Blood Brothers. Amy Rickman
TV: ‘Damon is a bastard and I love playing him. I’ve spent my entire career brooding, so it’s been great not to take myself too seriously. Damon’s good fun – I would love to hang out with him.’ It also helped that Damon was one of the best characters for Kevin Williamson to pen: ‘I love writing for Damon. It’s just about staying true to what Damon is, and Damon is a killer. He’s driven by this love for Katherine that he’s trying to get back, but at the core Damon is a killer. He’s dark, and if anybody thinks he’s going to suddenly soften up, they’re going to be waiting a long time. He’s a true predator and he needs to feed. Could the love of a woman possibly change him a little bit? Is there some humanity there? Maybe. Maybe, someday, but today is not that day. Don’t hold your breath for that.’
Really, for Ian the beauty of this role was that it had a future – The Vampire Diaries just wouldn’t be the same without him. And because he’s already dead, the chances of him getting killed off are that much slimmer!
Alaric Saltzman: I think Stefan is a good guy. But at the end of the day, he’s still a vampire. (1.18, ‘Under Control’)
Rewind a moment back to 2008 when vampires were the hottest Hollywood commodity: Twilight has smashed out of the box office and skyrocketed Robert Pattinson into demigod status, deigning us mere mortals with his tousled hair and golden eyes. True Blood, a much more adult, darker and sexy take on the vampire myth, smoulders on the small screen, courtesy of HBO. Everyone was desperate to cash in on the vampire trend and it seemed there really couldn’t possibly be any more room for vampires on our screens, small or large – or could there?
Even Ian admits to being at first incredibly sceptical despite being able to instantly tell how great a character Damon was. Indeed, he could totally see where the cynics were coming from. ‘No – I mean, look, it was snicker-able,’ Ian told Vampire Diaries’ Source. ‘If you weren’t a Twilight fan or you weren’t into the vampire thing or you’re oversaturated with Twilight, and you saw this show coming out on the CW, which is basically more vampires, like Twilight, but on television… if you’re going to snicker, that’s what you’re going to snicker at. And there’s an interesting thing that by virtue of this vampire oversaturation of the market, I think what people fail to realise is that within this vampire genre there’s an immense amount of storytelling capability. There are a lot of great stories that come out of this; that’s why it’s so popular. So, to answer your question, was I surprised that people were snickering? No.’
Paul Wesley (cast as Damon’s rival brother, Stefan Salvatore) had his doubts, too. ‘There was some trepidation of, “Hmm, this could kind of go in a really cheesy direction and it could be riding the coat-tails of something,”’ he remembers thinking when he first read the script.
Yet, believe it or not, no one was more sceptical than the creator of The Vampire Diaries himself, Kevin Williamson. ‘In the beginning I didn’t want to be involved with it, because I felt like sort of a Twilight rip-off, no matter what came first,’ he told The Torch Online.
For him, there was also the little matter of that other vampire show: ‘The second season of True Blood was all it took to make me not want to do vampires, because it was my favourite show and I wasn’t about to jump into the fray.’
Still, he couldn’t altogether dismiss The Vampire Diaries’ proposal (thank goodness!). Williamson was on the hunt for a show… and had been for a long time. Having wrapped a short-lived television drama called Hidden Palms in July 2007, he was certain of just two things: first, that he wanted to do something completely different, and second, that he was keen to collaborate with his long-term friend Julie Plec. They just needed the right idea to get behind.
Kevin Williamson has built a career around writing for a teen audience and has a string of successful television shows and movies to his credit. Yet as a writer and director, he didn’t have immediate success. Born on 14 March 1965 in New Bern, North Carolina, he spent years working on film sets – sometimes as an actor, sometimes as an assistant director – any odd job he could be hired to do in that kind of environment. Yet behind the scenes, he was unhappy and sensed his career was stalling. ‘I was in a hard place, working as an assistant to someone here in Hollywood – a desk job, sort of in the wasteland of life,’ he told the New York Times. ‘I decided: I’ve got to do something. I’m got to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.’
Indeed, his unhappiness stemmed from high-school days when an English teacher ripped apart a short story he had written for an assignment: ‘She didn’t like me for some reason, I couldn’t figure out why. When you’re 15 or 16 you never know why the teacher is being mean to you,’ he told the New York Times. That teacher went on to say some damning words that were to hang over him like a curse: ‘She ripped [my story] up and said to me that I had a voice that shouldn’t be heard.’
All that changed, though, when an idea sparked in his mind. It was 1994 and he was watching Turning Point – a TV series (also known in America as a newsmagazine) featuring hour-long programmes on a single ‘real-life’ topic, often of a sensational nature – like the O.J. Simpson trials or the Manson Family murders. This time, the episode was covering Danny Rolling, also known as ‘The Gainesville Ripper’: a serial killer who murdered five college students in Florida. Morbidly fascinated, Williamson wondered what might happen if a group of teenagers, all well versed in the classic horror movie clichés, were pursued by a serial killer. Would they be able to thwart him or would they fall into the same traps?
Kevin knew he had struck a gold mine with this idea; he worked his regular job and came back home at night to write feverishly until the script was done. He remembers the anguish of those days, never sure if he was about to make his mark: ‘I always wanted to direct – that’s my passion. I was an actor. That went nowhere. I tried directing theatre. Nope. I wrote this movie called Killing Mrs. Tingle. Sold it. It sat on the shelf. My unemployment dried up. I couldn’t get work. I had borrowed money from all my friends. So, I wrote Scary Movie [later retitled Scream]. Just banged all it out, as fast as I could.’
Scream was picked up by Dimension Films and directed by infamous horror director Wes Craven (also responsible for terrifying audiences with A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes, among others). It came out in December 1996 to massive audiences and much acclaim, was credited with rebooting the slasher-film industry and launched Williamson as king of the teen horror genre. He followed up this success with two more Scream movies and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), cementing his position. Meanwhile, the fascination with the Scream franchise still hasn’t died down and Scream IV came out on 15 April 2011.
The key to his success with Scream was the way he just understood teens. He spoke passionately about the respect he had for his young adult audience while writing the script: ‘You know, teenagers are so savvy and smart,’ he told Film Radar in 2002. ‘VCRs and the Blockbuster generation had surfaced. They know these films like the back of their hands. What if they used their knowledge of these films and found themselves in the same situation, what would happen? I sort of started with that kernel of an idea and just ran with it. That’s how it all came about.’
However, he wasn’t about to be pigeonholed as a horror specialist: Williamson already had another project up his sleeve. In 1995 Paul Stupin, a producer for the Fox Network, approached Kevin to see if he had a teen-oriented television series in him – they had just bought Beverly Hills 90210 (the original) and were looking for something similar. It turns out that Kevin did have something ready: a story about a group of high-schoolers growing up in a small town that pretty much mirrored his own upbringing. ‘Some Kind of Wonderful meets Pump Up the Volume, meets James at 15, meets My So-Called Life, meets Little House