+ + + NY Daily News :: June 13, 2007
'Tree Hill's' good girl is itching to play bad
By Cristina Kinon
'One Tree Hill's" Peyton Sawyer has played the victim one too many times.
Next season, Hilarie Burton, who plays the good girl Sawyer, wants her character to turn the tables.
"I want to be a bitch real bad," Burton told the Daily News from North Carolina, where the hit CW show is taped. "I feel like aggression needs to be a mood that we see from Peyton Sawyer. And those parts are always more fun to play anyway."
She might get her wish. Major character changes are ahead for "One Tree Hill," which revolves around a group of high-school students.
After tonight's finale, the show will go on hiatus until next season. When viewers see the cast next, they'll be four years into the future, having already gone through college. "[The writers] were super-gung-ho about [the jump] and I really took to the idea because nobody wants to have the 'Saved by the Bell' effect, where they all go to college and they all live in the same dorm room and you have to explain all that and it's totally hokey and unrealistic," she said.
"We've seen all these other teen-drama shows try to go that route and that's where it starts to fall apart. So instead of following that pattern, [the show's creator and executive producer] Mark [Schwahn] was always adamant about carving our own niche and jumping ahead. It's a really good opportunity for our characters to totally start over.
"The period in your life between graduating high school and graduating college is probably when you change the most," said Burton. "We can all come back, and maybe some of us will still be really tight and others of us will be totally different people - and I'm excited to see which is which."
Besides, Burton explained, the "One Tree Hill" gang has already experienced the things most kids have to wait until college to try out. The show launched in 2003 on the WB and moved to the CW when the WB merged with UPN.
"We've already had the keggers and lived without our parents and all that kind of stuff. Now we get to do, basically, a brand-new show with characters people are already attached to.
"It really makes me proud to be a part of a production like this," said Burton. "It could be just another teen drama, they're a dime a dozen, but we really go out of our way to try something new."
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