Sophia Bush Opens Up About Keeping Her Personal Life Private

Sophia Bush has been in the spotlight since her breakout role in “One Tree Hill,” so she’s no stranger to living a very public life. And yet, she’s managed to keep her personal life rather private for such a high-profile public figure.

In a new interview with ET, Bush explained why she feels it’s important to downplay whatever may be going on in her day-to-day life now, and what helped her come to this conclusion.

The latter is easy enough, considering what a breakout smash “OTH” was. All of the show’s young stars became easy tabloid fodder, with their every move scrutinized, analyzed and — according to Bush — even fabricated at times.

“When you are a person who lives in the public eye, everybody wants to pick over everything and that can be really tricky,” she told the outlet. “And, I also grew up in the early aughts when girls were raked over the coals for any choices that they made.”

“I just was like, ‘I don’t think I like this.’ I didn’t like having my private life lied about,” she continued. “There were times where someone would send through an article and be like, ‘Well, supposedly you’re dating this guy.’ And I was like, ‘I mean, I would. Who is he?’ Like, what is going on here?”

As this relentless interest in her personal life began to dominate interviews and discussions about her, Bush said it grew to bother her “that rather than … talking about work, substance, education, interview shows, what we believe in, what’s going on with women’s rights, it would be, ‘What are you wearing? And how’s your boyfriend?.'”

“I really think the kind of gamification of people’s private intimacy is just creepy to me,” she added. “So I don’t really hide what’s going on in my life, but I don’t flaunt it.”

As an example of the type of more meaningful discourse she’d rather participate in, Bush opened up about her new film project, “False Positive,” and the societal pressures women feel to get pregnant.

“We judge women who do get pregnant. We judge women who don’t get pregnant. We judge women for when they get pregnant, we judge women if they don’t want to be pregnant,” she said.

In the film, Bush stars as a woman who goes to a fertility doctor with husband Justin Theroux in an effort to become pregnant, but there’s more to this doctor than meets the eye — and it’s probably not good. The film is described as a “horror/thriller,” after all.

“False Positive” hits Netflix this Friday, June 25.