Will Friend and Bevin Prince Courtesy of Bevin Prince/Instagram
One Tree Hill’s Bevin Prince is reflecting on the death of her late husband, William Friend.
“He was standing in the water, looked at my father, handed him a cigar, and he lit it and he looked at my dad and he said, ‘Well, Mike, if we get struck by lightning out here this is where I want to be,’” Prince, 42, said on a recent episode of the “Missionary” podcast, “and seconds later he was struck.”
Prince, who played a recurring character named Bevin in the first four seasons of the WB/CW drama, shared that they were “very fortunate” that “anything that could’ve been done was done.”
“There was also a boat nearby where there was ex-military, a nurse and they ran over to help him, and a police boat happened to be passing right at that time so they were able to remove him quickly,” Prince said, before noting that he “instantly passed from the lightning strike.”
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Friend was taken to a hospital, where Prince waited to hear updates. Before she was told about his death, Prince said she looked at her sister and said, “Please tell me right now this is not going to be the very worst day of my life.”
“She was like, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ But she kind of knew because my dad had called her separately because my dad was with Will and he said, ‘It’s really bad. It’s really bad,’” Prince said. “He was 33 years old, it’s July 3rd, and he passed right around 3:13 [p.m.].”
Prince subsequently got candid about the grief she has experienced from losing her husband, whom she married in 2016.
“I think when you lose a partner at any age, what really you start to grieve are multiple things,” Prince said. “It’s the loss of a loved one and, at the same time, it’s the loss of the future you had started to plan. So every goal and dream I made for myself was wrapped around our love and then all of that gets pulled away. Your identity is stripped.”
It’s hard to look back at teen dramas without remembering One Tree Hill, and decades later fans are still talking about its explosive cast. The series, created by Mark Schwahn, aired for nine seasons from 2003 to 2012. It premiered on The WB then moved over to The CW in 2006 when The WB was […]
Prince explained that she was in “complete shock” the first year following his death, and began to “grieve” his death after the second year without him. Prince explained that accepting his death has been an important part of moving forward.
“The acceptance of the reality is going to allow you to move with grief,” Prince said, “and not have it stifle you.”
While processing the grief, Prince said she has experienced “days of joys” that she “couldn’t have imagined.”
“Even now, I couldn’t have imagined those were possible,” Prince said. “I can tell you with absolute certainty if you just show up and just continue to show up at some point and talk. I was right into therapy. … I had a lot of resources available to me and I held onto them for dear life.”
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