Chad Michael Murray Teases His Idea for ‘One Tree Hill’ Reboot

Chad Michael Murray has an idea for a One Tree Hill reboot! The 40-year-old actor, who played Lucas Scott in the hit CW drama, told E! News Friday that he’s surprised the show, which aired for nine seasons between 2003 and 2012, hasn’t already been rebooted, especially when he considers the regular questions he and fellow cast members get about returning to their characters.

“I can’t imagine that it won’t, at some point [get rebooted],” Murray said. “We get asked all the time. I know I do. And I know Hilarie [Burton] does, and I see everybody at least once or twice a year. I got to imagine at some point, there would be some version of it.” If does eventually get the revival treatment, The Cinderella Story actor has an idea for the plot. 

“I have an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head to do a new generation of this show, dealing with today’s issue,” Murray teased. “There’s just so many things now that are so very different than it was back in the early aughts. So, you can do issues that are relating to children and kids that [they] are dealing in high school today.”

Murray also revealed that the cast, including Burton, Sophia Bush, James Lafferty and Joy Lenz all stay in touch via a group chat despite being in different points of their careers. “The group text is about to blow up because it’s almost Christmas,” he said. “Literally Christmas, I think I get about 64 messages on the group chain from everybody, just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. When you look at your phone, you got 64 texts: ‘I don’t know that many people. OK, it’s all of them.’”

Over the years, the One Tree Hill cast has said the only tricky thing about rebooting the show would be them having cut ties with creator Mark Schwahn. In 2017, 18 women who worked on the show penned an open letter to Variety, alleging misconduct, including sexual misconduct, on his part. “More than one of us is still in treatment for post-traumatic stress. Many of us were put in uncomfortable positions and had to swiftly learn to fight back, sometimes physically, because it was made clear to us that the supervisors in the room were not the protectors they were supposed to be,” read the letter, signed by Bush, Lenz and Burton. “Many of us were spoken to in ways that ran the spectrum from deeply upsetting, to traumatizing, to downright illegal. And a few of us were put in positions where we felt physically unsafe. More than one woman on our show had her career trajectory threatened.”