It may or may not have been fueled by Ian Somerhalder and Nikki Reed, but Nina Dobrev’s decision to quit The Vampire Diaries was hers alone.
So says the executive producer and showrunner of TVD, Julie Plec, who reveals that she tried to convince Nina to stay on beyond this season.
Didn’t happen.
"She was just looking forward to moving on with no hard feelings and no drama," says Plec of Dobrev leaving The Vampire Diaries this spring.
"This is taking the personal out of it completely, from a storytelling point of view it’s a great challenge. As writers we’re finding it very rejuvenating."
"Just on a strictly creative exercise level," of course.
“Nina said earlier this year that she wanted to be done and we spent a little bit of time trying to talk her out of it," Plec adds, though it was fruitless.
"[We’d say,] ‘Oh, look at all these great plans of how you can stay!’ And she finally was like, ‘No, I signed up for six years. I’ve done my six years."
"I’m ready to move on and spread my wings.’”
Did Nina quit because of Nikki Reed, the Twilight actress who got engaged, then married to Nina’s former on-and-off screen love, Ian Somerhalder?
We may never know. (Read: Probably. There’s no way that personal awkwardness didn’t play some role, maybe even a big role … right?!)
As for the fact that we learned of her departure a month in advance, Julie said she and Nina mututally decided to break the news on Instagram.
The creator was inspired by The Good Wife, which killed off Josh Charles’ character Will last spring in a plot twist that NO ONE saw coming.
"A lot of people had a hard time with that," she says.
"It was a beautiful shock, but there’s grief attached … and I’m looking at Vampire Diaries, which is now six years deep, and it’s the main character."
"A lot of our audience [are] teenagers and there is a profound attachment to this character and show. I started looking at it from a fan point of view."
"I was like ‘We need to tell them that it’s happening before it happens.’ You can’t just end the season and do what we’re going to do to this character."
"As a fan I would die. I would be devastated.”
Julie said that watching fans react to the death of Derek Shephard – with Patrick Dempsey fired from Grey’s Anatomy – has been eye-opening.
"It’s really funny because watching this whole Grey’s thing now happen after the fact," she adds, tellingly. "I’m like, ‘Mmmhmm, okay, interesting.’”
That’s one word for it. Regardless of Dobrev’s reasons for departing, we would say Julie and Nina played their cards just right in that sense.