Sophia Bush may be widely known from the earliest years of her career for hit TV shows, but her turn as Ali for The Stranger in My Home proves yet again that she can deliver in the film format. The movie, based on the novel of the same name by Adele Parks, is a psychological thriller that poses the question of what you would do if somebody close to you isn’t who you thought they were, and the answer may leave you on the edge of your seat. In a fun twist, the actress returned to her One Tree Hill roots when it came to the world of high school cheerleading.
The Stranger in My Home also stars Grey’s Anatomy‘s Chris Carmack, Amiah Miller, and Chris Johnson in addition to Sophia Bush. Characters’ seemingly perfect lives are turned upside down when Ali (Bush) and her husband (Chris Johnson) learn that their daughter, Katie (Miller), isn’t their biological daughter at all due to a mix-up at the hospital. That alone would be enough for a dramatic story, but sinister forces are at work with secrets, lies, and Carmack turning in a much creepier performance as the obsessive Tom than Grey’s Anatomy fans are used to. The movie is available on Digital now.
But before everything goes sideways for the characters in this installment in the 2025 movie release schedule, Sophia Bush is back in a high school gym with cheerleaders. The trailer revealed ahead of time that she was helping to coach the teens, and the actress hasn’t played One Tree Hill‘s cheerleading captain Brooke in a long time. Still, when I was fortunate enough to speak with her and Chris Carmack about their thriller, I had to mention the sequence, and she opened up about filming it:
I know! [laughs] And actually one that we did closer to the end of the film, because we have the national championship team in to do a lot of the aerial work and the stunts, and so in my brain, even though, obviously I’d read the script a million times, by the time we left, in my experience, in my sense memory, that’s sort of at the end of the movie. And then the movie opens, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, of course! The first thing we see!’ And I’d kind of forgotten about it, and it was really, really fun to experience that in particular as a viewer, when we got to screen the movie together.
The Stranger in My Home evidently recruited some championship cheerleaders to pull off the trickiest moves. There was a touch of nostalgia in seeing Bush back in a fictional high school gym. Co-star Chris Carmack, a teen drama vet himself as the O.C. star who dropped one of the most iconic lines from the Fox soap’s pilot, chuckled as Bush recounted the cheerleading experience for their movie.
Laughs were few and far between in the movie once Carmack’s character made his entrance, however! Tom’s motives make for one of the greatest mysteries of The Stranger in My Home. The Grey’s Anatomy star (who may or may not have been affected by the latest season’s explosive cliffhanger) opened up about what “immediately hooked” him about the film’s script:
I have two daughters. I think the most important role I’ve played in my life is as a father. I think that’s what roped me into this script, more than anything, is the immediate questions and vulnerability around what is family? Who is family? What is blood? You know, nature versus nurture and the real horror of a realization that the person you’ve known and loved is not necessarily – I wouldn’t say who you thought they were, because, of course, they’re who you thought they were – but they don’t come from where you thought they came from. And it’s just this betrayal of reality.
The Stranger in My Home becomes widely available on Digital not too long after the end of Grey’s Anatomy Season 21, which also happened to feature Sophia Bush as a guest star while Chris Carmack continued his run as a series regular. Suffice it to say that nobody will be confusing their Grey’s characters with Ali and Tom, however!
Sophia Bush shared her own take on what about The Stranger in My Home script and about Ali in particular made her want to sign on. She said:
Gosh, for me, from the minute that the script hit my inbox, I was just very enthralled. The idea that this almost an old wives tale, or an urban legend, kind of happening, could happen to a family, and, in fact, has. And how do you make sense of it? What do you do when your whole world is turned upside down? Of course, it’s going to matter, and also, should it matter in your family? It’s sort of a Pandora’s box of questions that gets opened, and to have it go from this very tense family thriller to an almost fatal obsession, horror adjacency, thing just felt like something I really wanted to dive into.
You can find The Stranger in My Home on Digital now. The twists and turns certainly take Ali in different directions than what Brooke went through even in her wildest One Tree Hill storylines, but you can count on seeing Sophia Bush briefly back in cheerleading mode… before everything takes the creepy turn that made both Bush and Chris Carmack want to sign on, that is.