Jana Kramer is opening up about her time on One Tree Hill, and it sure sounds like there was some animosity on the set of the series.
Kramer played Alex Dupre on the beloved CW drama and reunited with co-stars James Lafferty and Stephen Colletti on Monday’s episode of Whine Down With Jana Kramer and Michael Caussin, a podcast she hosts with her husband.
The actress said on the podcast that she was “definitely closest” to Coletti, who played Chase on the series, a character who was romantically involved with Alex.
“I did all my scenes with Stephen. I had very few scenes with James,” Kramer said of working on the show.
“When I was on the show there was just some, not cattiness, but just, ‘You can’t talk to this person if you’re friends with this person.’ So, I wasn’t very close to James because of certain situations on the set at the time.”
Kramer opened up about the cast seemingly putting on a united front in recent years to attend conventions and reunions.
“It’s kind of frustrating because I’m like, ‘Why couldn’t we have all been friends then? And you made the newbies’ life a little bit of hell.’ But it’s cool,” she said during the podcast.
“But now it’s, like, annoying because they’re all like, ‘We’re all friends now,’ and I’m just like you — one person — literally made it hell for us, because if we chose the wrong friend, we would be destroyed.”
Kramer did not reveal the name of the cast member she felt caused the problems, but Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton had already exited the show by the time she joined in 2009.
Kramer joined the cast the same season Shantel VanSanten and Robert Buckley landed series regular roles.
This is not the first time Kramer spoke out about the drama on the set. In an interview with Us Weekly in January, the star said the following.
“It was, like, you either are on this side or you’re on this side. And if you are on this [side], then you can’t be friends with this person,” she told the outlet.
“When now everyone’s friends again, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute. Like, you were told that we couldn’t be friends with this person and now you’re saying you all are friends?’ That is the biggest misconception, but OK.”
Bethany Joy Lenz has also spoken out about the environment on the set of the series in her podcast in 2019.
“It would be great to go back and not have it feel like it was divided in any way or when we were going through a rough patch,” she shared, before stating that it was great to have Kramer on the series.
“You were such a firecracker. You always had such a great energy. I loved being in scenes with you because there was a firecracker in the room and you never knew when it was gonna go off.”
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Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.