Bethany Joy Lenz, 43, has opened up about her decade spent deeply entrenched in a Christian cult while also starring on One Tree Hill in her memoir Dinner For Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in An Actual Cult!) — and she says it was no big secret on set.
In an interview for a new cover story with PEOPLE, Lenz says that a year into starring as Haley James Scott on the popular teen drama, she was casually chatting with her costar Craig Sheffer in between takes.
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“We were sitting at the bleachers filming a basketball scene at Laney High School, and he started asking me questions about my family,” says Lenz, now 43.
She began to tell him all about her “chosen family,” a tight-knit group of deeply religious friends she’d met at a Bible study in Los Angeles who lived in a commune-like house in Idaho where they were led by a pastor she calls “Les” in the book.
“Eventually Craig goes, ‘You know you’re in a cult, right?'” Lenz says.
She laughed off the idea. “I was like, ‘No, no, no. Cults are weird. Cults are people in robes chanting crazy things and drinking Kool-Aid. That’s not what we do!'”
Craig Sheffer and daughter Willow arrive at the premiere of A Cinderella Story in 2004.
Frank Trapper/Corbis/Getty
It would take her eight more years before she saw the group she calls the “Family” for what they really were, and before she left for the sake of her daughter.
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But at the time, between acting and her commitment to the Family, Lenz began to feel like she was leading a double life. She says her cast mates were certainly cognizant of her ties to the religious group. There was even online chatter about it at the time.
Bethany Joy Lenz with Hilarie Burton and Sophia Bish.
Bethany Joy Lenz/ Instagram
“I could see it on their faces,” she says of her One Tree Hill costars, about what they knew and thought about it.
“But I’d justify it, like, ‘I couldn’t possibly be in a cult,” Lenz explains. “It’s just that I’ve got access to a relationship with God and people in a way that everybody else really wants, but they don’t know how to get it.”
Bethany Joy Lenz Shot for PEOPLE.
She adds that it gave her a feeling of superiority over everyone else.
“I don’t know that I like the term brainwashing. We convince ourselves of things all the time, and I think I just decided what I wanted to believe.”
In her book, Lenz writes that her religious devotion caused strain with most of the young stars on set.
“It makes me sad that I missed out on a lot of relationships I could have had with the cast and crew,” she says.
These days, she’s a regular at One Tree Hill reunions and was also a part of the Drama Queens rewatch podcast with Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton. She’s still close with many of her costars, including Paul Johansson.
“It makes me really happy that I get a chance to reconnect and do that with them now.”
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Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!) comes out Oct. 22 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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