Sophia Bush talks Chicago PD exit: ‘Staying was like certain death’

Sophia Bush is explaining more about why she quit Chicago PD, and the details she revealed on a new podcast aren’t flattering.

It’s been a season and a half since Sophia Bush left Chicago PD, and fans are still searching for answers as to why. But her latest comments about the show might have audiences stunned.

Bush gave more details about why she quit her role as Detective Erin Lindsay on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, which was released yesterday. You can hear her full interview here.

But at the one hour and two-minute mark, the actress begins to discuss the circumstances that made her want to leave the One Chicago series. And while she continues not to name names or spell out all the details, the anecdotes she tells are startling.

“There were a lot of people there who I knew and loved. But it was not okay,” the actress told Shepard, expressing her displeasure at some of the working conditions on set, including having to keep filming outside in the Chicago cold, and the toll they took on her health.

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Where it gets particularly grim is in what Bush says happened when she took her concerns to her bosses. Though she doesn’t give names, one of them would presumably have been Chicago PD‘s co-creator Matt Olmstead, who was the showrunner until the fourth season.

“When your bosses tell you that if you raise a ruckus, you’ll cost everyone their job, you believe that,” she recalled.

“It was also convoluted with the fact that there were great aspects of it. I did get to stunt drive, and [do] ride alongs, and training, and do all these things that were really fulfilling.”

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Sophia Bush also reiterated what she said the only other time she’s spoken about her exit: that she gave a season’s notice that if things didn’t change on the Chicago PD set, she would quit the show.

“I sat my two bosses down. It was after the table read for the first episode of season four. And they already knew what was going on. But, I was all this is how not okay it is,” she said.

She claims that when she began to tell them about what was happening on the set, “I was literally told to stop by my boss, ’cause this is all s–t I have to call HR about and I really don’t want to deal with this anymore.”

That conversation, she says, was when she knew she had made the right decision to walk away from the series. Her character, Erin Lindsay, was written out as having taken another job in New York.

Based on Sophia Bush’s latest comments, it sounds like One Chicago viewers won’t ever be seeing Erin Lindsay again. It’s clear that the actress was incredibly unhappy, and she’s glad to be through with the show.

But if you’re a fan, you also have to listen to her words and wonder about what was going on off screen. Sophia Bush’s words may still seem too vague to some who are looking for explicit details about who did what; for example, she doesn’t explicitly call out Jason Beghe, whose behavior on set has been rumored to be another part of why she left.

Yet these accusations are still pretty concerning. Even if you play devil’s advocate and claim that maybe the problems she speaks about weren’t that bad, the fact that she says someone told her to stop when she tried to bring those concerns up is not good at all.

It’s not necessarily an indictment of Chicago PD right now—things could have changed a lot on the show since then, as Rick Eid took over as showrunner starting in season 5. But her words are very critical of the way things were done in season 4, and it makes you wonder how the actors and crew members who are still working there feel, too.

You can listen to the whole Sophia Bush interview here. The Chicago PD criticisms begin at about the 1:02:00 mark and continues to the 1:09:00 mark, while she also talks briefly about stunt work on the show at 8:54.

But when talking about the process of getting out of her seven-year contract, Bush dropped this surprising sentence: “Staying was like certain death.” Those are bold words from an actress who doesn’t hold back, and she’s not being shy about the fact that she didn’t like being part of the One Chicago franchise.

What do you think about Sophia Bush’s latest interview regarding Chicago PD? Do they change the way you view the show? Let us know your thoughts below.