I ask Bethany Joy Lenz when she reached the point of no return.
"Point of no return ... 'The Phantom of the Opera' is playing in my mind," she says with a laugh.
For more than 10 years, Lenz was in a religious cult based in the Pacific Northwest. She talks about it now — and in the memoir "Dinner for Vampires," out Oct. 22 — with poignancy, sincerity and, yes, a bit of humor.
She recalls in an interview with TODAY.com how she told her former "One Tree Hill" castmate Hilarie Burton about her decision to leave the group, which she identifies in her memoir as the Big House Family.
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According to her memoir, she and Burton struck up an early friendship at the beginning of filming the nine-season show, but as Lenz drew closer to the Big House Family, she become more isolated from the cast.
She remembers riding in an elevator with Burton, who she said she saw about annually, a few years ago while attending a convention in Paris.
"We get in this elevator, and she's like, you know, 'How are you? How's things?' And I said, 'Oh, I'm good... I'm not in a cult anymore,'" Lenz says. "And she just like grabbed me and pulled me into this giant hug and just, like, laughing so hard she's crying."
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"Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!)" follows Lenz starting as a bright-eyed 19-year-old moving from New York to Los Angeles hoping to make it in the entertainment industry through her time on the hit teen melodrama "One Tree Hill." In between, Lenz became more and more involved in an at-home Bible study that "went sideways," according to the memoir.
That Bible study eventually stood in as her Family — denoted with a capital "F" throughout the book. From her time in the group, around 2000 to 2012, she married the son of the charismatic group leader, welcomed a daughter, had more than $2 million "siphoned" from her financial accounts and witnessed the group break down.
In an author's note at the beginning of her book, she writes that she used the word "cult" for "ease of reference and to portray my personal experience," through the word does not have a strict legal definition. She also describes the Big House Family as a "high-demand group" or "high-control group."
"The point of no return was kind of early on," she tells TODAY.com. "I'd been there for about a year, and we were all just friends and it felt very normal. It was not anything nefarious."
Then a man identified as Les arrived, she says, a pastor from another state who eventually became the group's de-facto leader and Lenz's father-in-law.
"He saw something about me that I thought nobody else could see. This like, childhood wound inside of me. And he spoke to it, and he said some incredibly encouraging things to me in that space. And because it was public, it was happening in the space of all these other people, I felt really exposed, and in that exposure, I felt really loved," she says.
"It's what we look for in all our deep relationships, right? Somebody who sees you and all of your flaws and just loves you anyway," she adds.
She wrote "Dinner for Vampires" with the aid of journals she kept from between 1999 and 2015. In the book, she recounts her feelings and emotions as she experienced them at each moment weaved in with asides — notes on what was really happening with the benefit of hindsight.
Now, she sees Les' words differently.
"I was 21, and he was doing nothing more than a two-bit psychic on the corner. You walk in and they're like, 'I feel like you like plants.' And you're like, 'Oh yeah, did you notice all the stickers on my backpack?'" she says.
How ‘One Tree Hill’ ‘saved’ her
At around 22, Lenz was cast in "One Tree Hill," which premiered in September 2003, as girl-next-door Haley James. She moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, for most of the year to film but stayed close to the group through a group email chain and regular calls.
She writes that she was encouraged to stay isolated, and she kept her "inner life" a secret.
She heard her situation described as a "cult" both by her parents, which whom she grew more and more estranged from during her time in the group, and on the set of "One Tree Hill." She writes of feeling "shunned" but later realizes the cast and crew had been trying to help her.
"They tried to help me by engaging me in conversations that would challenge my beliefs," she tells TODAY.com. Conversations that she was open to "to a point," she says.
"The stakes were way too high for me," she says. "When we have a deep need for something, and we've decided what it is that's going to fill that need — if it turns out that it's souring, or it it's not going great, we've already poured so much into it, our identity, our time, our money, our love, our care. To admit that maybe we're wrong, and we should look at something from a different perspective, it's really hard to do."
When the cast realized her reluctance, they backed off, she says. Some went on to engage with her "from any other place that they could."
“They still saw me and cared about me and wanted to invest in my life and saw a long-term friendship there,” she says.
For months out of the year, she lived apart from the group and did her job: She acted.
"In order to be a good actor, you have to be authentic, and you have to be in the moment," she says. "It required me, on a daily basis, to get in touch with that center core, most authentic, instinctually driven part of myself.
For that reason, she says that the show “saved” her.
“It really kept alive for me this sense of authenticity,” she says. "I never washed it away. I never suppressed it fully. It was always coming up to the surface. And I don't know what would have happened if I didn't have that."
The 'hardest goodbye'
Lenz was one of three cast members who starred in the show through its entire nine-season run, joining Bush and James Lafferty, who played Nathan Scott, a basketball star who marries Lenz's character in the Season 1 finale.
The show wrapped production in 2011, months after Lenz welcomed her daughter. She writes that Lafferty was "the hardest one to say goodbye to."
She recalls their goodbyes being "rushed" and involved giving him a card and a hug. "Saying goodbye to him in particular felt like, 'This is going to be so strange to not have my husband around all the time,'" she says.
Haley and Nathan stayed together throughout the show's run (barring brief separations in Seasons 2 and 5) and are today remembered as one of television's most iconic TV couples, even taking the No. 1 slot of a 2023 BuzzFeed list.
Acting out a happy marriage was "such a relief," Lenz says. Around 2010, Lenz describes the state of her own marriage in her memoir with, “I had never been less healthy and happy or further from God. It was hell.”
"My personal life was in so much turmoil, that (Lafferty) was a huge part of the relief that I felt on a daily basis," Lenz tells TODAY.com. "Remembering moments of peace and joy and feeling loved and laughter and playfulness, and all those memories that are with him and not with the group of people that I was involved with at the time — I think I just didn't quite know what to do with that emotion, so I just gave him a card and a hug."
Similarly, she had to say goodbye to her character, Haley.
She describes Haley — who starts the show as "Tutor Girl" and ends up a wife, mother, record-label owner and touring musician — as the perpetual optimist.
“Haley was written to be someone that was the cream rises to the top. She just kept coming up and finding the best in people and believing the positive thing and fighting through the hard thing,” she adds. “The muscle memory of your body remembering what it feels like to live in that mindset, I think was really powerful for me in ways that I didn’t realize at the time.”
Telling her story
Lenz first went public about her past experience in the group in July 2023 on "Drama Queens," the "One Tree Hill" rewatch podcast she co-hosted at the time with Burton and Sophia Bush.
"Drama Queens," which launched in 2021, follows the show's former cast members as they rewatch the nine-season show in its entirety. It's currently on Season 7, with Robert Buckley, who played Clay Evans, stepping in for Burton. (In regards to longstanding rumors of a feud between Lenz and Burton, Lenz says, "I love Hilarie, and I just have no interest in engaging in the rumor mill, but I love her dearly.")
Lenz was scared to do the podcast originally, she says.
“I was like, ‘I do not want to relive looking at myself in that place, knowing what was going on, knowing how obtuse I could be at times, knowing how sort of lost and in a haze and disconnected,’” she says.
Now watching Season 7, she sees a “weight” to her performance because of what was going on in her personal life. “I brought in some of my personal heaviness into moments of the character,” Lenz says.
In July 2023, Lenz went public with her history of being in a cult.
“I would love to write about my experience,” she said on the podcast at the time. “I was in a cult for 10 years. That would be a really valuable experience to write about, and the recovery — 10 years of recovery after that. So there’s a lot to tell.”
She started going through her journals, which date back to 1994, when she was about 12 or 13 years old. She labeled them year by year, noting key memories, core "emotional arcs," she says. Once it was in chronological order, she transferred the story to paper.
That's the "practical" version of the process.
The "emotional" version consisted of weeks of starting the project, but having to stop due to feelings of shame that at times "crushed" her.
"Sometimes just the voice of young Joy in turmoil coming back at me, or even not in turmoil, even just the times when I was feeling positive and writing over and over some sort of phrase or belief that I wanted to exist in more deeply ... it would just hit me," she says.
It made her want to "love on the young me."
As for anything she would want to tell her younger self, that question is more complicated. She says she would have had a "short window of time" to actually get through to young Lenz.
A moment where she could have heard it might have been when she was living in New York, she says — still a teenager, not yet in L.A. and miles from the home Bible study. She describes that version of herself as someone who "longed for family and community" and consumed by perfectionism, which translated to being hard on herself and others.
"I would love to just tell that young girl, you should be making mistakes," she says. "And that's not something that has to go against your faith either, because it really actually works in tandem. That's kind of the whole point. You're supposed to be able to live freely and live in the confidence of knowing that you're covered. God is there. He's with you. There is a safety net for you of love and kindness, and there's nothing you can do to earn it.
"Just stumble," she adds. "Go stumble through life."
For readers of her memoir, she hopes those who have experienced "narcissistic abuse" feel seen.
"If you've been dinner for a vampire," she says, with a slight laugh as she quotes her book’s title, "you're not alone, you're not stupid, you're not weak — your superpower is empathy and trust.
"You're probably a really smart person, because narcissists prey on really intelligent people," she adds. "You've been manipulated, and there's no shame in that. You are a loving, trusting person, and that's a good way to go about being in the world.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
