The Awkward One Tree Hill Episode That Made Hilarie Burton Morgan Break Character
Being a young actress in Hollywood can be a difficult undertaking. You have to be poised and prepared, ready for anything and everything that can be thrown at you on an active movie set. But sometimes one gets presented with a scene or a twist in a script that forces you to completely break character, whether it's to laugh at the ludicrous situation you've been forced to confront or to simply complain about the dialogue you're reading aloud.
Hilarie Burton Morgan put in six seasons on "One Tree Hill," a series that had her character Peyton Sawyer deal with everything from a coma to a cancer scare to a battle with an internet stalker. Peyton's romance with Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray) may be one for the teen drama history books, but one scene, in particular, had Burton Morgan breaking character while trying to cope with the wild twists and turns of her character's dramatic life.
Hilarie Burton Morgan's scenes with Chad Michael Murray kept making them cringe
On her Drama Queens podcast, Hilarie Burton Morgan and Sophia Bush reviewed "Resolve," an episode from Season 4 of "One Tree Hill." According to Burton Morgan, she and Chad Michael Murray had to cope with a scene that kept them off-balance thanks to some ripe dialogue.
"This whole episode is so weird. If you had just let the camera roll on Chad and I, we had a good time. We had a good rapport. We had good chemistry. We could have faked words that were fun to watch," Burton Morgan declared at around the 71-minute mark. She then called out the awkward dialogue, which kept them from turning in performances that were worthy of their characters. "It's like we're going to have internal monologues out loud at the cemetery, none of it felt cool or funny or flirty." The dialogue worked so poorly for both actors that they were forced to break character, tossing cookies at one another to try to up the playfulness quotient between their characters.
Fans have since told Burton Morgan that this is their favorite part of the episode, but she simply remembers how awkward the situation was for her and Murray to shoot; they couldn't move, as moving risked disrupting the shoot's continuity. They were stuck close to one another for a good chunk of time while each shot was prepped. But in the end, Burton Morgan admitted, it was worth the aggravation. "So for all of the uncomfortable dialogue throughout the course of the episode, Chad and I really did end it on a high note making something that was stupid, a stupid food fight, into a little bit of fun. We had fun!" she said.