Chad Michael Murray

Chad Michael Murray is an American actor whose two-decade career has been most-defined by his four-season role as Lucas Scott on The CW's One Tree Hill (2003–2009). He was born Chad Michael Murray on August 24, 1981, in Buffalo, New York. His parents divorced when he was ten, and he was raised primarily by his father in Western New York. He started modeling at age 17 in 1999 and pivoted to acting in his early twenties.

His TV roles included recurring positions on Fox's Gilmore Girls (2000–2001, in which he played the Tristan Dugray opposite Alexis Bledel's Rory Gilmore) and ABC's Dawson's Creek (2002, in which he played the Charlie Todd opposite Katie Holmes's Joey Potter). His 2003 launch of The WB's One Tree Hill — the Mark Schwahn-developed teen drama set in the fictional Tree Hill, North Carolina — produced his four-season starring role as Lucas Scott (2003–2009).

The One Tree Hill series ran for nine seasons across 187 episodes from 2003 to 2012 — making it one of the American teen-drama TV series of the 2000s. Murray's Lucas Scott — the high-school basketball star whose half-brother Nathan Scott was played by James Lafferty — anchored the show's first four seasons. He left the show after the 2009 fifth season.

His subsequent film and TV career has produced Freaky Friday (2003, opposite Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis), A Cinderella Story (2004, opposite Hilary Duff), House of Wax (2005, opposite Paris Hilton), Riverdale (CW recurring role 2017–2018), Lifetime channel TV-movies, and the 2020s Hallmark Channel productions. He has been with American actress Sarah Roemer since 2014, and the couple has three children. He has continued to be a recurring American TV-actor figure across the 2010s and 2020s.

His name Chad is the modern American spelling variant of Chadwick or Caedwalla — anchored in Anglo-Saxon tradition through Saint Chad of Mercia. Chad has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.