“I’m sure there’s some bulls— answer I could give, but I just don’t think I was famous enough for people to care about it, to be honest,” Bethany Joy Lenz says of her involvement in what she calls a small religious cult while she was starring in the CW hit “One Tree Hill.”
During a Zoom call from the sun-drenched porch of her Nashville home, she says her affiliation with the Big House Family was an open secret with castmates by the time she was able to extricate herself from it in 2012.
But when Lenz, who prefers to go by her middle name, Joy, offhandedly mentioned the group last year in the show’s rewatch podcast, “Drama Queens,” joking with co-hosts Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton that she should write a book about it, it made headlines. Less than a year and a half later, “Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult),” will appear on bookshelves Oct. 22.
It’s a quick turnaround for publishing, but Lenz had been toying with the idea of writing a book about her experience for a while before mentioning it on “Drama Queens.” She had put together about 40 pages to help process it, and she drew on those pages, along with years of journals, while writing the memoir.
“It was definitely an emotional and mental dump,” she says. “I don’t think I’d ever want to write something at that speed again.”
The memoir details her upbringing in Florida, Texas and the tri-state area around New York City, as well as her early experiences with religion, including what she describes as an encounter with God. As a young aspiring actress in the early 2000s, Lenz avoided the lure of the Hollywood party scene and instead gravitated to a youth Bible study group. It was there that she met an enigmatic pastor that she calls Les in the book (In an author’s note to her Simon & Schuster book, Lenz says she changed names and some identifying details for clarity and to protect the privacy of those that she says are recovering from their time in the cult), who would end up becoming the leader of Big House Family.
Lenz largely maintained two separate lives during her decade-plus in the group. This coincided with her nine seasons on “One Tree Hill,” which aired from 2003 to 2012. Her co-stars had suspicions, she writes, and were wary of the cult’s outsize influence over her life — particularly her finances.
When Lenz left the group, she also left her marriage to the pastor’s son, the father of her daughter.
“He was so confident that the girl he knew wouldn’t leave,” Lenz writes in the prologue. After reconnecting with her old friends, family and therapists, “I was reminded of that other girl I used to be before.”
Lenz could have easily just limited awareness of her experiences to her inner circle and the occasional Hollywood mixer, where she writes that she experimented with telling some of her peers. But, she says, “I weighed my desire for privacy and anonymity with my desire to see redemption at the end of this story and to be able to help people. The latter outweighed the former.”
In telling her story, she says her goal is to inspire faith in others. “I hope that people are able to use the book as a road map in some way and that they find hope at the end of their journey,” she says.
That faith isn’t necessarily religious, however. Lenz’s relationship with religion now is less defined by rules and more about curiosity and trusting herself.
She believes wellness culture has become culty in its own right, with wishy-washy aspects from different belief systems amalgamated into social media-friendly idioms.
“Every time I open up Instagram, there’s somebody telling me what to think, there’s somebody telling me what kinds of things I can say to myself in the mirror that are going to make me feel better about myself,” Lenz says.
She has her own ideas about why fellow performers, including “Smallville” actor Allison Mack — who served two years in federal prison for sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy and forced labor conspiracy related to her role in NXIVM, an organization purporting to be a self-help group — have been susceptible to fringe religious leaders.
“Actors are empaths, and they make a lot of money. You couldn’t make a brighter target for a narcissist,” she says matter-of-factly. Ultimately, “everyone is capable of indoctrinating themselves at any time.”
Right now, Lenz is focused on creative endeavors.
In “Dinner for Vampires,” she writes about workshopping a musical based on Nicholas Sparks’ “The Notebook” — not the version that is currently playing on Broadway — that she was forced to give up at the behest of the Big House Family. She’s also working on songs, novels, a pop musical about Pocahontas and a rock opera about a female sci-fi writer in the 1600s.
“I’m in a season of yes,” Lenz says.
Does that include joining former “One Tree Hill” co-stars Bush and Burton on a rumored reboot?
“I always want to go back,” Lenz says. “It’s never gonna leave my bones. I would be thrilled to participate on a creative level in some sort of reimagining if it made sense. It’s not no.”
