Sophia Bush is scrubbing in on season 21 of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy.
Bush, 42, was cast in a recurring role as Dr. Cass Beckman, according to Deadline. The trauma surgeon is described as “amiable, fun and a little messy around the edges” and works at the nearby Seattle Presbyterian Hospital. Her husband works at Grey Sloan. The actress will make her Grey’s Anatomy debut on the sixth episode of the season, which airs on ABC Thursday, November 7.
This isn’t the first time Bush has played a doctor. She was previously the lead on CBS’ Good Sam where she played cardiac fellow and interim hospital chief Dr. Sam Griffith. Bush also frequently appeared on Chicago Fire and Chicago Med as Detective Erin Lindsay before her Chicago P.D. exit in 2018.
Good Sam, which premiered in 2022, gave Bush the opportunity to be a producer on the project. It also reunited Bush with her One Tree Hill costars Hilarie Burton Morgan and Bethany Joy Lenz, with whom she continues to produce the “Drama Queens” rewatch podcast. (Burton Morgan remains an executive producer after stepping down as cohost earlier this year. Robert Buckley stepped in to cohost with Lenz and Bush.) Burton Morgan and Lenz also had separate significant guest arcs on Grey’s Anatomy in 2013 and 2018, respectively.
The trio opened up about what led to the onscreen reunion. Bush, Burton Morgan, 42, and Lenz, 43, previously shared the screen on One Tree Hill, which ran from 2003 to 2012.
“I think it was probably just me gabbing about the girls so often that led to my wonderful showrunner, Katie Wech, seeing an interview when the show premiered in January, where I said, ‘Oh, my God, if the ‘Drama Queens’ came on ‘Good Sam,’ I would die. It would be the best thing in the world,’” Bush told Variety in 2022. “She texted me and said, ‘Hey, you’re going to get the script for 108 and there’s these two sisters in it. Should we get Joy and Hilarie to come do it? Do you think they’d want to? We’ll just make an offer.’ I was like, ‘Well, I think they’re gonna want to read the script first, but yeah!’”
Bush went on to address the pressure from fans to do a One Tree Hill reboot.
“We’ve had such a long track record of supporting each other’s projects, and certainly we’ve gotten a group of our old gang back together for things. But for the three of us, there’s been so much singularly focused pressure on ‘Would you reboot the show? Would you reboot the show?’ We’ve always been like, ‘Leave us alone! Let us do other stuff together,’” she said. “The schedules we’ve all been on — Hilarie went from our show right to White Collar, I went to Chicago, Joy’s making movies and albums. We’re not all available a lot.”
She continued: “Even getting them here for three days to do an episode, it was a wild puzzle-making task for our teams and for the Good Sam team to figure it out. So I think what’s been so fun about it and what the podcast made us realize is, we can do whatever we want with Brooke, Peyton and Haley. We got to just have a toe dip on Good Sam and it was such a blast.”
Earlier this year, it was announced that Bush is developing a Netflix sequel series to One Tree Hill. If picked up, she will reprise her role as Brooke Davis and be an executive producer on the project alongside Burton Morgan, who played Peyton Sawyer.
Grey’s Anatomy airs on ABC Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET.