Tyler Hilton is looking back on the bonds he built on One Tree Hill.
The singer-songwriter, 41, who appeared on the show between 2004 and 2012, tells PEOPLE that after being introduced on season 2, he and his costars “totally clicked.”
Though on screen his character Chris Keller was hard to root for, in real life, Hilton was creating life-long bonds with his fellow actors and even lived with one of the show’s stars.
“Chad [Michael Murray] and I got really close and ended up moving in together,” he recalls more than a decade later.
He also remembered having a lot in common with Hilarie Burton, who played Peyton Sawyer, as they were the two “non-actors.”Hilton had more of a music background and Burton had been an MTV VJ.
“I was like 19,” he explains. “It was that age where your friends matter more than relationships or parents. It’s that weird college age and we were all young and everything was happening for us fast and we were filming in a small town in North Carolina and we had nothing but each other. No distractions, no L.A., no New York.”
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One of the relationships he built off camera even ended up translating onto the screen.
“Bethany Joy Lenz, she was a singer, and so she and I started jamming off set even before they started writing our characters singing together,” he recalls of Lenz, who starred as Haley James Scott.
More recently, Hilton has opened up more about the depth of his relationship with Lenz. Though they “started to catch feelings for real,” he said at a recent concert, Lenz’s involvement with an alleged cult ultimately stood between them.
“Every once and a while I would get cult vibes,” he said on stage in Portland in November. “So I was really into her though and I was like, ‘Dude, I’m down with cult, I don’t care about that s—. Yeah, that’s no big deal, I’ve dated tons of girls [in cults].’ ”
Before the two could actually date, Lenz said she’d have to get approval — leading to the young singer getting “sussed” out by the group, he shared.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, he’s not the vibe.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah the cult said no,’ ” he revealed. “I didn’t have an answer for that one cause normally you can tell a girl, ‘Is there something I can do?’ But if the cult says no, you’re f—ed. I’d never been broken up with by [a] cult before. That was the first time.”
Lenz talks about her time in the group — and her budding relationship with Hilton — in her memoir Dinner for Vampires.
“Tyler and I took up together like two kids in a potato sack race,” she wrote. “Even though he didn’t share my faith (or my Family), I was developing a big crush on him.”
The two are still friends today and in an Instagram post promoting Dinner for Vampires, Hilton shared that his voice is featured in the audiobook as well.
“Super honored to be a part of this. I am so stoked for my friend Joy,” he said. “Joy, congratulations, this is huge. I’m really proud of you.”
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