Chad Michael Murray has earned his place in the TV hall of fame for his roles on series like Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek, and One Tree Hill, and, much to his chagrin, his place in the meme hall of fame for one infamous scene from that last show.
“It was one of those scenes where I remember I begged and pleaded, begged and pleaded, ‘Please, I don’t need to be there. There is no need for Lucas Scott to be there. If you really want to do it, fine. Go ahead and write the scene, but it’s terrible,'” Murray recently recalled in conversation with James Lafferty, who played his character’s half-brother Nathan Scott on the teen drama.
Murray opened up about the scene in question during a wide-ranging conversation about the series for PEOPLE‘s Sexiest Man Alive issue. If you’ve spent any time online since the advent and mainstreaming of meme culture, you’ve seen it: Lucas’ father, Dan (Paul Johansson), is about to receive a heart transplant when the EMT carrying the organ drops it on the hospital floor — and right into the jaws of a hungry golden retriever.
“The scene went down in infamy,” Murray joked.
The actor proceeded to outline all the fictional stars that had to align for this highly improbable event to take place — underlining its sheer ridiculousness.
For starters, the dog, “who’d accidentally consumed marijuana,” apparently had owners who thought to themselves, Why would you take him to the vet? We don’t do that in pet emergency. Let’s go to the ER. The staff at said ER then have the gall to tell those owners, “‘We’re not going to send you to the vet. No, we’re going to let the dog chill out here.'”
The WB/ Courtesy: Everett
Paul Johansson and James Lafferty on ‘One Tree Hill’
“Next, we’re going to obviously get exhausted because we also ate some of these said pot brownies and fell asleep,” Murray continued, pointing out that the dog’s leash had to be comically long enough to trip the incoming EMT, who decided to make such a vital delivery in a concerningly casual manner. “The case is not locked off. It’s coming right in [a cooler].”
Finally, Murray pointed out the inanity of his character’s father “not in the prepping room waiting” for heart surgery, but just chilling in the ER. “Of course, I happen to be there” to see the heart go “skidding across the room. It’s not in a package. It’s just sitting right there on top of ice” to the dog, which is miraculously now no longer on a leash.
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In a 2017 oral history of the notorious scene, One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn recalled that the origins of the scene lay in the idea of cultivating some sympathy for the villainous Dan.
“I just felt like, we don’t want Dan’s redemption to be too easy,” Schwahn said. “We don’t want him to get a heart transplant and have it be too conventional. We want to take him to the edge of hope and then see what he’s made of. I just thought, ‘What’s an absurd way of this guy getting really close to getting this heart transplant and not getting it?'”
Johannson, who actually had to play the scene straight, reacted incredulously when he first read it. But when it came time to film the season 6 moment, he remembered fully committing.
“If you half-ass the moment for something like that, it can come across pretty bad…. But if you fully commit, you can completely convince yourself that you are a guy who needs a heart transplant who just saw your last hope get eaten by a dog,” Johannson said.
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