Fifteen years ago, Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson thought that, on the heels of True Blood and Twilight, vampires were becoming a bit overrated.
Luckily, they didn’t listen to that instinct when they forged ahead with an adaptation of L. J. Smith’s fantasy horror novel, The Vampire Diaries, for The CW.
The pilot aired on Sept. 10, 2009, and, not only was it a resounding success, putting up what at the time was the largest premiere audience since the network debuted three years earlier, it also spawned an entire franchise that would last more than a decade. The Vampire Diaries would also influence pop culture and the entire young adult genre in unpredictable ways — so much so that it’s still worth talking about seven years after the final episode.
“It feels like blip, and yet, like the longest 15 years of my life,” Plec told Deadline this week, reflecting on the anniversary of The Vampire Diaries premiere. “I’m both proud and exhausted.”
While The Vampire Diaries ended its run in 2017, Plec continued to shepherd the universe through two spinoffs, The Originals and Legacies. The latter was cancelled after four seasons in 2022, making the last two years the first in more than a decade of television without the TVD universe on air.
In an interview with Deadline, Plec reflected on her journey with The Vampire Diaries — which she doesn’t feel is entirely over — and her entire career championing young adult projects. She also gives a few updates on her upcoming series with Carina Adly Mackenzie, We Were Liars.
DEADLINE: It’s funny now to read how worried you and Kevin Williamson were that vampires were already overdone when you were developing The Vampire Diaries. Not only were they not then, I’m not sure they even are now. Are vampires timeless?
JULIE PLEC: I think so. I thought maybe we had run the course a little bit, but I just got sent a book that somebody’s trying to make into a movie about vampires and werewolves. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the genre is still very much alive. I have not had a chance to see this yet, but I guess Interview with the Vampire is really spectacular television, and so I love that people are still doing it and doing it well, and that the fans are still responding to the genre.
DEADLINE: What was the moment when you really realized how big the show had gotten?
PLEC: I kept waiting for that moment where I would finally believe that we were this huge hit, and the actual moment never came. It was really when it started airing on Netflix, and all the international audience that it had, and when the cast started getting invited to conventions all over the world, and generation after generation after generation of young adults would stop me or their mothers would stop me and tell me That Vampire Diaries was their favorite show. Every year, a new generation was having the same experience. So I think it was about the 10th time I had a young teenager fan out over the show, 12 years after the show itself had launched, that I finally realized what an impact it had and continues to have.
DEADLINE: These past two years have been the first in a while without a Vampire Diaries show on the air, since Legacies ended. How did you feel about the cancellation?
PLEC: I was not entirely pleased with that decision. There had been a Vampire Diaries show on the air for 13 years, and it seemed unfathomable to me that the studio wouldn’t want to keep that show going as long as humanly possible, knowing that we had plans in our minds for more spinoffs and more ways to keep the world going.
It was a pretty seminal moment in my career when I realized that often just the unpredictability of the business and the metrics of the business can get in the way of a creative journey, no matter how much people like your show, no matter how much the people who hire you to make it, enjoy the process. If there’s a business reason to let it go, then people let it go. I was kind of sad and surprised at that decision, as was Mark Pedowitz, by the way, very vocally. And wish it didn’t have to happen that way, because Legacies, in particular, I felt like was designed to go on for many, many years, and have new generations of cast come through. It just felt like an incredibly short-sighted missed opportunity all around.
DEADLINE: I think that audiences were at least glad to see Candice King and Joseph Morgan back for that finale. Did that lessen the blow?
PLEC: The best thing that Mark Pedowitz and Michael Roberts at the CW did for us knowing that the network was getting put up for sale and that they might not have any control over the future of the programming, was to just warn us that the future was uncertain, and that allowed us to design the ending of the season in a way that if the worst thing did happen, that we could still really leave our audience with something that felt satisfying and emotionally centered for them. And of course, that’s going to come in the form of Klaus returning, and for many it’s going to come in the form of Caroline and Klaus being in the show at the same time, although I’m sure other people would have preferred them being together.
Candice is a friend and had willingly come and guest starred on The Originals and Legacies several times, and was game for it. But it was being able to call Joseph and say, ‘Hey, listen. I don’t know if this story is going to continue, and this whole show is about a daughter trying to get past the grief she feels for the loss of her dad, and her fear of his legacy, and who she’s supposed to be as a person, and as she steps into herself, it just wouldn’t feel right if her dad wasn’t there to give her that final bit of guidance at the end.’ And he couldn’t have agreed more and was so gracious to be willing to step in and show up for us, and that felt really good. You don’t always get that. People don’t always say yes to that request, and I was really glad that he did.
DEADLINE: I saw you recently said something about having an idea for another spinoff. Is that something you’re going to pursue more formally?
PLEC: There’s, in my mind, always a road to travel that could be another branch on The Vampire Diaries tree. I think that it’s a matter of timing, and the moment, and the idea. So hopefully the stars will align and someone will do it, hopefully with me. But you never know.
DEADLINE: It might be silly to ask since The Vampire Diaries just ended in 2017, but besides these guest appearances in other shows, is there a world where you bring back any of the original characters to explore another facet of their story?
PLEC: I think there are ways to keep the universe alive without having to go back and start over. So if somebody were to ask me my preference, I would definitely want to go in a different direction. But I think it is a testament to all these shows and the mark that they made in the moment of pop culture, in that moment in time, to the fan base that has aged up an entire generation and still wants more, and to the new fans that have been able to discover it.
DEADLINE: I think it’s safe to say that The Vampire Diaries also influenced the YA genre more generally. Jenny Han has spoken about the inspiration she drew when creating her own love triangle for The Summer I Turned Pretty. How does that make you feel?
PLEC: I feel proud. I feel a little old. It’s full circle storytelling. I was a huge fan of Buffy and Angel and those shows really influenced my perspective on how I wanted to tell the stories in The Vampire Diaries. Kevin Williamson was a huge fan of Dark Shadows, and that really impacted the choices he made and the choices we made together. So to know that now, we have done something that the next generation of storytellers can look at and say, ‘I’m such a fan of this,’ I want to do things that honor it or pay homage to it.
DEADLINE: Some of the details of the casting are out there already, and you’ve said you did have some trouble casting the main love triangle. But ultimately, what goes into trying to figure out how to cast such an epic, seasons-spanning love triangle in that vein?
PLEC: Casting a pilot is so hard, because you don’t yet have the voices of the characters in your head in a way that makes somebody instantly undeniable as a choice. I speak for myself. I don’t want to say that as though I’m speaking for the world, but I find casting difficult, and every now and then someone will come in and just read the scene exactly like how you heard it in your head. That’s thrilling. But more often than not, you’re molding and shifting what you think the character sounds like, and trying to match it with some sense of something exciting you get from whoever’s auditioning.
That certainly was the case with Nina Dobrev, where, at first glance, because she was sick, we thought, ‘Oh well, she seems good, but we’ll keep looking.’ She’s not blonde, and the character in the books is blonde. Then when we decided casting somebody for hair color was stupid, then Nina put herself back on tape, and we saw the tape again, and it just seemed so instantly right that she was the perfect Elena. I always have given that lesson when I talk to actors over the years that people might think you’re a bit thirsty if you continue to chase a role that you really believe is yours, but damn if there aren’t a lot of really great success stories about people who stuck to their guns and gave it another shot and ended up getting the part. It was a fun story for Nina, and it’s a fun story to tell.
The canon of casting The Vampire Diaries is so well documented, so I won’t bore you with all the details, but it is funny to me that the success of the show was built on this really, really excellent triangle between Damon, Stefan and Elena — and Stefan was the last person we cast, and Damon almost didn’t get the job because he blew his audition so badly when he went in front of the bosses. So when you think about the other ways it could have gone and what else could have been, it’s just mind blowing to me, because, of course, I can’t see anyone in those parts other than those three.
DEADLINE: I can’t either, truthfully.
PLEC: I think if early days CW bosses had their way, it would have been Ashlee Simpson, Travis Van Winkle…I can’t remember who else they were advocating for, but there was a lot of voices in the process. It was a wild ride to get to where we got.
DEADLINE: Elena not being blonde is far from the biggest liberty you ended up taking with the show. How did you empower yourselves to really make the show stand on its own?
PLEC: The books definitely had a very, very steep genre bend very early…even in the early days of the writers room, we were doing a lot of pitches about things like talking and walking gargoyles and flying monkeys. Funnily enough, a lot of that stuff we ended up using in Legacies, because we always thought it would be fun to do a show that lived more in a creature space. But early on, we really decided that Vampire Diaries needed to be as grounded as possible in a real world, even the magic grounded in Earth magic and not fantastical magic. So a lot of the changes really came from just trying to keep things as centered and grounded as possible, so that we weren’t losing control of the mythology too early, and making sure the tone felt very real world, even though the genre itself is so heightened.
Nobody really wanted to see Elena having to take care of an eight-year-old little sister. That just felt like we would be pretty bored of that quickly. But having ‘on the cusp of being a very hot, young coming of age teenager ready for his own love story’ brother seemed like a better way to go, just for storytelling. Then when we started trying to write for all of Elena’s friends in the book, realized that there was a redundancy in the friend group, that there were just one too many characters. Renaming the town from Fells Church, that was just me wanting it to be more mystical, less religious. I tried to rename the Salvatore boys, which is really dumb in hindsight, but there was a brief moment in time when their last name was Whitmore and but it didn’t clear legally. So we changed it back, thank God. Then eventually named the college that they all went to Whitmore, just as a little homage to that lapse in judgment at the moment.
So anytime you’re adapting something, you have to give yourself certain freedoms in order to tell the best version of the story that you want to tell. What The Vampire Diaries books gave us was this incredible setup and this incredible group of characters and connections to each other, and then we just freed ourselves very early on from feeling the need to stick to the books, and just went down our own path of crazy storytelling. As a result, it was really hard to find our way. I think it clicked in when we were writing the third episode of Season 1, which is the ‘Friday Night Bites’ [episode], when we finally figured out what the show was in our minds, which is really the redemption or lack thereof of Damon, the mystery surrounding why he cares about this girl that he shouldn’t know, what his secret is, what he wanted. That’s when it all kind of clicked for us, and we were able to just continue down our own road without needing to reference the source material as much.
DEADLINE: I’m very excited to see that you’re reuniting with Candice for We Were Liars. How did that come about?
PLEC: Yes, Carina [Adly Mackenzie] and I, from almost day one, were writing Bess in Candice’s voice…but we thought she was too young, and we didn’t think we’d be able to get her hired. Then we realized that we didn’t care. [Laughs]. Candice has a very grown up, mom soul, in addition to being this young, vibrant woman. We knew she could do it, and we just decided to put her forward and hope for the best and keep our fingers crossed and prepared to go into battle for her. And then nobody said no. Everyone just thought it was a great idea. All of our anxieties were for not.
And honestly, I mean, if Caroline Forbes is the part she was born to play, Bess Sinclair is the part that she’s meant to play next. They’re the same person, just separated by two generations and some children.
DEADLINE: You mentioned you’re nearly done with production. How has it been going?
PLEC: I’m so excited about how it’s coming together and so proud of it. Carina and I have been in the trenches all summer up in Nova Scotia, which is doubling for Martha’s Vineyard for us, and so we’re having this incredible like Northeast Atlantic, lobster roll, oyster and clam chowder summer while also working so hard outside in shifting weather, in faraway locations, with an ensemble of 10 and sometimes 20 characters, telling a multi-generational love story. It’s also an amnesia mystery, balancing a lot of tones, wearing a lot of really excellent clothes, building mansions on our sets…It is not easy, but the footage has been spectacular, and our ensemble is just extraordinary.
I think fans of the book are going to be very, very happy, because I think we hit all the marks and all the beats that the book does, and then also expand the universe, layers upon layers upon layers to really make the adult characters really nuanced and really multi layered, and to set the stage for Season 2, which theoretically is going to take us deeper into the moms’ lives as well and add another generation to the story.
DEADLINE: So you’ve already been thinking about Season 2? It is such an interesting book, and I’ve always felt that it could be expanded so much.
PLEC: Amazon, in particular, has been very vocal about wanting to service their YA audience. They had a huge hit in The Summer I Turned Pretty. Netflix has done very well by the YA audience, but not everybody is doing it right now. When The CW went away and stopped programming that kind of content, it created a huge gap in fandom television viewing culture, and the fact that more people aren’t trying to fill that gap is mind blowing to me. It is. It is a genre that withstands the test of time.
The idea that anybody thinks that there isn’t an audience for this stuff blows my mind, because, in my opinion, it is the most enthusiastic audience, the most highly energized audience, and an audience that you can find young and grow over decades into being your audience for anything. I’m a big fan of really trying to nurture that fan base and that viewing base, because I think that if you catch people young with and make them fall in love with storytelling young, then they’re going to spend their lifetimes reading and watching TV and seeing movies and reading graphic novels and doing all the things that make somebody an audience member for life.
DEADLINE: After working on around 500 episodes of television, what’s the biggest thing you’ve learned?
PLEC: I have learned that Malcolm Gladwell was right about the 10,000 hours of experience making you at least able to pass as an expert in your field, because I really do feel like so much of what I know is based on just the repetition of having done it again and again and again. I can look at a story break on the board and tell you where, structurally, it’s going to go awry. I can look at an edit and tell you why it’s not working. I could have a disaster happen on set and not break a sweat, because I’ve seen it all. I’ve been there. I’ve done it all. We’ve had terrible things happen over the years, and we’ve had great things happen over the years.
You just learn how to react functionally and with a mature perspective in real time, because you’ve seen it. So there is something to be said for the seasoning that comes with experience, even though in my heart, I’m still a 17-year-old fan girl. That has been the greatest thrill over all these years and all these episodes of television, is just…being in the trenches again and again and again and coming out the other side with story after story and show after show, and really feeling like I put in my time. I’m still ready to put in more time, not slowing down anytime soon. It’s been a real privilege to be able to do it.
DEADLINE: In that same vein, how do you decide what’s next for you, with so much already under your belt?
PLEC: Well, in this current market, it’s find the people that actually are making television and make friends with them and hope that they want to make something that you love. But joking aside, for me, I love the process of making television so much that sometimes it’s as much about the experience as it is about the project. I can be just as happy birthing something from my brain and seeing it all the way through as I can supporting someone else and trying to be a partner to them, or supervising them and helping them tell their stories, because I just like the job so much.
When I think about what I want to write, always my North Star is: ‘Is this going to make somebody feel a powerful emotion?’ Whether it makes somebody cry or makes somebody grieve, or makes somebody understand what they want from love or to feel the pain of loss, or to connect with family or found family. If I look at something and I’m deciding whether or not it’s a story I want to tell, it has to tick all those boxes, so that’s usually my barometer.
