All four of the girls of the N.Y. department – all about 25 years old – pounce on my office and with a palpable enthusiasm they tell me that yes, Chad Michael Murray will be photographed by Steven Klein and that it would be better to interview him the evening before the shooting. It’s the tone of their voice which surprises me, it’s euphoric, joyful, as they were telling me I have won 3 million dollars at lottery, so when I look at them and I whisper “Chad who?” they watch me as they had in front of them a specimen of the Mesozoic period or something like that. “But he is the One Tree Hill star!” (a WB’s TV show that is very popular, as I find out later), they chatter in chorus. Well, it’s true that I’ve lived without TV for years and now I use the small screen just to watch again old black and white movies, but apart from the reasonable excuses I can advance, the reality is another: they know everything, really everything, about this Chad and I, that don’t have “Teen Vogue” on my bedside table, considering my age, notice a considerable generation gap for the first time. But, instead of getting upset about time that passes by, I try to gather information about this handsome actor that is new to me: after all I have to meet him after dinner in the Jean George restaurant and I can’t clutch at straws. Search is soon done: Chad is 24, he was born in Buffalo, N.Y., he played in some teen movies with unequivocal titles as “Freaky Friday”, “Cinderella Story”, the recent “House of Wax” – remake of a mythical horror, with omnipresent Paris Hilton among the others – and, above all, he has reached a big success with “One Tree Hill” where he plays Lucas, a young intellectual with many problems, including the fact he lives with his mother, his father is absent and his brother is more self-confident and successful than him.

Short curriculum, I think, while I go up to the crowded counter, where he is waiting for me with Dan, his agent. It’s Thursday night, everybody is out from home in N. Y. and to talk in a public place is impossible: noise is deafening. Since I live very close to the restaurant, I suggest it would be better to have a chat at my home, at least my sofa is more comfortable than those stools which you must be at least an accomplished mountaineer to sit on. Said and done (by the way, my porters – they too! – recognize him and the day after bombard me with questions). We have a drink and even before sitting down he asks me: “do you use coasters?”, and just to apologize he adds: “I have an obsessive disorder”, that in English sounds a little sinister, but translated in Italian it’s like to say “I’m precise”. I already adore him: I tell him that if he has an obsessive disorder or something like that, I’m a real maniac. He smiles, he just feels more at his ease.

“Do you know I was in Rome for long time?”, he tells me with a movie smile. “It was about 5 years ago, at the beginning of my career. I had got a role in an independent movie, “Megiddo: The Omega Code 2”, and I had to shoot some scenes just there. So I spent a fantastic month and a half, I watched all I could and I was even thrown out of Sistina Chapel. The fault was of a friend of mine who was making an awful row; in short, a bad impression”. Chad is a guy nice and tormented at the same time. Surely he hadn’t an enviable childhood. He tells me that at school he was “one in jeans and white shirt whose family drama everybody knew”. His mom left him when he was ten: he has grown up with his father and his siblings, doing all he could to clean home, take care of his little sister, search for a part-time job to earn some money. “We had nothing, we were financially instable, as it’s used to say. People my own age excluded me”, he reveals. “For some time I also worked in a cinema of essay, where anybody never went, so I watched beautiful movies as “Buffalo 66”, one of my favourite. Acting for me has always been a way to escape from my world, to express what I used to keep hidden in the depth of my soul”.

Fundamental a little episode of 8 years ago: Chad, who was 15 and played football (sport he still loves), goes to the hospital because of a serious intestinal occlusion. It was there that, motionless by force, he was treated by 2 nurses – “I can’t forget Sandra and Alana, without them I wouldn’t be here now”, he says – and above all he was encouraged to get into modelling. “After school, when I was 18, I left for L.A.. I found a home in North Hollywood, a bad zone full of pushers and criminals where every night my car ended up dented, with a broken window and the radio stolen. I didn’t have money and so I worked for some advertising campaigns (Gucci, Tommy Hilfiger) for living but at the same time I got acting lessons. Hard time, really”, he summarizes with a grimace. Then, slowly here they are the first movie roles, the contract with Warner Brothers for “One Tree Hill” and a big and true love with Sophia Bush, his co-stars in the TV show, from whom he has recently separated: a marriage which hasn’t lasted long, a still open wound and an obvious reluctance to talk about it with an unknown journalist. It’s better to talk again about his job, a matter in which he is more self-confident.

“In this season, that is the third, Lucas, my character, lives an important and formative period. We see him growing up and maturing, finding out love and sex. I hope to have the chance to get to the bottom of his psychological description. Clearly the decision isn’t up to me, but I count on scriptwriters”. And he points out: “No, Lucas doesn’t look like me, even though I had very similar experiences at his age”. Idol of young girls, with sacks of mail that arrive daily to the production office (and he answers everyone), Chad would like to do also something more challenging. He dreams a director like Scorsese, that can direct and pull out the best from him and, meanwhile, he is working on the script “Blank Screens”, the story of a mature man that nobody knows really. “It’s a project I have been cultivating for 6 years and maybe it reflects the aware part of myself. Who I would see as protagonist? Surely Sean Penn, my idol. Phenomenal. Potent. Unique”. Chad is one who gets excited when he talks about something that fascinates him directly. But he has also some reluctance, above all when he is afraid to promote himself. So, when I ask him about his active commitment in charity (he is involved in the Hunter’s Hope Foundation which gather money to cure children who suffer from Krabbe disease and in the Pop Warner Little Scholars which, through football, tries to take children away from streets) he just tells me: “I try to do what I can to help. There are things that touch my heart and children are the first”. Then he looks at me and Dan, his very silent agent, and says: “I’m hungry: what about a sushi?”.

Interview by Grazia D’Annunzio