Trending 29th August 2023 by Lorna Gilligan

Hilarie Burton Claims A One Tree Hill Boss Exhibited ‘Creepy’ Behaviour While Filming

There’s been a lot of uncomfortable claims made by the cast and crew.

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We all love a good 2000s show. From The OC to Gossip Girl and Dawson’s Creek to One Tree Hill, they all managed to hit the spot when it came to good tv.

Unfortunately it’s not until years later, if at all, that we hear claims that all wasn’t so rosy for the young actors playing our favourite characters.

Recently Hilarie Burton, who played Peyton Sawyer on One Tree Hill, made some particularly uncomfortable claims when it came to one particular scene in the series.

 

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Hilarie hosts a podcast along with her former co-stars Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz called Drama Queens, where they recap each episode from the nine seasons of the show.

On the August 20 episode they were discussing the season five episode entitled Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace, when Hilarie accused a boss she only named as ‘Voldemort’ of purposefully writing himself into a scene when they were no longer speaking outside of work.

Recounting her series of events the 41-year-old said: “I wasn’t speaking to him in real life and so he wrote himself into the episode of me hugging him.”

Bethany, whose castmates and friends nickname Joy, immediately called the move “so psychotic”, while Sophia asked “Can you guys imagine Shonda Rhimes or Aaron Sorkin casting themselves on their own show?”

 

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Although Hilarie didn’t name the boss her claim pertains to, the episode being discussed was written by One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn. Mark appeared in a scene of this particular episode as Max, the record store owner.

In the scene, Peyton (Burton) and Max (Schwan) share a hug before having a deep conversation which ends with her holding his hand.

Hilarie remembered feeling so uncomfortable with the scene that she asked her dad to come on set for the shoot. She said: “In between every take, I would just beeline to the monitor and go stand next to my dad because you can’t touch me, you can’t pull me into a sidebar conversation, you can’t do any of that if I’m just making jokes with my dad.”

Back in 2017 she, along with a number of other cast and crew members, publicly accused Schwan of misusing his power as a showrunner. An open letter was written by the cast and crew revealing the behaviours they had experienced over the duration of filming One Tree Hill.

An excerpt of the letter read: “Many of us were spoken to in ways that ran the spectrum from deeply upsetting to traumatising, to downright illegal. And a few of us were put in positions where we felt physically unsafe.”

In an earlier episode of the podcast Hilarie accused ‘Voldemort’ of assaulting her on their way back from shooting a season four episode in Texas. She revealed Chad Michael Murray confronted the show’s creator as he, unlike the rest of the young cast, “had nothing to lose because he knew our boss hated him anyway”.

“You don’t speak up when you’ve a lot to lose,” Hilary concluded.

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