Redeem now - Hilarie Burton Morgan revealed on "Drama Queens" that she received "prison mail" about her feet.
- She said some prisoners wrote that they wanted to "cut" her feet off and put them in a "refrigerator."
- She recalled a sex scene on "OTH" where she asked the crew not to start on her feet for that reason.
Former "One Tree Hill" star Hilarie Burton Morgan revealed on Monday's episode of the "Drama Queens" podcast that she had a specific reason why she felt "uncomfortable" about the way some sex scenes were filmed on the teen drama.
While discussing the season two episode "Somewhere a Clock Is Ticking," which features her character Peyton Sawyer having sex with her boyfriend Jake Jagielski (Bryan Greenberg), Burton Morgan revealed that she regularly received "prison mail" from men focused on her feet.
"There was a couple dudes in particular that were like, 'I'm gonna cut your feet off and put them in my refrigerator,' the "The Walking Dead" actor revealed in a conversation beginning at the 38:40 mark. She said the letters were "very specific."
"And I had a thing about my feet on TV. I would always try to, like, hide my feet because I was just like, 'I don't want them to think I'm baiting them,' you know?" She said she had been receiving those types of letters since she began working for MTV in the early 2000s.
For the sex scene in question, Burton Morgan said that the episode's director, Billy Dickson, wanted to shoot the scene from an angle that started with a focus beginning "on our feet and like our legs rubbing together" with the camera "coming up our bodies."
The actor remembers feeling like the artistic choice was "way too adult" for a scene featuring two teenagers having sex.
She said she felt conflicted shooting it the way Dickson wanted to but described him as "a beloved crew member of ours." She said she agreed to the shot because "it's so much harder to say 'no' to someone who you like and respect than it is to say it to a total stranger who's just coming in to direct for 10 days."
Burton Morgan said she begged the crew, "Please, please, please don't start on this shot" of her feet. According to Burton Morgan, they said they wouldn't start on that shot and that they would blur it in editing, but that didn't happen when the episode aired.
"And when that thing aired on TV and it starts on our feet and our legs like grasshoppering together, I'm just like, 'what the heck is this?'" she recalled.
Burton Morgan explained on the podcast that actors today often get to watch playback of their scenes, but that was not the case for "One Tree Hill" in 2005 when the episode was shot. "Back then, it was on film and you just had to trust what was going on on the monitor was what you asked for," Burton Morgan explained.
Dickson, the director of the episode Burton Morgan referenced, didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
The former "White Collar" star and her fellow "One Tree Hill" costars Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz started the "Drama Queens" rewatch podcast in 2021 so they could "reclaim so much of what was good and joyful about our first job together while taking out the respective trash," Bush told Insider earlier this month.
The women were three of many former female cast and crew members who detailed being "psychologically and emotionally" abused by "One Tree Hill" creator Mark Schwahn in an open letter published by Variety in 2017.
On Monday's episode of the podcast, Bush agreed with Lenz that their friend's experience with the crew not listening to how she felt about a shot of her body was "why we didn't trust anybody" at the time," as Lenz said.
Listen to the full podcast episode below. New episodes of "Drama Queens" are released every Monday.
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