15 Years Later, ‘The Vampire Diaries’ Co-Creator Talks Casting Secrets, TV Romances and Building a “Timeless” Supernatural Franchise
It’s been 15 years since audiences were introduced to Mystic Falls and its vampires, love triangles and teenage drama. And still, The Vampire Diaries holds a special place for many viewers.
Vampire Diaries premiered on The CW on Sept. 10, 2009, and ran for eight seasons,. Now, to celebrate the milestone anniversary, showrunner Julie Plec looks back on the series she created with Kevin Williamson and how it launched a supernatural franchise.
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She recalls wanting to “tell a really emotional story that was sexy and romantic and scary and all the things,” while also creating “something that felt timeless, that could live on and continue to feel like anybody, any generation at any time can connect to it.”
And to accomplish that, Plec and Williamson knew they had to build a solid team that could produce stories with “creative integrity and that we’re deeply emotional and highly entertaining.”
They also needed the perfect cast, as building successful onscreen relationships is a “very complicated dance,” says Plec. Especially when the audience wanted Damon [Ian Somerhalder] and Elena [Nina Dobrev] together, even when they made him “worse and meaner and more murderous and more despicable.”
But to their surprise, they ultimately turned The Vampire Diaries into an entire television universe, with two successful spinoffs — The Originals and Legacies — as well as launched the careers of Dobrev, Somerhalder, Paul Wesley, Kat Graham, Candice King and more.
Below, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Plec looks back at The Vampire Diaries 15 years later, as well as her successful television career as a whole. She also reveals her favorite episode and opens up about casting challenges, navigating onscreen romances, the moment she knew she created something special — and teases if there could be more Vampire Diaries stories to tell in the future.
When you think back to 2009, as you’re preparing for The Vampire Dairies to premiere, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Kevin would say constantly that we had a 50-50 chance of riding the wave of the vampire craze, or being the ones that put the final nail in. We had Twilight and True Blood, and you always have a risk when you’re chasing a zeitgeist moment that it can totally backfire on you, or then it could deliver everything that everybody wants, and we didn’t know if we were going to succeed or fail. So going into a show, we knew we were proud of it and we were happy with the way it was turning out, but we had no idea how it was going to be received and it was equal parts thrilling and terrifying.
Looking back to the beginning, could you have predicted what the show was going to turn into, or that it would launch two successful spinoff series?
When we started, it was really just a straightforward approach at adapting an old book series [The Vampire Diaries by author L.J. Smith] that really spoke to Kevin and me for two different reasons: He was a big fan of Dark Shadows growing up; and I had become, in the late ’90s, a massive fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not to mention both of us had read Anne Rice and all the books and all great vampire movies. We’re just huge fans of the genre itself. So we were just excited to get in there and tell a really emotional story that was sexy and romantic and scary and all the things.
I don’t think either of us was ever looking down the road to a franchise opportunity, but it was the darn Originals that came around and were so good. And it’s conceptually the idea of an original family of vampires, the origin story of the species in our world, coupled with incredibly successful casting. Joseph Morgan and Daniel Gillies and Claire Holt, specifically, opened the door for more opportunities that we hadn’t even thought of until it became very obvious that it was the right and perfect thing to do.
It sounds like it was a nice surprise.
Absolutely! The books mentioned the Originals, but hadn’t really built out a family dynamic. And one thing that you do in writers rooms constantly when you are introducing new characters is you try to figure out: What is the emotional core of who they are, even if they’re villains, and what are their powerful, emotional relationships? Kevin and I always have to do that with the villainous character, because we’re big believers that the villains are always the heroes of their own story. You really want to give them a deep set of wants and needs that you would give to your hero. So it just became this really great opportunity to build a highly dysfunctional 1,000-year-old history of children of abuse, and how that both brought them together in the most intense way and also how they perpetuated that abuse with each other. And the idea of, is this cycle something that we can break or are we quite literally trapped in it for all eternity?
It was such a different set of thematic ideas than what we were doing in The Vampire Diaries, which is really all about grief and family and loss, that it felt like we were able to watch an entirely new story without retreading too much familiar territory. That’s the risk you create with a second show and sometimes it can feel like you’re just retreading the first one with different people in it. We really wanted to avoid that trap and had a lot of exciting conversations about how to make the Originals feel like a more Shakespearean version of what The Vampire Diaries had been.
How was it working alongside Kevin Williamson to help make the show such a hit?
The exciting thing about collaborating with Kevin Williamson is that his brain works in ways that no one can predict. As a result, he’s the one that comes up with the plot twist that no one can predict. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just step back and watch. I call it the story blender where every other writer in the process will take all their ideas and drop it into the story blender, and then Kevin will hit “on” and it will spit up the one thing none of us ever thought of, which of course turned out to be the coolest thing or the most surprising thing. His existence and the way his brain works is its own version of a master class in plot twists and successful storytelling.
He would pitch me things and my jaw would just drop to the floor. I’d be like, “How does your brain do this?” And he said, “Well, when everyone’s going in one direction, I try to look at it and say, what’s the direction nobody’s looking in?” And that is the lesson that I took from him and then proceeded to teach all the other writers over 13 years of three different shows. So in a way, he’s sort of the godfather of everybody that came out of that trilogy and franchise and all the writers that started with us, the staff writers who are now all creators and showrunners in their own way.
You were also juggling The Vampire Diaries and The Originals at the same time for several years. What was that like?
It was an exercise in delegation (laughs) and prioritizing. I spent the first couple of years with Kevin and then without Kevin on Vampire Diaries, really feeling like the world would stop spinning if I didn’t have my hand in every small piece of it. And that kind of incredible attention to detail can result in really quality television, but it can also slowly drive a person mad and drive one to dark and scary places. It was sort of just like physical health and emotional survival.
So watching The Originals, four years into The Vampire Diaries, came sort of hand-in-hand with me having realized how important it was for me to start empowering other people and my partners on the team, to teach them more, to let them do more, to let go of things. And in doing so, I really discovered the strength of the writing team, specifically Caroline Dries and Mike Narducci. I was then able to leave Caroline with Vampire Diaries so that she was day-to-day and take Narducci over to The Originals so that he was day-to-day, so that I could stay involved in both. I think it was Carol Mendelsohn who said, “You never leave the mother ship.” And I learned that early on in Vampire Diaries, you never leave the mother ship because you always want to make sure that you’re taking care of the parents of anything franchise-able. Because if that falls apart and if that fails, then your foundations have crumbled. So it was really important to me to never walk away from Vampire Diaries no matter how busy I got, no matter how many shows I was juggling.
Another writer who was added to Vampire Dairies in season three, who really did such extraordinary work over the years with Brett Matthews, who became my work husband, as I call him, and really was the heart and soul of Legacies. And so finding people who loved the show as much as I did and then could be my partners as we built the franchise into multiple shows.
I also realized you have had at least one show on the air continuously since The Vampire Diaries premiered. What do you make of that?
I feel really proud of that run for 15 years, and feel like with We Were Liars coming out next year, theoretically, that a run can and should continue. So it’s nice to be still in it, as opposed to looking back on something that has ended. And looking forward, there is hopefully a lot more to come.
But the thing about the Vampire Diaries franchise was when we started in Atlanta, we all were new; new to each other, the crew was new. And over the eight years of Vampire Diaries, we watched crewmembers grow up from day-playing to gaffers and DPs. One of our day player groups became the best boy and then a key grip and then went on to do Marvel shows. We had ADs who became directors and script supervisors who became directors, and the editors who became producers and directors, and the ecosystem really grew. I always used to say, “We go to high school for four years and then if we’re lucky, we go to university for four years. And that eight-year window built all your most formative and most powerful relationships.” And we had that journey with each other over the eight years with Vampire Diaries. So in a lot of ways, continuing the franchise with The Originals, and then ultimately with Legacies, was as much about keeping the story alive as it was about keeping that ecosystem driving and growing and keeping the crew and the machine that made the shows, giving the opportunity and keeping everybody working and building that actual crew family, which really, was a very powerful, powerful connection over the decade and a half.
You were also working on shows in the supernatural space for so long with The Vampire Diaries, The Originals and Legacies, but your most recent show, The Girls on the Bus, is the complete opposite, being a political drama. How was it shifting away from the supernatural genre?
That was such a thrill to be able to do that show. And that show is entirely credited to Greg Berlanti, who I went to college with, and we’ve been friends for 30 years and he called me out of the blue five, six years ago and said, “I have your next show. It is perfect for you. You’re doing it,” and told me to go look at Amy Chozick’s book Chasing Hillary, specifically the chapter that was called “The Girl on the Bus.” And he was right because he and I share a love for the West Wing. We share a love for The American President. We share a love for politics in general. And always, always, always, I’m looking to tell stories about the founding family, and that’s one of the foundational flags of the stories I like to tell. So it just hit all the boxes for me, intellectually and emotionally, and the coolest part of it was, it was the first time I was making a show that wasn’t for broadcast. … [and] freedom that exists when you’re going to have a little bit more money and you’re not trying to adhere to act breaks and running time and what your character can wear.
Also, to have a writers room where we were just writing the script without a limiting production deadline … all those things that come along with making shows for broadcast. So all in all, even though the version I got to write didn’t end up as the version that made it onto the air … that was fun to be able to be the creator-showrunner of part A and then ultimately the executive producer of part B.
You mentioned your upcoming TV adaptation of We Were Liars. What are you most excited about on that and can you tease anything for book fans? I know you’ll be reuniting with Candice King, who played Caroline on Vampire Diaries as well.
I’m so excited! This book is a book I’ve loved since it was published in 2014, and I tried several times over the last decade to get the right to the ability to make it into a TV show, and it took a couple of failed attempts and other people dropping out before Carina Adly MacKenzie and I were granted the right to do it with Universal and Amazon. Our goal is to deliver the most romantic, beautiful, mysterious, sharply funny, deeply cowardly, emotional, coming-of-age love story and older generational. We’re shooting the last episode right now of the season and it feels really good. It’s a role that Candice was born to play, so I’m really excited to give her the opportunity to step into an adult role, now that she is an adult after kind of growing up with her, we were one of her first acting jobs.
Going back to Vampire Diaries, the show catapulted so many of the actors into fame. When did you know you had something special with that cast?
I think we had individual moments when shooting the pilot where we had a sort of clear understanding that like, “Oh wow, Nina Dobrev really knows how to hit these scenes.” And Nina and Paul Wesley have this incredible chemistry, and Ian as Damon is just this wicked delight, and you can sort of see the individual success stories’ early days. I think I kept waiting for that moment where it felt like suddenly everyone was so famous, like the Twilight story or the Beverly Hills, 90210 moments or the screaming girls of the mall appearances. But it all just sort of happened organically over the eight-year experience that suddenly the show was incredibly successful and incredibly popular and long-running without me ever having noticed.
I think that the show became its most successful somehow over the last five years [during] COVID or Netflix or whatever. I will be walking down a European city street and a waitress will run out of a restaurant because she saw me walking by and she’ll come out and say hi to me and she recognized me. And I’m like, when you get to that point that people in foreign lands are recognizing the writer of a TV show, then I think the TV show must have made a pretty big impact globally. So that’s been sort of a wild ride, seeing the audience grow and grow and grow in global ways, and multigenerational ways.
Do you recall any other top contenders for the lead roles of Elena, Damon and Stefan?
The roller coaster of casting the leads was sort of hilariously well-documented because we really struggled with all three roles. Nina came in early in the process and was sick, and so we kind of didn’t look twice at her and she had to fight to be seen again and put herself on tape so that we would take a second look at her when she felt better. And it came perfectly, right at the time when we were sort of throwing our hands up in the air. And we were instantly interested in Ian because I had actually been a fan of Young Americans … anyway, so he tanked [his audition] and he knows he tanked and everyone knows he tanked and it’s cannon at this point. But we had a moment where we were like, “Well, if he’s not our Damon, then who is?” And then Paul Wesley came in amidst a sea of 10 other possible Stefans. And Kevin and I — we’ve also said so, I don’t feel like I’m talking shit — just thought he [Paul] was too old, and so we said, “No, we don’t want him. He’s too old.” And then the network said, “Well, make him Damon instead of Ian.” And we were like, “Oh, no, we can’t do that. A terrible idea.”
So Kevin and I were like the last two people to be on board the Paul Wesley train, and it wasn’t really until his first day shooting when he was shooting in the cemetery with Nina Dobrev in a scene where they run into each other for the first time in the cemetery where we were like, “Oh my God, we were so wrong. How embarrassing, because he’s perfect.” I know we were chasing, in one way or another, all the possibilities with the covenants, you know, Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Taylor Kitsch, but it really turned out to be — I don’t think we could have done a better job.
Thinking back, do you favorite memory from the show or set that comes to mind?
There are two. One is when we did the finale, I think it was episode 172 and eight years of working together. So every time we shot on the set for the last time, I would make a speech about the set and what it meant to us and we would all take a moment and say goodbye to the set. And every time we shot out one of our actors for the last time, I would give a speech again and we’d all say goodbye to the actor and the actor would say goodbye to the character, and it was just one big weepy sob fest for about two straight weeks. It’s just really emotional and really beautiful, and you don’t really get to feel those feelings unless you’ve been at it with each other for that long.
And then, socially, there was this little tiny bar that was the size of like a small New York studio apartment, but it had a big patio that we used to go to on Friday nights if we wrapped in time or on Saturday nights and meet up to have drinks, and the manager there became our friend. And so he would let us stay until after closing and we would sometimes be there hanging out and drinking until 6 o’clock in the morning. Honestly, I think one of the reasons why the crew and the actors on this particular show were so close is because the amount of wine consumed at this wine bar at 3 o’clock in the morning on the weekends. And then they tore it down and literally paved paradise and set up a parking lot, so it’s no longer in existence and it’s the thing that we probably all as a group miss the most.
What are you most proud of with The Vampire Diaries?
What really sticks with me is, one, that we’re now 15 years after the launch of the first show and people are still 15 years later discovering it new and loving it and/or rewatching it. It just doesn’t go away, and we can really thank streaming for that. So as much as we can all be mad at streaming for our own reasons lately, I still feel very grateful to the success the show found originally on Netflix after its own success on The CW. I feel really proud of the content itself because Marcos Siega, who directed the pilot, said to us, “We’re not making a TV show, we’re making a series of small movies and everything that we do, we should approach with the cinematic integrity and storytelling integrity of a feature film.” And Kevin and I really took that to heart and then I tried to keep that going for all the years later, never settling for cheap storytelling, never settling for the rushed episode.
I know a lot of showrunners who talk about a 22-episode season and they say not every one’s a winner. And I would always say that’s not acceptable to me. If it’s not a winner, we’re going to work as hard as we can in the time that we have to make it a winner. And if we run out of time, then we’ll settle, but until then every episode needs to be as good as the last. … And I feel proud of when we were able to really achieve that — and I also accept that there are times we just flat out couldn’t and that’s OK, too. Because when you get that deep into shows, sometimes the audience is just so invested and so engaged with the characters that they’ll forgive the writers sometimes.
And I feel really proud about the careers that were launched both on in front of the screen and behind the screen over the last 15 years. So many people on The Originals, we gave the first television writing job to Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson who have now gone on to have their amazing success with Yellowjackets. And Caroline Dries, who is now a creator-showrunner. So many people, but I’m just proud of the fact that I could look at that experience as a little bit of a training ground for people as I was learning on the job. But I finally realized that as I was learning, I needed to make sure other people knew what I knew. So we were all in it together and I’m happy that now everybody gets to do that on their own.
And I’m proud that we made people cry a lot because really, that’s why I got into television storytelling, is because I grew up in a family that wasn’t comfortable expressing a lot of emotion. I used to cry at movie trailers and Little House on the Prairie … and I needed an outlet for my tears, so I channeled it all into the storytelling so that other people could have an outlet for theirs.
If I’m being honest, I cry every time I rewatch the series.
I have one more to add since you’re rewatching … when Kevin left the show at the beginning of season three, I was terrified that I was going to be the one to run it into the ground and fuck it all up. And it really weighed heavily on me and early in the season, we had just added Mike Narducci to the writing staff and he wrote episode five of the third season, which is “The Reckoning.” And that was a hard episode to put together and a hard episode to write, but he crushed it. And when I saw the cut of that episode of television, I felt like, “Oh my God, I can do this, we can do this. We are not going to fuck this up.” And so that one episode in particular start to finish, the editing, Lance Anderson edited, it was just really one of my favorite episodes of the series.
There were so many onscreen couples that became fan favorites over the years, so how did you balance them all while also making sure they didn’t overshadow one another?
Building a successful relationship on television is equal parts math, chemistry and then, fan reaction. I decided at the end of season two that eventually Stefan and Caroline would be getting together and that this was the beginning of a long, long, long, long arc for them. I didn’t care how long it took, if it took five years, that the show would end with them together. And then literally one season later, Klaus comes along and without any of us doing anything, other than Rebecca Sonnenshine writing a really great monologue, Klaus, all of a sudden, the chemistry between those two was so palpable that it almost completely derailed the plan to get her and Stefan together. And so you’re constantly shifting your plans, you’re abandoning plans, you’re trying to make something work and then seeing, “Oh shoot, that doesn’t work” and then you’ve got to throw all those plans out the window, you’re reacting in real time. The beauty of broadcast is you literally just wrote the episode a month and a half earlier and shot it like three weeks earlier and then it’s on the air. So you actually have time to let fans react and to make adjustments based on what’s working and what isn’t. It is a very, very complicated dance.
Worse is when the audience decides that Damon and Elena need to be together and no matter what we did as writers to try to convince them otherwise, by making him worse and meaner and more murderous and more despicable, they just wanted it more. And so then we are trying to catch up to them and figure out how to give them what they want without giving them what they want because the minute you give them what they want, the show’s over. So then had to figure out all those things.
I saw that you mentioned there have been conversations surrounding a Vampire Diaries movie at a fan convention last year. Do you have any details you can share on that?
You know what, Paul Wesley and I were literally just texting two days ago because he saw the news about the Twilight animated show and he’s like, “Why aren’t we doing this?” And I said, “Good question. We should do this.” There are so many opportunities to keep this world alive and keep this franchise going. For me, it’s just about the right idea and the right time, like I’m game. Leslie Morgenstein started talking about a Vampire Diaries movie in like season two, so I’m sure that it’s something that he still continues to pursue quietly. We’ve talked about all kinds of different ways to revisit parts of the story that we love or to tell a new version of the story. I know that those conversations are always happening. I personally know that there is a story that I would like to tell if anyone will have me eventually, so we shall see.
Do you ever think about trying to get the band back together for another project with the original Vampire Diaries cast?
The tricky part of a vampire story is that your character is not supposed to age, right? So it makes it more complicated, and also 90 percent of them died before the show ended, so it makes the idea of a sequel or a prequel very complicated. But there are still ways that you can pay homage to the central characters and revisit those characters and some of the ideas I have in my head are ways to do that. However, whoever takes on the next chapter of The Vampire Diaries’ story, if it’s me or somebody else, they will have their work cut out for him because all those hundreds of episodes across all three shows, like a lot of stories have been told, so it’s not without its challenges, but it’s a fun challenge.
What would you say to the new viewers who are still discovering the show for the first time?
I will say that what we tried to do is make something that felt timeless that could live on and continue to feel like anybody, any generation at any time can connect to it. So in a lot of ways, I think that’s why it holds up over the years. I will also say, being frank and self-aware, that there are things that don’t hold up. The world has changed and the way that we live within it and the way that we tell stories now, it’s very different than perhaps the way we were telling stories 15 years ago. Things like agency, things like inclusion, writing characters of color through the prism of writers of color as opposed to just colorblind writing and colorblind casting and not really acknowledging race in the right ways and learning a lot of lessons that over the years as the world changed. So there’s plenty of hard lessons learned that led to me making a lot of different decisions the way I tell stories today than I did 15 years ago. But outside of those things, I think that we can all hold our heads high and feel pretty good about the fact that we tried to tell stories that had creative integrity and that we’re deeply emotional and highly entertaining. And I think that we were able to accomplish that, which is something to celebrate.
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