Seven months after her sudden exit from Chicago P.D., Sophia Bush is shedding a little more light on her decision to turn in her gun and badge.
The actress, who played Detective Erin Lindsay for four seasons on the NBC drama, addressed her departure on Refinery 29’s Unstyled podcast, revealing that “I knew by the end of the second season I couldn’t do that job anymore.” She emphasized that she won’t be revealing exactly why she left the series “until I’m ready to do that,” but her comments make it clear her choice to leave was several years in the making.
Calling her Chicago P.D. role her “dream job,” Bush insisted that certain “aspects of it… were wonderful.” But she also recalled how she sat down with the show’s producers after Season 3 and told them, “If something really drastic doesn’t change, I’m leaving at the end of the year… I’m giving you 23 episodes’ notice.” She felt “liberating” telling the producers that, but the conversation helped her realize “just how miserable I was going to work everyday.”
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“For me, it felt like I was trapped in a burning building,” she added. “I was just so unhappy, and it was my dream job, and I was miserable, and I had to go.” (A report surfaced last month that co-star Jason Beghe’s anger issues may have contributed to Bush’s decision to exit the series.)
Bush left the show in May, and has since signed a deal with 20th Century Fox TV to develop a new series with her in the lead role. And she promises that the time for her to fully explain the reasons for her Chicago P.D. departure “is coming… The analogy I like to use for big-life things is almost like something’s approaching, but it’s still a little blurry in the foreground, but you can see it. You can see the shape of it. That’s kind of the stage where I feel like I am with the whole thing.”
