Every day we understand a little more why Izzie Stevens cut those LVAD wires on Grey's Anatomy. Because Denny Duquette—sorry, Jeffrey Dean Morgan—just might be a guy worth losing your medical license over.
Take it from his IRL wife Hilarie Burton Morgan, who had just wrapped a tumultuous six-year stint on One Tree Hill in 2009 when her costar Daneel Ackles and husband Jensen Ackles played matchmaker.
"I had left a very toxic situation and I was like, 'I'm never gonna act again. I'm done, retired,'" Hilarie recalled in an exclusive interview with E! News' Francesca Amiker. And Jeffrey, Jensen's Supernatural costar, "was the first person that was like, 'Great, I'm in love with you. I don't care what you do.'"
Having acted since she was in preschool, "so much of my worth in my relationships had been based in, I was the actor, that's what my role was," noted the 41-year-old. "And so to have a person be like, 'I don't care what you do for a living was so empowering."
Thrilling enough, anyway, for her to skip a planned trip to Paris to join him on set in New Mexico.
Nearly a decade and a half, two kids and a move to a farm in delightfully bucolic Rhinebeck, N.Y. later, Jeffrey is still showing his bride that life is too damn short to be following the rules.
"When I decided to go back to hosting," noted the former TRL emcee, "he's been like, 'Awesome.' And when I decided to write books he's like, 'Awesome.' And when we bought the town candy store, he was like, 'Awesome.' And then we started a liquor line and he's like, 'What else do you want to do Hilarie? I'll do all it.' Having a partner that knows that you will always be in transition and loves you for that is so important."
Hilarie's latest swerve sees the multi-hyphenate simultaneously launching her true crime podcast It Couldn't Happen Here (the natural extension to her Sundance TV series of the same name that efforted to shine a light on criminal cases still in need of justice) and releasing her second book, Grimoire Girl.
Part memoir, part spell book, it's a guide she was inspired to write after welcoming now-5-year-old daughter George. "I wanted to collect traditions," she explained, "and ways of thinking and made up holidays and all the things that I wanted my daughter to have as her birthright."
In piecing together a catalogue of her life, said Hilarie, who's also mom to 13-year-old son Gus, "I wanted her to have a really sound sense of self, so that I could send her off into the world. And she would know who she was, she would know what she came from."
While the Virginia native insists she wasn't necessarily raised surrounded by the supernatural—though dad Bill Burton was "really imaginative," she said, "so we heard lots of stories growing up"—there's some fairly strong evidence to suggest that she manifested the marriage she shares with The Walking Dead star.
"I found a list from when I was 19 years old that described the life that I wanted," Hilarie explained. "And I thought I was writing it about my boyfriend at the time, but he didn't fit any of those things that I wanted. And lo and behold, it walks into my world when I'm 27 years old. And I'm still with him. Going back and looking at that now is crazy."
So, yes, she believes in the power of practices like candle magic in which she spends the length of a burn meditating on whatever is worrying her "so that you can feel it to its fullest and then let it go." And she's not above placing a subtle spell on her husband, tending to cook up some fresh marinara or chili post-tiff to, as she described in the book, infuse it with a bit of love magic to calm any tempers.
"I definitely make my son do that with me," she said of instructing the middle schooler to make an intention with each tomato he squeezes. "You're creating a manifestation while you're doing that physical action, or you're squashing a fight, which is an important thing to do. And even if it's a placebo effect, even if it has no actual magical quality and there's no energy transfer happening, my husband knows when he walks into that room that I am making him something that is full of love. And now that he's read the book, he knows that I'm conjuring a peaceful resolution."
Because even though they're well-versed in each other's best moves after more than a decade together, they still work.
Asked the most romantic act the 57-year-old puts into practice, Hilarie revealed, "When I travel, he just writes on napkins and draws pictures and stuff and shoves it in my suitcase."
In fact, she had one on hand while chatting with E! in L.A., where she was doing press for her new book. But she couldn't share its contents past the "Mrs. Morgan" opening line. "Oh man, this is a good one," she teased. "He's flirty in this one. I can't read this one."
Suffice it to say, though, the missive provided a jolt to her heart. "He knows how to get me," she acknowledged. "He knows."