Chad Michael Murray’s comeback: The 2000s heartthrob on Hollywood, faith and family

The public has spoken: Lindsay Lohan is definitely back. With strong box office sales and positive reviews, the release of Freakier Friday — a sequel arriving more than 20 years after that teen classic — marks the definitive milestone in the actress’s long road to redemption. The child prodigy who ended up branded as “Hollywood’s bad girl,” trapped in a self-destructive spiral of addictions and legal troubles, and herself a victim of the era’s relentless scrutiny, has managed to restore her image — so much so she is headlining a Disney family blockbuster this summer.

But the comedy doesn’t only herald her comeback. Another millennial icon, nearly as dazzling and just as sidelined as Lohan herself, joins her in this particular rebirth: Chad Michael Murray.

He was the official teenage heartthrob of the early 2000s. The bad boy with just a trace of vulnerability behind the tough exterior, the mystery figure with a troubled past only you could solve — the perfect package of chiseled abs, sharp jawline, intense gaze, and perfectly tousled surfer-blond locks. Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek, Freaky Friday, A Cinderella Story, One Tree Hill… there wasn’t a teen product, a “sexiest men” list, or a school folder that didn’t feature him. But the man once dubbed the “new Brad Pitt” never lived up to the expectations, aged out of playing the cliché of the young rebel without a cause, and saw his career stall between made-for-TV movies and afternoon soap operas.

Now he once again steps into the shoes of Jake, the Ducati-riding, leather-jacketed heartthrob who won over Lohan and her mother — Jamie Lee Curtis — in the original film Freaky Friday. Murray — who will turn 44 this coming August 24 — is sporting more gray hair, but is just as charming. Is there still time for him to get back on the path he lost? He believes so: “I truly feel like I’m just getting started,” he told the Los Angeles Times last November, when he premiered the holiday-flavored Netflix film The Merry Gentlemen.

At just 30 years old, and after the end of his last major project, the series One Tree Hill, Murray nearly walked away from acting. “There was a moment where I was quitting. I was done. I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in late 2024.

He decided to change his life, went to therapy, and returned to his Catholic faith — the same faith he had leaned on when his mother left his father and five siblings when he was just 10 years old. The family barely made it to the end of the month, and he had to start working to bring some money home, but every Sunday he served as an altar boy at his neighborhood church. “Putting God and my family first,” he says, has helped him out of the “bad situations” that surrounded his daily life.

In 2015, he married actress Sarah Roemer — his second marriage, after a brief five-month union with his One Tree Hill co-star Sophia Bush — and together they have three children. “I love being an actor, but at the end of the day, the real grassroots thing for me was being a family man,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

He gushes about coaching his eldest son’s football team, taking his middle daughter to dance classes, and having the whole family accompany him on every shoot, even when they have to move to Canada for half a year to film Sullivan’s Crossing, the soap-style drama that has filled his schedule for the past five years. How did he land the role? By praying. “It was a very specific, very detailed prayer that I put out every single night,” he said in a conversation with People magazine published last week.

Success came to him very quickly. A native of Buffalo, New York, at age 15 he was hospitalized for months due to twisted intestines that, as he has recounted, caused him to lose half the blood in his body. His condition was so critical that his family even contacted a priest to discuss last rites.

He pulled through, and one of the nurses who cared for him — an aspiring model herself — encouraged him to get in touch with her agent once he recovered. He tried his hand at modeling and worked for brands such as Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger, but his ambition lay elsewhere. At 18, he moved to Los Angeles to begin auditioning as an actor, and just a few months later he was appearing in Gilmore Girls, one of television’s highest-rated shows.

But the situation overwhelmed him. He stopped smiling on the red carpet because he didn’t like his own smile, felt ashamed of his nose, and suffered panic attacks that kept him from leaving his room. In another promotional interview, earlier this August, he told The New York Times that at the height of his fame he developed agoraphobia, a debilitating disorder characterized by the fear of being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult — or embarrassing. “I’ll be completely honest with you, it’s downright terrible. You haven’t lived enough life to truly understand what any of this means. So, being agoraphobic, being anxiety-ridden, I tried to hide all the insecurity with cool.”

Today, far from shying away from fans, the actor embraces the nostalgia for his work and says he’s delighted that people still stop him on the street for roles he played more than 15 years ago. “I love my job and I love meeting people. I’m the first guy to say, ‘Yeah, let’s take a photo.’ We’re spreading joy and happiness everywhere we go. That’s what it’s about for me. I became an actor because I wanted to make people happy,” he told Interview.

Not all of his peers have managed that transition so well: actors like Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Mischa Barton (The O.C.), James Van Der Beek (Dawson’s Creek), or Jennifer Love Hewitt (Ghost Whisperer) have also faced stop-and-go careers after the end of their iconic series.

Murray, by contrast, seems comfortable inhabiting that middle ground, where nostalgia becomes a tool rather than a burden. He has also taken the chance to cultivate his writer side, publishing a graphic novel and a thriller. The success of Freakier Friday and the potential return of One Tree Hill, in a reboot already in the works at Netflix, might put him once again in a prime spot in the collective memory — if not on the covers of school binders, then on plenty of smartphone wallpapers. That is, if that still interests him.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition