It’s certainly been an amazingly unpredictable life journey for Rhinebeck resident Hilarie Burton Morgan: MTV VJ, acclaimed actor, TV host, bestselling author, producer, podcaster, farmer, small business owner, mom, activist, philanthropist—and witch (the good kind, that is).
“Self-identifying as a witch is an act of rebellion,” she writes in Grimoire Girl: Creating an Inheritance of Magic and Mischief, her newly published second book. “And a grimoire is a testament to your power and your craft.” Loosely intended as a repository of remembrances and a compendium of accumulated knowledge and life lessons to be passed down to future generations, the aesthetically beautiful volume is her spiritual scrapbook. A poetically assembled life guide/memoir, it is brimming with methods and meditations on mythology, astrology, folk medicine, spells, muses, potions, recipes, ancient country wisdom, and other arcane ephemera.
Born in Sterling, Virginia, in 1982 to an Army-vet father and a real estate-agent mother, the television/movie/media star is the eldest of four children. (She has an older half-sister from her father’s previous marriage.) Living the characteristically wholesome the life of an all-American teenage girl, she was class treasurer, student council president and vice president, captain of the cheerleading squad, and homecoming queen at her high school. But the pull of the theater had taken hold well before her teenage years, with the then Hilarie Ros Burton taking her first local steps into acting at age eight.
Upon graduation, it was up to New York to attend Fordham and NYU. After she’d made the hectic rounds of multiple other auditions, she got her first big break with a slot as a commentator for a segment on MTV’s “Total Request Live.” The channel’s producers were so impressed with her outgoing style that they decided to make her a full-time VJ on the show, and soon she was also hosting the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, the channel’s much watched “Iced Out New Year’s Eve” special, and other programs. She made her network television debut in 2002 with a minor part on an episode of The CW’s “Dawson’s Creek,” but her next role would be the breakout score that would make her a generational star.
“One Tree Hill,” a drama set in contemporary Wilmington, North Carolina, that focused on the lives of two basketball-playing half-brothers and their romantic relationships, premiered in September 2003. The series saw Burton cast as the visual artist, musician, and cheerleader Peyton Sawyer, a complex persona that drew from her own Southern-small-town-cheerleader beginnings. A runaway smash, the show ran for nine seasons, and Burton’s character became iconic among its mainly teenaged viewers, landing her on the covers of national magazines and earning her three Teen Choice Ward nominations. Between episode tapings, she appeared in her first feature film, 2005’s Our Very Own, another small-town-young-adult story, and the 2007 Lifetime drama Normal Adolescent Behavior. Burton Morgan left “One Tree Hill” in 2009 as her film career began heating up, forming her own production company, Southern Gothic Production, and appearing in such movies as Solstice (2007), The Secret Life of Bees (2008), and Bloodworth (2010).
Costars
In 2009, her life changed again when she and “The Walking Dead” star Jeffrey Dean Morgan were introduced and became an item. The couple’s son, Gus, was born in 2010, daughter George arrived in 2018, and the pair married in 2019. It was the birth of the latter child that helped spark the idea for Grimoire Girl. “Once my daughter, George, was born, I started collecting scraps of information, quotes, book excerpts, and other pieces of knowledge in a leatherbound journal with creamy thick pages and irregular edges,” Burton writes in the book’s preface. “A grimoire of ideas and habits I wanted her to have.” But at that point neither family bliss nor the start of the book project would keep the actress away from the screen entirely.
Shifting back to TV but even further from coming-of-age castings, she moved into crime and medical dramas, starting in 2010 with the recurring and regular role of insurance investigator Sara Ellis on the USA Network’s “White Collar.” In 2013, following a 2012 guest appearance on ABC’s “Castle,” Burton played Dr. Lauren Boswell on the same network’s wildly popular “Grey’s Anatomy” in its ninth season for three well-received episodes; that fall brought another recurring role, that of Samantha on NBC’s short-lived “Hostages.” The briefly running science fiction series “Extant” (one season, 2015, on CBS) saw her reunited with her “One Tree Hill” costar Tyler Hilton. Her next high-profile role, for two seasons (2016-2017), was as Karen Palmer, a DEA agent and love interest of main character Martin Riggs on Warner Bros. TV’s “Lethal Weapon.”
By that time, however, the new mother and her husband, then living in Hollywood, had grown weary of the Tinseltown grind, an under-the-boom-lights existence that saw added cathartic drama in 2017 when Burton spoke against sexual harassment she had experienced from actor Ben Affleck during a 2003 MTV appearance and similar abuse that some of the “One Tree Hill” crew had endured from Mark Schwann, the show’s creator. With her husband’s star rising with “The Walking Dead” (on which she’d eventually play Lucille, the wife of Morgan’s character, Negan, for the 10th season) and Burton looking to lessen her acting work, the country life the couple had long fantasized about was beckoning.
A Rhinebeck Homestead
In 2018, they realized their shared dream of buying a farm when they purchased the 100-acre Rhinebeck spread—complete with cattle, chickens, donkeys, alpacas, llamas, and other animals—that they dubbed Mischief Farm, after two identically named pet headstones found on the property. They fell in love with their new hometown, helping to save beloved candy store Samuel’s Sweet Shop by becoming co-owners of the business, along with fellow local actors and power couple Paul and Julie Rudd, after the shop’s original owner, Ira Gutner, had died and left the confectionary’s future uncertain.
“Our childhood homes were destroyed,” Burton told “CBS This Morning Saturday.” “The small towns disappeared, the mom-and-pop shops disappeared. Everything got replaced by big, massive chains. When we found this community that was all mom-and-pop shops, it was so important to us that we preserved it and that we honored it in a way that [showed that] maybe other people [also] saw that value in it.” Among more local causes, the Burton Morgans also took an interest in the effort to renovate the Astor Home for Children, a residential treatment center for kids, and volunteered to do physical work on the project. “Not only did they move to the community,” James McGuirk, the Astor Home’s executive director and chief executive officer, said to the Poughkeepsie Journal in 2017, “they basically adopted the community.”
Moved to chronicle their idyllic and more meaningful new lifestyle, Burton penned her first book, The Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock, and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm. “From the realities of farm living, home renovations, and the struggles of growing a family and finding her footing after heartbreak, Hilarie’s warmth and humor are on full display,” raved Country Living upon its release. “The Rural Diaries reads like a favorite girls’ night chat.” Published in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the work became an immediate bestseller, and with its success, Burton, while also working with local business relief organization Rhinebeck Responds, moved to further help her family’s Dutchess County hometown. She asked her fans to purchase signed copies of the book from long-running shop Oblong Books, which, like so many other area merchants, was struggling during Covid. The drive, along with PPP assistance, helped keep the store’s staff employed during the crisis.
“I really wanted to prove to the people in our community that we meant it,” she told “CBS This Morning Saturday.” “That it was coming from a place of love, a place of humility… I found so much self-worth in this community that I hadn’t found in work. Thankfully we live in an area that really values [keeping small towns afloat]…Rhinebeck can be a model for other towns something like this, a roadmap. I would love to see every small town like this, rehabilitated.”
From their living room during the Covid quarantine, Burton and her spouse cohosted the AMC series “Friday Night in with the Morgans,” which saw them welcoming guests virtually to offer mutual moral support to each other and viewers and to discuss a range of issues that included the BLM and #Metoo movements and pandemic life. She also entered the podcast realm, appearing as Shelly Hoskins on the fictional series “Bridgewater” in 2021 and that year launching “Drama Queens,” which she cohosts with her fellow former “One Tree Hill” stars Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz. Currently, the busy Burton is back in the spotlight, promoting the bewitching Grimoire Girl just in time for Halloween—but always keeping it close to home.
“Home is the cornerstone of magic, after all,” she writes in the book’s prologue. “It is safety. It is comfort. It is sacred and divine.”
Presented by Oblong Books, Hilarie Burton Morgan will host a launch event for Grimoire Girl at the Bardavon in Poughkeepise on October 8 at 3pm. Tickets are $42 and include a signed copy of the book. Bardavon.org.
This article appears in October 2023.
