Great interview up at DishMag with Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder. Paul talks about the audition process and how he landed the role of Stefan Salvatore.  Ian discusses the intense powers of a “vampire”.  They also have a contest going on where you can win some swag that includes Vampire Diaries bumper stickers. Follow this link and click the red banner at the top!

For Wesley, who plays the “Good” brother Stefan, landing the role wasn’t a walk in the park. “Oh my God, hardest I’ve ever worked for a part. I auditioned for the role of Damon three times, four times maybe. Constantly went back for Damon, back and forth, back and forth. They wouldn’t see me for Stefan, they thought I wasn’t right for it. Then they went older for Damon, they passed it to Ian, and they go ‘maybe this will work.’ They brought me in for Stefan and I read for it like four times.”

As for the competition, Wesley said “I then had to screen test against like, three guys from Australia, three guys from London, four guys from New York, five guys from LA. It was like American Idol. It was like ‘go home… go home…’ and ‘you stay… you stay…’” He credits his upbringing with helping him finally score the role, “I don’t know how I got it but I will have to say, I’ve been on my own since I was 16 years old and that’s a long time… I think if they went with the guy who just left his parents’ house I don’t know if he could pull off being 160 years old.”

Like Paul Wesley, Somerholder had to wrap his head around what it means to play a creature that is much more powerful and experienced than any human. “Try for just a second to imagine that as a vampire you have 160 years of experience, life experience, knowledge of humanity, of love, of death, of everything, of history. Then, on top of that, your senses… everything is heightened by 1000% , all the things you hear you have to learn to block out, your sense of needing to feed constantly, having hunger 1000 times more than human have. It’s a very intense proposition.”

Surprisingly, even though his show is riding a wave of vamp fiction, he hasn’t seen or read anything from the Twilight series. His influences go a little farther back. “You know, Lestat [from Interview with a Vampire] is one of the coolest dudes ever… I grew up on the lake in New Orleans, and I remember always thinking ‘there’s vampires over there, there’s vampires over there’”

Read the rest of the article.

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