By Shawn Adler in Los Angeles

Continuing "House of Wax" week on Cinema Confidential is Shawn Adler's interview with "One Tree Hill" star Chad Michael Murray. The WB heartthrob co-stars with Elisha Cuthbert, Paris Hilton, Jared Padalecki, and Jon Abrahams in this remake of the 1953 Vincent Price horror feature. He plays Nick Jones, a rough-around-the-edges kind of a guy, who has trouble reconciling his actions with his twin sister Carly (Cuthbert). The two must put aside their differences and work together to simply stay alive when one by one, their friends begin to disappear in a mysterious ghost town where nothing is as it seems.

Q: When were you first approached to star in this and what was the appeal about the project?

CHAD : I couldn’t give you a date, [but] Joel called my agent and said he wants to sit down and have a meeting, and I said rock and roll, I read the script and I thought to myself, ‘can I do a horror [movie]?’ I’ve seen horror movies my whole life and I wanted to know if it was in my blood to be able to do it. So I sat down and Joel said, ‘look, you’ve done a great job with everything else you’ve done and we’d really love to have you as part of this film.’ So I mean, Joel Silver- I had to take that blessing.

Q: Are you trying to take the "tough guy" role as something darker than you're used to?

CHAD: : Yeah, I think definitely part of the evolutionary thing. I wanted to do something- the great thing about this is that you can sit down and watch this, especially if you’ve seen "One Tree Hill," and you can watch "One Tree Hill" and this and you’ll say ‘there is no piece of Lucas in this character.’ They are two totally different human beings, and I think that’s what I was trying to prove with this to myself and to my fan base and everybody- just that I’m here because I want to do my job, you know. It’s important to me that I just creatively challenge myself on the up and up and this just gave me the opportunity to express that to my people and I think at the same time just grow, grow as an artist. I enjoyed it; it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Q: How was it working with Elisha and how did you develop your onscreen sibling relationship?

CHAD: We didn’t really have an opportunity to get to know each other that much prior to filming, but I have a lot of siblings, so I really had an opportunity to just go, "Look, I’ve done this before. I’ve got brothers and sisters so I can do the brother-sister thing.’ They’re not twins, but I think we had a lot in common just in our professional lives in what we want to accomplish with ourselves and creatively do throughout our careers that we were able to bond on that.

Q: Were you on set when the fire broke out? Did you sustain any injuries?

CHAD: No one was. I don’t know- I was in the middle of a take, I was laying on the floor of one of the sets right around here, and next thing, I looked to the right and fire was shooting out of the ceiling. Everyone took off, but everyone was fine. Everybody got out, I mean, they did a great job of just getting everybody together. Our A.D. staff there was incredibly professional; they waited until the last moment to make sure everyone was out before they left, which is really heroic.

Q: How tough or easy is it to soldier on past the horror movie cliches when you’re making a movie like this?

CHAD: That is the one thing here is there’s not a lot of that, especially for my character in particular, there’s not a lot of ‘Oh, dude, what are you doing? Just leave!’ No, there’s not a lot of that. You know, we had reasons to stay- there was a reason we had to go into the house, there was a reason we had to do a lot of the things we had to do, because we had to find our friends, our family. So I think there wasn’t a lot of that conventional ‘oh no, why are you going into this dark room?’ But it’s frustrating. You’d have to ask Jared, because I didn’t wander into rooms that I shouldn’t have.

Q: How tough is it to find those roles that challenge you creatively as opposed to merely commercially?

CHAD: There’s a lot of [commercial opportunities], and that’s just not what it is that I’m looking for. I want to at the end of the day go home and be incredibly happy with what I’m doing. I want to mess with my brain a little bit, you know? I want to go to places that I’ve never gone. I just really want to creatively challenge myself, because at the end of the day, the money and the fame, that really doesn’t make a difference to me when it comes to doing what I’m here to do. If you leave your mark through the projects that you choose and the work that you’ve done, and I’ve been growing for the last five or six years and I think that I’m finally at the point where I’m ready to take on those challenges. But yeah, it’s hard to find. Being 23, there’s not a lot out there.

Q: Are you still working on your own scripts?

CHAD: Yeah, I mean, whenever I get a spare moment. It’s been a really busy like six months so I haven’t been able to complete a few of the ones that I was working on, but as soon as I get into filming, I’ll be working on that consistently because I don’t really like to talk when I’m filming stuff that’s as serious as the one coming up. It will be Ipod and write time.

Q: Are you interested in starring in them yourself?

CHAD: A few of them, yeah. One, not so much. I’m not old enough yet, but maybe down the road. That’s actually the first one I wrote, so I’ll was until later in life to do that one, maybe.

Q: Are they dramas?

CHAD: Yeah. I don’t believe very strongly in happy endings, in film anyway. So I think I like the opportunity of just taking tortured characters and experiencing their lives through ways that maybe you haven’t seen them before and really going down those paths, like "Taxi Driver"-type films. Those, that’s what I really really aspire to do.

"House of Wax" opens in theaters May 6th.