Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan Call Working Together 'Fun': 'We Don't Actually Want to Kill Each Other' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in April 2023.Photo:Jamie McCarthy/Getty

Jamie McCarthy/Getty

Not every couple can call working together “fun,” but luckily forHilarie BurtonandJeffrey Dean Morgan, it is.

The couple,who met in 2009andhave been married since 2019, previously worked together on projects likeThe Walking Dead, ExtantandFriday Night In With the Morgans,andnow they are the producers behind the campy horror filmBloody Axe Wound.

“We’re good at it,” Morgan, 58, says of his working relationship with his wife. “We don’t actually want to kill each other or anything.”

Burton, 42, appreciates how the couple balances one another out. “His strengths are my weaknesses, and vice versa,” she says of her husband.

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Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton in January 2024.Mat Hayward/Getty

Mat Hayward/Getty

Plus, when the pair are alone at work, “it’s almost like a date,” Burton jokes.

Under their Mischief Farm Production Company banner (named after their upstate New York farm) which encompasses scripted and unscripted work, the pair have aimed to work on projects with “a sense of humor, that were maybe a little bit gross.“Bloody Axe Woundfits that bill.

Burton and Morgan initially discovered Lawrence’s work during the pandemic when they stumbled across his 2020 horror-comedyUncle Peckerhead, which follows a punk band that hires a man-eating demon as a roadie.

“We saw this movie and it was so freaking weird, and we reached out to Matthew and said, ‘Do you have anything else?’ " Burton recalls.

Luckily, he had a stack of scripts. “[Bloody Axe Wound] really stood out as a mix of our background with the horror genre and my experience with the teen drama genre,” she explains. “This movie mashes those two things together, so it was a perfect fit.”

According to Burton, there’s even a nod to her teen soap roots onOne Tree Hillin the film. Not only were the lockers blue, just like onOne Tree Hill, but the mascot at the school is called “the Sawyers.”

Because much of the film’s budget was spent on special effects, Burton and Morgan called in some “favors” from their artist friends, including Pom Pom Squad, He Is Legend, Five Hundred Bucks and Your Future Ghost — Kate Voegele and Michael Grubbs ofOne Tree Hill.

There is even a direct nod toUncle Peckerheadin the film’s opening sequence, where Morgan makes a cameo as the homicidal Butch Slater in a video recording. “We brought back all the actors from UnclePeckerhead, and then I killed them all in that first little scene,” he says with a laugh.

Burton loved the “meta experience” of the movie.

“Butch Slater and [Roger Bladecut] are these two big bad guys living in this small town of Clover Falls, and then you cut to their private lives, and Bladecut’s just a dad,” says Burton.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton in November 2011.Jason Merritt/Getty

When it came to makingBloody Axe Wound, Burton also found inspiration in one of her favorite horror films: 1983’sSleepaway Camp. “You have a serious conversation about gender and bullying that comes through this campy slasher flick from the ’80s,” she explains. “So, for me, I wanted to make something that high school kids would watch in each other’s basements over and over again.”

Bloody Axe Woundis one of the many projects Burton and Morgan hope to collaborate on in the future.

Bloody Axe Woundis in select theaters now.

source: people.com