotional manipulation and sexual harassment in 2017.
“One of the 1st things we were told was that the showrunner hired female writers on the basis of their looks. That’s why you’re here ― he wants to fuck you,” Wauchope wrote on the time in a prolonged thread on X, previously known as Twitter.
Later within the thread, she added, “He’s a man in a position of power who was allowed to run a television show for years where this behavior continuously went on.” Within the thread, she didn’t determine Schwahn by title.
In 2022, Burton and Bush recalled how “One Tree Hill” producers had been so “fixated” with “male numbers in viewership” that they allegedly pressured the feminine actors to pose for a males’s journal.
“They saw that a lot of young men were drawn to a violent assault of women and they went, ‘We should do more of it,’” Bush shared on an episode of her and Burton’s “Drama Queens” podcast.
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Lenz is at present within the midst of a publicity tour to advertise “Dinner for Vampires,” which hit retailers this week. Showing on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast final week, she spoke at size about her decade-long involvement with the Massive Home Household, which she readily described as a cult.
