Hilarie Burton has great faith in a One Tree Hill revival, which still remains one giant question mark.
Weeks after it was reported that the teen drama’s stars Hilarie and Sophia Bush were working on a sequel series at Netflix, Hilarie shared an update on where things currently stand.
"It's very, very early in the process," she exclusively told E! News, "and so we can't say that it's happening because it is in development."
That said, she’s optimistic about its future—and her collaborators.
"I firmly believe in the story that our showrunner has created," Hilarie continued. “But when Netflix officially greenlights it, we will party and we will tell you everything. And I think working with people that you really, really love, everyone has sensed the enthusiasm so they're chomping at the bit."
Multiple outlets had reported Aug. 30 that Netflix was developing a One Tree Hill sequel with Hilarie and Sophia set to executive produce and star in it, along with fellow show alum Danneel Ackles.
And it’s been gratifying seeing fans of the show—which ran from 2003 to 2012—just as excited as the cast is about the new series.
"For everyone involved, all the cast, everyone has been talking about it for years," Hilarie told E! News. "So seeing the public reaction to it is really nice."
But while it’s been more than a decade since the White Collar alum played the iconic Peyton Sawyer, the 42-year-old’s been hard at work, balancing a busy acting career and raising son Gus, 14, and daughter George, 6, with husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
And with her partner of 15 years by her side—they wed in 2019 after 10 years together—she’s navigated all life has brought her way, from new sets and schools to changes that come with aging. Like, perimenopause symptoms, for instance, which she’s been taking OLLY's Mellow Menopause vitamin to alleviate.
"So many people reacted by saying, 'You're too young, you're too young," she explained. "So my job now is to come out and be a megaphone and say, 'You're not too young. If you're having the symptoms, it is starting.' The sooner you manage it, the sooner you can just keep kicking ass, and you don't have to go through that pitfall of trying to keep it a secret."
That kind of honesty Hilarie brings to her everyday life—specifically with her experience as a mom—is what she’s most looking forward to bringing to the One Tree Hill sequel series.
"I think any story I tell, I tap into my real life," she said. "There's not a ton of content being made that is specifically for teenagers and their parents to bridge that gap. And One Tree Hill was really, really good at that."
"The point of One Tree Hill is to connect kids and their parents, and kids with each other in a meaningful way," Hilarie added. "So I want to be able to watch productions like that with my kids especially."
—Reporting by Nikaline McCarley
Look back at shocking secrets about the original One Tree Hill series...
1. Creator Mark Schwahn initially wrote the project as a movie called Ravens and it took four years for Warner Bros. TV executives to convince him to turn it into a series.
2. Believing the original name to be too sports-centric, the show's title came from the U2 song "One Tree Hill" off their Joshua Tree album. Each episode of the series was named after a song from various artists, ranging from Dashboard Confessional to R.E.M.
3. After reading for the part of Ryan on The O.C., Chad Michael Murray turned it down to star as Lucas, the brooding writer and basketball player. Though producers initially envisioned him as Nathan after his bad boy turns on Gilmore Girls and Dawson's Creek, Murray related to Lucas—as his mother left his family when he was young—and pushed to be cast in the role.
4. Bethany Joy Lenz auditioned for Haley and Brooke, but didn't really want to play the latter, admitting to reading it the same way she read the former. The final series regular to be cast, Lenz dyed her blonde hair dark and straightened her natural curls to differentiate herself from Hilarie Burton, who played Peyton.
5. James Lafferty, then 17, had more experience playing basketball than acting and knew he had his work cut out for him to land the part of Nathan. "I don't think I was an initial choice," Lafferty said in a behind-the-scenes featurette, revealing he had to audition six times.
He wasn't wrong. Noted executive producer Joe Davola, "When James went into casting he was a dark horse to get the job."
6. While she wasn't in the pilot, Sophia Bush made her debut as Brooke in the second episode and went on to appear every week after, even stepping behind the camera to direct three times.
7. One year after meeting on set, Murray and Bush got engaged in 2004 and wed less than a year later. Five months later, news broke that Bush filed for an annulment citing fraud, which was denied but she and Murray divorced.
As for what it was like to still work with her ex on One Tree Hill?
"There was no space to self-reflect," Bush said on an episode of Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, adding OTH producers were "really deeply inappropriate" to her and Murray after their breakup.
"They ran TV ads about it, it was really ugly," she added. "They made practice of taking advantage of people's personal lives, and not just for me and for my ex, for other actors on the show who would share as you do when you get close to people. Deeply personal things that were happening in their lives and they would wind up in storylines. It wasn't OK."
However, Bush has no interest in bad-mouthing Murrary—or talking about him at all really.
"I've tried to poke fun at being a dumb kid. And whenever I've done that, it gets twisted into I'm talking s--t about somebody who I don't even know anymore, who's clearly a grown-up," she explained on a 2021 episode of Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum. "I think you have to laugh at who you used to be. But when people ask me about history that involves someone else...it's not worth my time. It's not a place where I harbor ill will or anything."
As she put it, "I was a very naive 21-year-old kid and that's all there is to it."
Murray has shared similar sentiments.
“I was a baby. I didn’t know up, down, left, right,” he told The Cut in May 2024. “You move out there and you go, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do now? Get married? That’s exciting!’”
8. Bush would later date Lafferty in 2008 before striking up a romance with Austin Nichols, who played her husband Julian on OTH. The couple called it quits in 2012, the same year the series ended.
9. There was one successful on-set match: Lisa Goldstein, who played Millie in the later seasons, married Brendan Kirsch, the show's basketball coordinator, in 2011.
10. During an episode of her podcast Drama Queens, which she co-hosts with Bush and Lenz, Burton revealed her husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan was almost her colleague on OTH.
"You know when I met Jeff, he was like, 'Oh I auditioned for that show,'" she said, revealing he had read for the part of Keith, Lucas' father figure, a role that went to Craig Sheffer. "'And I was like, wait, what?'"
11. Burton and Morgan would instead get introduced by her co-star Danneel Ackles, whose husband Jensen Ackles formed a close connection with The Walking Dead star after Morgan played his father on Supernatural.
12. In a shocking open letter published November 2017, 18 cast and crew members levied sexual harassment accusations against Schwahn, hinting about the dark atmosphere that existed on set
In her 2020 memoir The Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock, and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm, Burton wrote of Schwahn, "In my particular fairy tale there had been a villain who pitted female actors against one another, pushed us to do gratuitous sex scenes that always left me feeling ill and ashamed, told young female actors to stick their chests out, put his hands on all of us, and pushed himself on me, forcing unwanted kisses."
13. Additionally, Bush spoke out about her experience during a June 2021 appearance on the Chicks in the Office podcast, claiming that she and her One Tree Hill co-stars—who she didn't identify—were being controlled and manipulated by unspecified adults on set.
"We had grown-ups who we trusted, who now we understand were being really controlling and manipulative—who didn't want us to be close 'cause they thought we would band together and ask for more money," Bush alleged. "It's just so weird and those were just things we were not aware of at the time."
Schwahn has not publicly addressed the allegations.
14. After six seasons, Murray and Burton exited the series in 2009. But the seeds for Burton's departure were planted much earlier, she revealed in her memoir.
After her dear friend Scott Kirkpatrick was killed while serving in Iraq in the summer of 2007, her life "took a turn," she wrote, his death snapping her "priorities and goals back into focus."
"I had spent the previous few years wandering, never really finding my place, but I wanted more," she explained. "I wanted a family. I wanted a home that could be a refuge and a blank canvas that would allow me to daydream, to take risks, to try and fail and try again. I wanted to push myself every day. I wanted to make every moment intentional. Wake up intentionally. Work intentionally. Eat intentionally. And rest intentionally." So she quit, began writing a novel and booked a one-way ticket to Paris.
15. At the time, however, Schwahn told a group of fans in Paris that their departures were due to a contract dispute, according to The Los Angeles Times. "I know they've been offered great things, and hopefully they'll decide to come back," he said. "If they don't that's always a possibility...[the show] has made it through some of the riskier moves we've done."
Murray also spoke out to the show's viewers, saying in a video, "They're not bringing me back next year...because they want to save money. Start blogging and being pissed off." While Burton never returned, Murray made an appearance in the final season.
16. In a bold move, One Tree Hill staged a time-jump in season six, choosing to forgo the college years to catch up with the characters as adults.
"When you look back and see similar shows to ours try to make that jump from high school into the next chapter of these characters' lives," Lafferty told E! News in 2015, "it's sort of awkward and clunky and it doesn't work that well."
17. Country singer Jana Kramer joined OTH for its final three seasons and revealed on her podcast Whine Down that one unnamed cast member "made it hell" for everyone else on the series, alleging she was not allowed to be friends with Lafferty.
"When I was on the show...there was just some, not cattiness, but just, 'You can't talk to this person if you're friends with this person,'" she said in a 2021 episode. "So I wasn't very close to James because of certain situations on the set at the time."
18. In 2010, cast member Antwon Tanner was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in a scam to sell stolen Social Security Numbers across state lines. The actor, who played Antwon "Skills" Taylor, pled guilty after getting caught in a sting operation trying to peddle 16 phony Social Security Numbers and three counterfeit cards in 2009.
19. In 2024's Dinner For Vampires—in which Lenz wrote about her "life on a cult TV show while also in an actual cult"—the actress noted she initially "wasn't eqipped to get too close to Sophia."
“Frequently favored and constantly underestimated in life because of her beauty, Sophia worked obsessively at proving her value—a character trait that made her perfect to play Brooke Davis but clashed with my own insecurities and militant beliefs about how one should go about proving their value,” Lenz wrote. “I missed the irony that I was doing exactly the same thing, only I was using religion as my benchmark."
However, she regrets this judgment.
"My budding friendship with sweet Sophia became a casualty of this," Lenz added, "and instead of sitting shiva for my ego, I really f--king wish I could turn back time, walk into her trailer, and give her a long, hard hug.”
They later became pals, and Bush has spoken about her bond with Lenz and Burton.
"Our friendship and all of the things that it was influenced by that we didn’t know about when we were young and the ways that we’ve always returned to each other to unpack the good, the bad, the ugly and the very best of our lives as friends, we have that feral, primal, familial love for each other where we’ve been to hell and back and had so many times where we’d laughed so hard we’ve wound up in tears and we’re so ferociously protective of each other," she once told People. "In my adult life, I go, 'This is what real sisterhood is.'"
20. But in 2024, fans started to wonder where Lenz and Burton stood. Eagle-eyed TikTokers noticed the two weren't following each other on Instagram and that Burton had reposted a quote that read, "I don't think imitation is the highest form of flattery. I think it's just annoying," leading to speculation that she could be referencing the covers of her and Lenz's memoirs. That same year, Burton announced that Robert Buckley would be replacing her as co-host of her podcast with Lenz and Bush Drama Queens.
In October that year, Lenz addressed the Burton feud rumors.
“I love Hilarie, I have always and will always,” she said on Call Her Daddy, “and I don’t have any problem with her. There have been some bizarre misunderstanding that I really hope we can figure out one day. But I love that girl.”