Hilarie Burton Morgan’s 5-year-old daughter George understands One Tree Hill better than most.
Burton Morgan, 41, took to social media on Tuesday, August 15, to show off her daughter’s latest artwork which featured the five OTH main characters — Brooke (Sophia Bush), Lucas (Chad Michael Murray), Nathan (James Lafferty), Haley (Bethany Joy Lenz) and Peyton (Burton Morgan). In the colorful drawing, George labeled each character with the correct corresponding actor’s name.
“This is OUTRAGEOUSLY funny to me because there’s no way my five-year-old could know that @chadmichaelmurray‘s character was the broody one. And somehow @jameslafferty is pumped and sticking his tongue out. Looking better than ever and moody as all get out!” Burton Morgan, who shares George as well as son Gus, 13, with husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan, captioned the snap.
Burton Morgan concluded the sweet post by thanking “@raenia23 for the @fwbcharityevents coloring book” and her daughter for “making us GORGEOUS.”
Bush, 41, quickly took to the comments section to gush over the drawing, writing, “George is a genius! Can we make Tshirts?” while Lee Norris, who played Mouth on the CW series, replied: “Genius!! God, I hope I’m the stick figure. 🙃.”
Other fans praised the 5-year-old for her work as well. “Sooooo funny. Kids are smarter than we all realize. They’ve got it sussed. We lose that as things get complex!” one fan quipped.“This is freaking adorable!!!!” another user wrote. “Awesome job, George!!! She’s an artist in the making!!! ❤️.” thers echoed Bush in her call to make the artwork into merchandise. “Can we get this on a @dramaqueensoth t-shirt please?” one commenter asked.
Burton Morgan, along with Bush and Lenz, 42, have worked hard at finding the bright spots around their time on One Tree Hill over the years. The women of the teen drama, which ran from 2003 to 2012, went public with harassment allegations against creator Mark Schwahn in 2017. Four years later, the trio started their “Drama Queens” OTH rewatch podcast.
“Those girls are my family and we spend so much time together, whether it’s on FaceTime or whether we’re recording episodes of ‘Drama Queens,’” Bush told Insider in March 2022. “We’ve forged such a friendship and been able to, as a unit, reclaim so much of what was good and joyful about our first job together while taking out the respective trash. We’re just more in love with each other than we’ve ever been.” (Both Bush and Lenz were in attendance for Burton Morgan’s wedding in October 2019.)
Lenz echoed those sentiments that same month, telling Variety that the podcast has been healing for them. “Our time on One Tree Hill was so tempestuous; there were so many great times and so many hard times and we were scared to go back and revisit it,” she explained. “That’s why doing the podcast has opened up all these doors inside of ourselves, to explore this new way of working together that’s been so healthy and healing.”
Burton Morgan, who played Peyton Sawyer for six seasons before her exit in 2009, revealed earlier this year that she has struggled at times with having to retell some of the darker stories from OTH — but knows there is an important reason for doing so.
“It’s the boogeyman in the closet. To talk about it over and over again, I am making a commitment to continue talking about it so that other showrunners don’t operate that way and so he’s got no safe passage, like a ship,” she explained during an April “Drama Queens” episode.
