Hilarie Burton Morgan thought she might spark a romance with One Tree Hill costar Austin Nichols — until Sophia Bush walked into the room.
Burton Morgan, 41, opened up about spending time with Nichols, 43, after he joined the season 6 cast of OTH during the Monday, February 5, episode of her “Drama Queens” podcast. Clarifying that she had “no idea” he dated Bush before his time on the show, Burton Morgan recalled wanting to take her friendship with Nichols to the next level as they painted their faces before attending a mutual friend’s wrestling match.
“My face is fully painted like a saber-toothed tiger and I’m like, ‘Are we going to kiss? Our faces are so close, we’re not going to kiss! We’re just friends.’ And later I’m thinking, ‘We’re going to kiss all this face paint off,’” she said. “We come rolling three deep in face paint to the local armory, which is a very rough-and-tumble scene, to root for [our friend]. And I am having the time of my life. And I know it’s not a date, but also, this man let me paint his face, this is fun.”
The “fun” stopped, however, when Bush, 41, walked in the door moments later. “All of a sudden Austin looks really distracted, like, looking over my shoulder. And I was like, ‘Oh, what’s he looking at?’ I turn around, and Sophia has entered the armory in, like, a cashmere turtleneck and tweed blazer,” she said, joking that her ethereal friend looked like she had “rays from the sun shining on her glossy hair” as Gary Wright’s “Dream Weaver” played in the background.
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“And I see heart emojis in Austin’s eyeballs and I just turn around and I could still feel it in my bones, the, ‘Oh, no!’ I had so seriously misjudged that situation,” Burton Morgan continued. “And so then I had to sit there for a whole other hour in face paint and know that I was a f–king goober.”
While Nichols initially joined OTH as Burton Morgan’s onscreen love interest, he and Bush had an on-and-off romance for years before he was cast. Bush revealed during an October 2023 episode of “Drama Queens’ that Nichols was her first date after her public divorce from her other costar Chad Michael Murray — and that he auditioned for his role on the show after Bush claimed long-distance was “too hard” to maintain.
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After seeing Nichols’ devotion to Bush, Burton Morgan knew their chance at romance was over before it even began.
“I was such an awkward single person that I cherish that memory of, like, ‘It’s not gonna happen,’” Burton Morgan explained of Nichols’ polite decline. “I felt like every girl in every ‘90s rom-com who, like, thinks they’re going to go to the party and it’s going to work out. And it didn’t. In such grand fashion. I knew it was going to be a good story in the moment.”
Bush and Nichols’ respective characters, Brooke and Julian, ended up sparking their own romance on the CW series, later walking down the aisle in season 8. Off screen, the pair continued dating until calling it quits for good in February 2012, just months before the series finale of OTH aired. Despite their real-life split, the exes remained amicable.
Burton Morgan, meanwhile, went on to wed Jeffrey Dean Morgan in October 2019, and the couple share son Gus, 13, and daughter George, 5. As for her and Nichols, the duo became good friends over time. According to Burton Morgan, Nichols took the time to connect with her and the people she cared about after moving to OTH’s shooting location of Wilmington, North Carolina, which helped deepen their bond.
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“I really have enjoyed knowing Austin all these years at this point. He’s a wonderful actor. He’s really fun,” she explained during the January 29 “Drama Queens” episode. “We did a lot, hangout-wise, after work, and he made a real point of making friends out of my friends in town. And I appreciated that. He valued them. I really respected that about him.”
