Vampire Diaries‘ Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley look back at the TV series in an exclusive interview with E! News. Find out why Ian partially credits Twilight for the show’s success.
Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder Play “TVD” Game
While Ian Somerhalder was in The Vampire Diaries and Nikki Reed was in Twilight, there’s no bad blood.
In fact, the actor, 43—who is married to the actress, 34—recently expressed how he thinks the popularity of the film franchise helped the TV show. (The Vampire Diaries premiered shortly thereafter in 2009.)
“You have to remember, Twilight hit in 2008—I only know that because I live with Nikki—and so we rode on the coattails of that theatrical success,” he exclusively told E! News Aug. 23. “We were the TV version of that.”
Reed played Rosalie Hale in Twilight as well as in its follow-up films The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn parts one and two (2011, 2012), which also starred Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. As for Somerhalder, he portrayed Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries, which ran until 2017 and also featured Nina Dobrev and Paul Wesley.
And even Somerhalder can’t believe how much time has gone by. “To think that it was 13 years ago,” he told Wesley, who portrayed Damon’s brother Stefan Salvatore, “you were in your 20s and now you’re 40. I was 30 and now I’m in my mid-40s….What the f–k?”
Indeed, Wesley told E! News The Vampire Diaries “does feel like a lifetime ago.” So what are he and Somerhalder up to now? They’ve both appeared in other roles—with Somerhalder playing Luther Swann in V-Wars and Wesley portraying Tucker Reed in Tell Me a Story—and have founded the bourbon brand Brother’s Bond.
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“We first met getting fitted for our fangs and that was literally 13 years ago,” Somerhalder told E! News while at a cocktail party for their company and the Tennis Channel in New York, later adding, “We’re brothers because we were contractually bound to live this life. But we became brothers because these boys bonded on-screen over bourbon. Paul and I bonded off-screen over bourbon. So it’s really powerful man that this is what we ended up doing with our lives together.”
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