The Vampire Diaries Returns! Executive Producer Julie Plec Teases Season 4!
The CW’s still-smoldering hit The Vampire Diaries returns for its fourth season on October 11, and (holy crap) there is a lot of fanging going on! Snakkle caught up with executive producer Julie Plec to discuss her interactions with fans, Elena’s “brutal” new life, and so much more! By Erin FoxSnakkle: You seem to be one of the more accessible showrunners, and really excited by social media and the fan interest in your show.
Juile Plec: Yeah, definitely. The social media thing has been great for me and for Kevin [Williamson] too, because we were able to build a bond with our audience—or at least a portion of our audience—very early and they’ve grown with us, and we’ve developed such a dialogue that now they kind of feel like family in a weird way.
Snakkle: And you also did some old-school mall tours. Like Debbie Gibson, but with vampires.
Plec: Yeah. I said we need to throw our own Hot Topic mall tour. We just get a bunch of people we like together and a bunch of bands we like and just say, “Hey, we’re having a party!” It could happen.
Snakkle: Speaking of bands, do any of the people on the show play musical instruments? Let’s make this tour happen.
Plec: You know what, I think they all have their little midnight guitar sessions, but you know, Kat Graham is a musician in her own right, and Candice Accola is a singer and is also starting to do some songwriting. And then if we’d ever get Matt Davis and David Anders into a room together with a guitar and a bottle of whiskey… you’d get some really great stuff.
Snakkle: So the end of last season was quite traumatic and a huge turning point for the show. They [the press] were talking a little bit with Nina Dobrev about Elena’s transformation and she said that she’s already played a vampire. But this is going to be a whole different level of vampire for Elena, and a whole different world… and it’s not sparkly. How is that transition going to be for her?
Plec: It’s not going to be sparkly actually at all. That’s the perfect word that you just used. It’s not going to be sparkly. It’s going to be kind of brutal, actually. And you know, the interesting thing for Nina as an actress is going to be how she portrays that. Because Katherine and Elena were separated by a very distinct truth, which is that everything that came out of Katherine’s mouth is probably a lie. And everything that Elena says is probably true. So the shift in performance is simply the difference of being honest and being dishonest, which for an actor is a very specific thing to latch onto. Elena is a vampire. She is going to be honest, but she’s going to be going through some things that she doesn’t know if she can explain, she doesn’t want to admit to—feelings and urges and desires. And all these things that she would never want to speak about. So in her own way, she’s becoming more dishonest out of necessity, because it’s terrifying for her to have to admit the kind of person she’s becoming. And so it’s going to be a real struggle for her.
Snakkle: I expect a sense of the seven stages of grief. Her human life is over and she’s going to be kind of pissed off, I would think.
Plec: Well, she’s definitely going to go through a thoroughly quick and profound adjustment period, that’s for sure. And you know, we’ve already talked in the press about how there’s a new character coming to town. And Connor is a vampire hunter, so it couldn’t be worse timing for her. She’s going to have to be going through all this while trying to keep a low profile.
Snakkle: Who can you tease is going to be there for her the most during this transition?
Plec: Well, luckily for her, most of her friends have been through some form of this trauma, whether they themselves are vampires or they themselves know somebody who’s been turned into a vampire or any of those things. So she’s going to have a lot of shoulders to cry on and a lot of friends to lean on. And really it’s going to be more of an issue of do they agree with each other on how she’s being handled.
Snakkle: There is always so much that happens in every season. There’s so much going on with every character, and a lot of it is pretty dark stuff. But you’ve always managed to keep some humor in there, especially with Damon’s character. Is there going to be an opportunity for you to bring in a little bit more lightness this season?
Plec: Yeah. You know, we try like hell to let our characters have a little bit of fun every now and then, and ironically it’s really hard to let them have fun, because fun omits all the stakes and all the jeopardy.
Snakkle: No more school dances!
Plec: We’d love to have a school dance that just went off without a hitch, but then the episode would have no conflict. So one of these days we’ll figure out a way that an episode can be both scary terrifying, deeply profound, and wildly entertaining and fun and our characters can actually be happy in it. It’s just a recipe that we haven’t figured out how to crack yet.
Snakkle: If you could be any one of your characters on the show, who would it be and why?
Plec: Oh my God. You know what? May he rest in peace, I would have been happy to have been Alaric. Just, you know, a cowboy on a barstool having a sip of bourbon and saving the world.
The Vampire Diaries returns Thursday, October 11, at 8/7c only on the CW.