'The Vampire Diaries' series finale will be 'beautiful' and definitely final, the stars promise
Vampires may be immortal, but TV shows aren’t.
And, after eight seasons of dopplegangers, witches, werewolf-vampire hybrids, not-quite-dead parents and all the other baggage that our favorite forever-young Salvatore brothers brought with them when they returned to their native Mystic Falls, Virginia, it’s time to close the coffin on The Vampire Diaries.
“This show is forever going to be ingrained in my personality, which is a major deal,” says Paul Wesley, who plays perpetually brooding teen Stefan Salvatore opposite Ian Somerhalder’s cocky older bro, Damon. “I didn’t sign up for that when I walked into the audition, but I'm very grateful for it and it's amazing.”
The two actors joined co-stars Zach Roerig, who plays token human Matt Donovan, and Michael Malarkey, who plays (now) dearly departed vampire Enzo St. John, to reflect on the CW series and its impending finale during a press conference last week in West Hollywood.
One obvious question from journalists was what the cast could say about the return of Nina Dobrev. The series’ original star played good-versus-evil lookalikes – and frequent paramours for the Salvatore brothers -- Elena Gilbert and Katherine Pierce, before leaving at the end of Season 6.
But, as few ever really stay dead on this show, it should be noted that Elena’s currently in a coma and will only wake up when best friend Bonnie (Kat Graham) shuffles off this mortal coil, while the penultimate episode revealed that Katherine has devised a plan to return from hell and seek vengeance on Mystic Falls.
“I think it would be very strange to not have Nina come back for the finale,” Wesley says. “It’s like the whole story is about two brothers, essentially; the crux of it is two brothers fighting over a girl. I mean, there’s a zillion other storylines, but I felt like it would have been a real shame for the fans and for the show to not wrap that up to a degree.”
That said, there is at least one significant death in the series finale, which airs March 10. We don't know much, but Wesley teases that “it’s definitely a main character.”
Somerhalder adds that, as an alum of ABC’s Lost, he knows you can never please everyone but that he thinks “there’s a very beautiful orchestration to how this was laid out.”
Although it was frequently mentioned during the Q&A just how many episodes there are in the series – 171, to be exact – there were, shockingly, some stories and time periods still left unexplored. Somerhalder would've liked to see his character at a Rolling Stones concert and Wesley wished for more traveling; pondering, “What were we doing in the '70s? What were we doing in the '80s? [I wish we’d done] something a little more modern, yet still [a] flashback.”
Wesley and Somerhalder share an affinity for “Lost Girls,” the sixth episode in the first season and the one that offers a flashback to how their characters’ rivalry began (Katherine is involved, of course). Wesley adds that he also loved Season 3 as that’s when audiences got to see a darker side of Stefan; a twist because, as he puts it “I've died 17 times and killed 18,000 people, and I'm still the hero!”
Everyone on the panel except Malarkey has been with the show since its inception – Wesley was the last one cast and Roerig even remembers seeing photos of him and other potential Stefans on Dobrev’s phone when they were filming the pilot – and the original actors acknowledge that the show really struck a nerve straight out of the gate.
The Vampire Diaries, which is based on the young adult books created by L.J. Smith, premiered at the height of the vampire boom during the aughts. By the time its first episode aired in 2009, the Twilight saga had already made movie stars out of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and HBO’s much more NC-17 True Blood was introducing us to vocabulary like “fangbanger” and “glamouring.” But do the actors feel any pride over the fact that their undead drama has outlasted its competition?
Somerhalder deadpans that it "depends on if it [we] outlived it by virtue of shoving it down everyone’s faces, and the market wasn’t necessarily asking for it,” while the others argue that this particular vein of supernatural stories will never go out of style.
“You have to revamp a genre in order to validate it coming back,” says Malarkey. “So I think if it does swing back in, it’ll be different.”
If we do see another vampire resurgence, though, it’ll have to be with someone else. Despite the fan fervor over reboots like Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life and the upcoming Prison Break revival, don’t come calling on Wesley and Somerhalder for a Vampire Diaries movie.
“In 10 years, I'm going to be living probably on a ranch in Wyoming and you'll never hear from me again,” Somerhalder says. “I think it's good to close this chapter … Now in this digital age, television never dies. It's called Netflix.”
The Vampire Diaries series finale airs Friday, March 10 at 8 p.m. on The CW.
Topics The CW
