Esquire Presents Me in My Place with Hilarie Burton

You may or may not remember Hilarie Burton from MTV’s Total Request Live. And you better not remember her from The CW’s One Tree Hill — unless you are, in fact, the nicest husband on Earth. Well, she may or may not be returning to that show for the teenyboppers, but as far as the men are concerned, she’s definitely back on USA’s highly addictive White Collar, as pretty much the most attractive insurance-claims investigator in the history of insurance. Even if that guy with the skinny lapels does end up dumping her in Season Three. Anyway, she invited over our photographer friend the other afternoon. It was memorable. —The Editors

I move around a lot. I’ve lived in a ton of different places — and only for a month or two at a time. I have a deep, rabid curiosity, so I like having a gypsy life.

We’ve been moving around so much that I have a Tupperware container full of my books. Some people have a blanky; I’ve got books.

I like to write paper mail — nobody does that anymore — with my pen pals. John Doe from the band X played my dad on One Tree Hill, and he just collects post cards from all the places he’s toured and doesn’t write a whole lot. He’s not into that, but he’s a good pen pal. Still, you write things out when you actually write a letter. When you right an e-mail, it’s all smiley faces and LOLs and shit.

I’ve named a couple things after Edgar Allan Poe: the cat, and my garden upstate, where I only planted black flowers and purple flowers — and there’s a raven statue.

Gardening gloves are for sissies. I always have dirt under my nails.

My weekends are spent hidden in the woods, and then I have to come back and pretend to be this very upper-crust insurance investigator. But, I mean, duality’s nice. You never get bored. You can’t say the grass is always greener if you’re in both backyards.

I like my hands. They’re certainly scarred up, but they’re wormy. They’re knuckly. They’re hands that have done stuff, and they’re not going anywhere. It’s like with your legs or your ass, you’ve got to worry, like, Uh, I’ve got to maintain this! But your hands are those things that will be there for you — that will exist however they’re going to exist. I have a lot of confidence in these things. They’ve done me well.

Subletting is great. You get to try on all these different versions of yourself. This apartment was clearly decorated by an artist — there’s a great, big, huge chandelier and red fur rug, and it’s all stuff that I would never, ever, ever buy. I’m having a really good time waking up to this.

The plaid shirt: I’ve had it forever and ever and ever. It’s one of those things that I’ll drag along with me probably until I die.

Listen, my son is one. I don’t do the subway.

When you’re working at MTV, you’re going to a show three nights a week. I can’t hang like that anymore. That’s from my past life — a past life! — but I’m down in Soho now, and it feels like a totally different New York.

We were working pretty heavily when I was working on One Tree Hill — and you feel a whole lot of responsibility to not do immoral things because you understand your fan base is pretty impressionable. Now I’m playing an adult, so we don’t have to worry about, Oh, my character’s sleeping with someone! What are the kids going to think?

I hated being blonde. And there was something about redheads that I think always excited me. There’s the whole Ann-Margret redhead, which I am partial to, but as a kid, I really liked Debbie Reynolds and fiery women. There’s just something ballsy about a woman with red hair. I like being treated like an equal. Like a threat.

When I was growing up, other girls had New Kids on the Block and shit on their walls, and I had Ray Bradbury. I had his autograph: It was a Xerox of an autographed photo of him holding a cat, wearing a turtleneck and his glasses. I thought he was the coolest dude on the planet.

They’re the soothsayers, all these sci-fi short-story writers. They have totally predicted our civilization and what the future is, and it’s nice to read those stories and see how many of those things they predicted have come true. Now I’m reading all this post-apocalyptic literature. I’m like, I’ve got to get prepped for this, man! I’m on it. I am on it!