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

Not every couple can call working together "fun," but luckily for Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, it is.

The couple, who met in 2009 and have been married since 2019, previously worked together on projects like The Walking Dead, Extant and Friday Night In With the Morgans, and now they are the producers behind the campy horror film Bloody 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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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 Wound fits that bill.

Written and directed by Matthew John Lawrence, the coming-of-age queer romance slasher follows teen Abbie Bladecut (Sari Arambulo) as she wrestles with following in her father Roger's (Billy Burke) murderous trade and the thrill of her first crush.

Burton and Morgan initially discovered Lawrence's work during the pandemic when they stumbled across his 2020 horror-comedy Uncle 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."

Related: Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton's Relationship Timeline

According to Burton, there's even a nod to her teen soap roots on One Tree Hill in the film. Not only were the lockers blue, just like on One Tree Hill, but the mascot at the school is called "the Sawyers."

"It's built by a sawmill, and so I walk in and Sawyers are written everywhere," Burton recalls. "I was like, 'It's a sign.' There's some Tree Hill lore in the movie."

Like Uncle Peckerhead, Bloody Axe Wound is driven by its eclectic soundtrack.

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 of One Tree Hill.

There is even a direct nod to Uncle Peckerhead in 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 Uncle Peckerhead, 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.

"He's just a guy that wants to sit on his couch and be a dad. Jeff and Billy [are] these big guys with deep voices, and everyone has an idea of who they are because of the characters they've played on TV. Then they come home and they're both girl dads. I liked that the movie could reflect that."

Related: Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan Embrace Their Grays and Match Outfits for Rare Red Carpet Date Night 

When it came to making Bloody Axe Wound, Burton also found inspiration in one of her favorite horror films: 1983's Sleepaway 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 Wound is one of the many projects Burton and Morgan hope to collaborate on in the future.

"If we can work together, then more power to us, because it turns out that we kind of like each other," Morgan says. "Whether it's running a farm, making a film or shooting a TV show, it's just really easy for us to be together. And I think that that makes it nice."

Bloody Axe Wound is in select theaters now.

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