Arguably the most-memorable episode of One Tree Hill almost didn’t happen.  The season three story of outcast teen “Jimmy Edwards” holding students hostage at gunpoint before committing suicide was met with strong resistance from the cast, according to a new interview with Hilarie Burton (Peyton).  “None of the actors were into it, none of us wanted to do it,” she tells Fanvasion.  “We got the script and were very upset about it.  We were like, ‘This hasn’t happened in so long.  Why would we bring this up?  We don’t want to encourage or give attention to that kind of behavior.’”  The Columbine tragedy had occurred seven years earlier, when Hilarie was still in high school.  “Then literally while we’re having this conversation with our creator and our bosses, two (shooting) incidents happened.  It was heartbreaking to know that stuff was still going on, it just wasn’t receiving the media attention that it used to.”  A year after the One Tree Hill episode aired, Hilarie said, her brother’s homecoming date was shot in the hand trying to keep a classroom door closed during the Virginia Tech massacre, so the subject hits very close to home.  The popular actress made her comments during an interview about her next film project, The Sacrifice, based on the inspirational novel by Robert Whitlow, which includes a school shooting.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under One Tree Hill. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.