Chad Michael Murray Considered Quitting Acting After “One Tree Hill”: 'I Just Couldn’t Do It Anymore'

Chad Michael Murray says he nearly quit acting after leaving One Tree Hill.

In a Q&A with Interview, published Wednesday, Dec. 11, the Merry Gentlemen star talked about the weirder aspects of fame in the early 2000s after he became a teen heartthrob thanks to roles in Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek and, of course, One Tree Hill.

“I remember we’d just finished shooting Tree Hill and Craig Sheffer and I had gone down to a place called Hell’s Kitchen and we’re having a drink at this bar,” Murray recalled. “This girl comes up — she was a super big fan. She came over, and she pulled her chest out on the bar, and said, ‘Could you sign these?’ ”

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Murray said Sheffer, who played his character’s Uncle Keith in the series, “peer pressured” him into obliging the request. “It was terrible. I’m talking like, the worst autograph you could ever autograph,” he recalled. “Anyway, I’m like, ‘Okay, all right, great, done. Thank you so much.’ Then two, two-and-a-half hours later, she comes back and she now has the autograph tattooed right there.”

“That was one of those moments where I said, ‘I don’t ever want to write on any skin ever again, because that’s on her body forever,’ ” he continued. “And I was like, ‘Oh, gosh. Now some boyfriend’s going to come beat me up 20 years down the road.”

But according to Murray, it wasn’t outlandish fan request that made him consider giving up showbiz after he left One Tree Hill in 2009.

“There was a moment where I was quitting. I was done. I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he said. “It was because, when you’re 18 to 25, these formidable years where you’re really cutting your teeth on life experiences and your brain isn’t fully developed, you make mistakes. I mean, gosh, we still screw up when we’re grown-ups. But I think it’s hard for me to see past those moments when you’re not adult enough to understand the scenarios that you’re in.”

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“That was hard for me because there are so many eyeballs on you,” Murray, 43, explained. “And you go to the grocery store and someone points at you, ‘Oh, that’s the guy that’s on the tabloid, or that’s the guy that did this.’ Even if they’re not talking about that, sometimes your head goes to a negative place, and I know mine really did. And so I just made a big pivot at that point in my life and said, ‘You know what? This is not what I want.’ ”

After leaving One Tree Hill in 2009, Murray appeared in a couple TV movies the following year, followed by roles in films like To Write Love on Her Arms (2012) and Fruitvale Station (2013).

Murray went on to say that after finding initial success in Hollywood at a young age, he “didn’t understand the power that the industry can have, the respect that you must give it and give everyone and every moment.”

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“So I took a lot of time to reassess it all,” he said. “It took years of talking to people much smarter than me to get where I wanted to go.”

More recently, Murray has had roles two 2024 Netflix films: Mother of the Bride and the recently released Christmas movie The Merry Gentlemen. He’s also set to reprise his Freaky Friday role opposite Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in next year’s sequel, Freakier Friday.

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