Bethany Joy Lenz isn’t only opening up about her experience in the Big House Family cult. In her new book, “Dinner for Vampires,” the actor details about her time as Haley James (later Scott) on “One Tree Hill.”
Lenz writes that she initially passed on the WB series since she was focused on doing film and didn’t want to be “stuck on a teen soap.” Eventually, after the actor cast as Haley didn’t work out for the pilot, she was called again; the executive knew her since he’d tried to get her to read for “What I Like About You.”
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“The show was marketed toward tween girls, and I was concerned that the big-sister role I was testing for — which eventually went to the lovely Jennie Garth — was a woman living with her boyfriend,” Lenz writes about the Amanda Bynes-led show. “I didn’t want to normalize ‘living in sin’ for young girls.”
The night before the “One Tree Hill” screen test, the executive called her manager, and said, “You tell her this show is about fucking and sucking, and if she’s gonna have a problem with that, she shouldn’t come in tomorrow.”
Luckily, Lenz believed in the script enough to see past that. The drama, which aired for nine seasons on The WB/The CW from 2003 to 2012, was much more than that and she related to Haley. But the point came up again down the line.
For example, she was once asked to try on bras for a scene and she pushed back, saying it didn’t suit her character.
“‘This is what the creator wants you to wear in the scene,’ the wardrobe designer would say apologetically. When I stood my ground as a matter of religious modesty, my manager would get a call from him: ‘She’s being difficult again. We told you what this show was about!'” Lenz writes about the show’s creator, Mark Schwahn. “And, in fairness, they did. The ‘fucking and sucking’ executive had been very clear about that … But my manager was in LA and three hours behind North Carolina time, so every time I tried to get ahold of her to explain the situation and ask her to intervene, it slowed down production, which just made me look even more ‘difficult’ to everyone else.”
Schwahn was publicly accused of assault and harassment by Hilarie Burton and a number of the show’s cast and crew in 2017. He has never responded to the claims, but the women talk about the allegations at length on the “Drama Queens” podcast.
In her book, Lenz compares Schwahn’s motives to that of the cult leader, a man she calls Les in the book, who also tried to control everything she did.
“Now I see the similarity between the creator’s strategy and Les’s strategy. In hindsight, it became clear that they both used geography to isolate us young and trusting people from our support systems and pressure us into doing what they wanted. But whereas the creator’s only leverage was fame, Les’s leverage was my eternal salvation,” she writes. “The more my personal beliefs and preferences interfered with the creator’s demands, the more he started writing things into the storylines to purposefully humiliate or antagonize me. Like making other characters call Haley ‘fat.’ Or having Haley ‘overreact’ to her high school boyfriend watching porn.”
Although the cult leaders told her that none of her coworkers were “spiritually safe” to trust, she managed to form connections with some of her colleagues in the first few years of filming in Wilmington, North Carolina.
That changed at the end of 2005, after she married a man she refers to as “Q” or “QB” in the book, the leader’s son. Her husband moved to Wilmington. (Lenz never shares his real name in the book, but her husband was Michael Galeotti.)
“He monitored where I went, what I watched, who I talked to. He didn’t even want me to own anything that represented my life before marriage,” she writes. “When he met the cast and crew, everyone was cordial, and a few people, like Paul [Johansson], made an effort to befriend him. But Q resisted. He mistrusted them all. He had never been prepared to face the world on his own. He had been trained to be terrified of the unknown, groomed to need Les there to guide him through everything. On set, he managed his fear by smiling and feigning sweetness and docility. Later at home, he’d wax on about what frauds they all were.”
She continues, “Things quickly got worse. He wanted to read every script to see if he was okay with what I would be doing in that episode. He examined photos of my wardrobe choices to make sure there wasn’t any midriff or cleavage. Who was I eating lunch with? It better not have been a male cast member. Was I confiding in anyone at work about our relationship struggles? Not if I knew what was good for me! Only Jezebel wives disrespect their husbands by airing dirty laundry.”
Her costars, she tells Variety, didn’t know about him trying to control her wardrobe or storylines. “I knew they would think it was weird. There was a lot that I knew people would think was weird, and I justified it by saying, they just don’t have ‘spiritual eyes’ to see things,” she says. “It builds kind of a sense of superiority. That’s the only way you can manage living that way.”
“Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!)” is available on Amazon and on stands now.
