Sophia Bush

CraveOnline: You're in pretty bad shape most of the movie. What did it take to get to that level of disarray, dirt and blood every day?

Sophia Bush: Yeah, our makeup time doubled since the beginning of the movie because they had to get us all ready. And then they sort of got to trash us. It’s just a lot of matching, a lot of continuity. They photograph everything, every bruise, every day. And obviously, with us being out in the desert, we are exposed to sun. And I am an incredibly pale person so I had to be coated in tanner and then coated in an illustrator blood and alcohol mix that sort of creates a sunburn and that goes on heavier and heavier every day to sort of copy the elements, bruise from handcuffs and car crashes. All sorts of exciting things. It’s quite a bit.

CraveOnline: That tan wasn't real?

Sophia Bush: No. No. I scared the producers the one day, lifted my shirt and showed them my stomach and everyone ran. But some of my bruises were real. I got a pretty good burn on the back of my leg from shooting some fire stuff. Lotta cuts and bumps and bruises but it’s exciting. I’m just happy because they let me do a lot of my own stunt stuff, so I take the bruises and burns with open arms.

CraveOnline: You did two movies last year. Have you been able to squeeze two movies in every hiatus?

Sophia Bush: No, not generally. This is a pretty difficult thing to do. With this hiatus, for instance, I wrapped the show and went home and helped finish casting this movie and then came out here. So it was a lot more preproduction but last summer worked out really well. I went straight from the show to New Orleans and straight from New Orleans to Vancouver, then did a little bit of back and forth between Vancouver and Wilmington once the show started. And I’ve actually had to go back twice in the period that we’ve been shooting this movie, back to the set of One Tree Hill. But it’s been great. It’s all working out really well.

CraveOnline: Did you have any hesitation to do another horror movie?

Sophia Bush: No, because Stay Alive is a horror movie and was very much based in that sort of license of movie magic realm. A horror film with, I don’t want to say sci-fi but definitely an out of reality context to it. This movie, granted it is a remake of a horror, but we’re really approaching it from the angle of a thriller. Horror fans are going to be happy. The scares are big and the blood they’re going to get is great. But this movie is very psychological and at the same time, in addition to being a thriller, it’s very much a character story. And most of these movies aren’t. When you go and see a scary movie, you don’t generally get to know your characters and we’ve taken a lot of painstaking steps to make sure that we’ve developed Jim and Grace, developed their relationship, their chemistry, the sort of quirks about their relationship that come with having been with someone for eight months to a year, sort of in that time period. So I think there’s a lot more elements than fit into just a genre film. We’ve taken things from all aspects of filmmaking and really tried to put them into this movie to ground it in reality and make it feel more believable and make it something that an audience can get much more invested in than simply going to see it just for the gore.

CraveOnline: But it's very physical and you mentioned doing your own stunts?

Sophia Bush: It’s great for me. It’s my dream to sit and get to blow up cars and shoot people and make an action movie. Being on set with helicopters and car chases and stunts every day is amazing. That’s the tomboy side of me, the action junkie, the adrenaline junkie that wants to do all of those things and it’s been great because our stunt team is so great, so amazing. They’ve given me the opportunity to do everything that liability-wise I can’t. They didn’t let me jump through the 10 foot wall of fire. I asked to. I was like, "Put the burn cream on." And they’re all kind of like, "No, no, no. You don’t get it.” But they did allow me to be in the car when it was on fire and kick the doors off and flames were coming in. That’s a pretty big rush and it’s a lot of license that you’re not normally given on a set. It’s been really great for me to get to do all those things. It’s what I like to do.

CraveOnline: Did you grow up looking up to the Linda Hamilton’s?

Sophia Bush: I mean, a little bit. I have my girlie side, don’t get me wrong. I love being a woman. I enjoy my femininity very much. But I also enjoy the fact that I can sit and hang out with my 10 guy friends and be the only girl in the room and be one of the boys. It’s a nice thing and I grew up definitely with my tomboy side, climbing around in tide pools and hunting snakes and frogs and things when I was a kid.  So it’s nice I think to be able to comfortable in either setting. It’s definitely something that’s good for me in my life and definitely my work because it gives me a wider range of people that I can play.

CraveOnline: Have you had any interesting road experiences?

Sophia Bush: Absolutely. Yeah, when I was in college, I did a cross country road trip with a friend of mine. We really extended it and we made it a sight seeing trip and sort of went through landmarks and cities and towns and national forests that we wanted to see and up to the Grand Canyon. We drove down through Santa Fe on our last day, which was odd getting back to Santa Fe shooting because I’m walking around going, "Wait a minute, I ate there." It’s a pretty incredible thing but it’s definitely if you’re going to embark on a road trip, you’ve got to be careful. It’s a little scary and we definitely had moments, she and I, driving when you realize you’re in the middle of nowhere on a two lane highway, with no cell phone reception and if anything happened to you you’d just be gone. You’d be off the map and nobody would ever know. So it’s something you’ve definitely got to be aware of if you’re going to undertake any adventure.

CraveOnline: You've been working so much, do you get any personal time?

Sophia Bush: Not much. I love my blackberry. I keep in touch with all of my friends via my various gadgets. And I go home when I can, even if it’s for an evening. When I’m shooting the show, I’ll fly back to LA on a Saturday and fly back to Wilmington on Sunday. It’s a big trip to make but it’s the way that I sort of keep myself attached to my life and make sure that I get to see the faces of the people that I love, so it’s just about where your priorities are. I would never make my friends or family feel like they were second to anything. But by the same rule, for me personally as an individual, my job is the thing that I love most. There’s nothing better to me than working and getting to do this. It’s the reason that I treat it with respect and I really make sure to try to treat it with dignity. It’s a fortunate thing to have the opportunity to be working so much. I watch a lot of people sort of waste that with ego or a sense of entitlement. Nobody in this business deserves to have any of that because there’s 100 people waiting at your doorstep to take your place. It’s the reason that I work so hard, because I don’t want to stop working. But it’s definitely at times is hard. This was the first year that I’ve gotten to see my mom on her birthday in three years and it’s great. It was really nice. I managed to get on a late flight going to Texas so that I could go home and have lunch with my parents and then go to the airport and I was lucky.

CraveOnline: So in 20 years we’ll still see you working just as hard?

Sophia Bush: Well, I think it depends. You hope that you get to a point in your career when you can sort of dictate your schedule and when you get to choose. I think something that demands this sort of burning the candle at both ends for me is the fact that it’s not that I’m sitting here scheduling films back to back. I have a television series that takes up eight months of my year, nine months of my year at times. So it’s my choice. A lot of people who work on shows don’t want to work during their summer. They want to take time off. I would love to take time off. I would love to go on vacation but there are so many things that I want to do and so many things that I’m interested in, I feel very stagnant if I’m not working on my hiatus. So yeah, at least while this is going on, I will be trying to squeeze things in. 20 years from now, maybe I’ll be doing two movies a year and actually taking vacations with my family in between. I think that’s what you hope for. You hope to have that kind of good fortune but you can’t bet on it.

CraveOnline: Doing this movie and the show at the same time, did you ever bring a little bit of this character back?

Sophia Bush: I can’t. They’re completely different. It’s something that I actually work on for me. When you’re working on a job, you have to make sure that you have that box that your character is, that you can close at the end of the day and let go of and go home and be you. So when I’m kind of double timing and doing two jobs at once, I have to have two very specifically located boxes far away from each other, with me in between so I have the resources to pull from both because it’s not something that I in good conscience could ever allow to mix because it would jeopardize both projects.

CraveOnline: Do you know what's going to happen to your character every season?

Sophia Bush: No. Very often they won’t tell us what’s coming. I mean, I know about halfway through this season because there’s a lot of complex things coming. But they generally try to keep some surprises for us as well because sometimes when something major is coming, they don’t want us to know. They don’t want us to play into it. So it just depends but very often, yeah. Very often it’s script to script.

CraveOnline: Have you always had this energy level to do so much?

Sophia Bush: You know, I’ve really learned that holding onto negativity from anything drags you down or makes you tired. I wake up in the morning and I appreciate that it’s a beautiful day. I appreciate driving to set. I appreciate the landscape. I appreciate the clouds. I wake up in bed with my dog and he’s the best. He’s just the best thing and there is so much to be happy about. I want to make sure that I value every day as an amazing day. That keeps my energy up. It keeps me happy and it keeps people that are close to me happy. I think it’s really just a choice.