For I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries — a new book out Sep. 9 — author and Entertainment Weekly’s own executive TV editor Samantha Highfill somehow managed to find new intel after years of reporting on the hit CW show. That includes some factoids on the casting process for leads Stefan and Damon.
In an exclusive excerpt from the book, key members of the show’s team reveal that Stan (the future Marvel superstar behind the character of Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier) took a meeting for the role of Stefan, the brooding vampire hottie eventually portrayed by Wesley on The Vampire Diaries.
Find out more secrets from the Stefan and Damon casting process in EW’s excerpt below.
From I WAS FEELING EPIC: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries by Samantha Highfill, published by Plume, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Samantha Highfill
JULIE PLEC: Stefan was the hardest to find. It’s the kind of role that you can’t just cast the smoldering pretty boy because there’s such depth and layers of loss and loneliness living in that character. So you really need a true actor. But you also can’t just hang your hat on a great theater-trained actor who doesn’t also make people’s hearts go pitter-patter.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The book destroyed us because if you look at the description in the book, that person doesn’t exist.
JULIE PLEC: [Stefan’s] a good man, a good soul, but with a layer of danger because he’s a vampire who struggles with bloodlust and struggles with his addiction to this woman and with his fury with his brother.
GREG ORSON: There was a meeting with a star for Stefan.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: It was Sebastian Stan. He came over to meet, so we got to spend some time chatting with him. It was very cool. We were totally interested in him, and he was discussed at the studio the first time we tested Stefan, but we couldn’t do it because he was tied to another show when this happened, so it didn’t work out. He was tied to Kings.
JULIE PLEC: We also met Steven Strait for Stefan because he’d just been in that movie with all the hot boys, The Covenant. But he passed.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: For a while, their dream cast would’ve been Steven Strait [for Stefan] and Sebastian Stan [for Damon], because Sebastian also read for Damon. That was Stefan and Damon for a while. But Sebastian was on Kings, so that wasn’t going to work out.
PAUL WESLEY: Then I got a call that they were having a bit of a hard time and had done all these tests, and they thought they found the guys and they didn’t.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: Greg and I both felt very passionate about Paul Wesley, and I wouldn’t let it go. They were sick of me talking about Paul Wesley, bringing in Paul Wesley.
GREG ORSON: Lesli was relentless.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: At the same time, we’re still doing our due diligence and reading lots more boys for this role and finding great options. Nathaniel Buzolic was the one that was the closest. He was so charming and lovely. We read a lot of guys for that, but it was really between him and Paul.
JULIE PLEC: We pushed production at least once, and we were in danger of being less than a week away from shooting and having no male lead and ultimately — and quite famously — we were sort of pressured into casting Paul Wesley against our desires, which of course means everybody knew way better than us and that we almost missed out on the most perfect piece of casting.
PAUL WESLEY: Lesli was like, “Just see him one more time!” And they were like, “Okay, we’ll see Paul Wesley again, ugh, whatever. We’re over this kid.” [Laughs]
JULIE PLEC: There just aren’t that many actors who can live in both worlds, the heartthrob world and the serious-actor world, and Paul had never been a heartthrob and neither Kevin nor I saw him as a heartthrob, which I think was sort of the problem. There was so much going on in Stefan that a lot of the actors we were reading just couldn’t act him. There was no denial that Paul could act the part, we just didn’t see him lighting up the screen, but we were just dead wrong.
GREG ORSON: He was the hardest role to cast. We sort of wanted to save Paul for Stefan because we knew Ian [Somerhalder] was our Damon.
Casting Wesley as Stefan wouldn’t officially fall into place until they’d found their Damon, which was about as challenging as defeating Klaus Mikaelson. Casting directors reveal they saw around four hundred actors for the part of Stefan’s diabolical older brother.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: Prior to us reading Ian, Matt Czuchry read for Damon.
JULIE PLEC: He had just done a movie called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell with my friends who produced it and I was like, “This guy’s fucking great, I love this guy!”
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: He was someone we wanted, but when we read him, unfortunately he had already tested for The Good Wife and they were holding him. During pilot season you can’t wait, you have to keep going, but they really wanted him for Damon, everybody was in love with him. He would’ve been a great Damon. But The Good Wife picked up his option, and we were in the process of making a test deal with him and we couldn’t do it. He was at our work session when we found out.
JULIE PLEC: Jesse Bradford read for Damon. I don’t know if he tested for Damon, but we read him a couple times. It’s wild.
IAN SOMERHALDER (DAMON SALVATORE): I had come off of Lost, and I saw the whole network dog-and-pony show and I said, “I want to be edgier, have fun, and do really cool weird shit.” And I tried, and I fell on my face a few times. I fell off the map for sure. It was a very rebuilding, humbling time, but the one thing I said I wasn’t going to do again was some network show. So they sent me this pilot and I was like, “This is Twilight on TV, I have no interest in doing this.” I didn’t read it.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: For Ian Somerhalder, we loved him in The Rules of Attraction and Lost and Pulse, so he was a known thing, but he didn’t come in until later. We’d actually already tested Damon at studio and network with others prior to him reading. And then he finally came in.
IAN SOMERHALDER: Cut to: I’m in Vegas with my family, I read it and I’m like, “Holy shit, this is an amazing piece of material, what the hell am I thinking?” I called and they said, “They’ll see you tomorrow morning at eleven a.m.” I’m sitting there thinking, “Oh my God, I’m in Vegas.” So I taped the [script] sides together from the business center at the hotel, put them on the dashboard of my car, and, starting at like five in the morning, drove through the desert with the light on in my car because there was no [day]light yet, and as the sun came up over the Mojave, that’s where I started figuring out Damon.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: When he came in to read for us it was a little rough, but it was so clearly going to be him. We all felt it in the room, even though he was a little raw, but he was so charming and ultimately so Damon in the way he carries himself. And look at him. [Laughs] He was just beautiful on every level.
GREG ORSON: Lesli and I both take notes after each session, and one of the notes that we write all the time is “it’s him” or “it’s her” and there was no question when Ian came in, both of our notes were, “It’s him.”
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: For us, it was done. And honestly for Kevin and Julie and [director] Marcos [Siega] it was done. We all saw it. Then he had a killer studio [test]. It was a slam dunk. And then I don’t know what happened, but the network test just wasn’t good. It was so hard to watch, and this is the first time that the network execs are seeing it, so they’re not seeing any of the magic that we saw prior to.
GREG ORSON: The room is very intimidating. It’s a theater setup with lights, so Ian walked into it and just was overcome with that I think. He just lost it.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: He came in and you could see Damon, but his audition didn’t say Damon. I think he was nervous and his headspace was somewhere else, and he just didn’t really do a good job, but I had watched the first season of Lost and I knew him from Pulse, a movie I had done some work on back in the day, so I kind of knew his ability a little bit.
IAN SOMERHALDER: When you want something that badly, the stakes are very high. I did really well in my studio test, which was fun. And then I bombed my first network test. The first take I did was awful. [Laughs]
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: He just wasn’t giving it. The network wanted somebody else. It was split. Some people wanted him, and some people didn’t. The president of the network, Dawn Ostroff, looked at me and said, “Go talk to him. I understand why you like him, but he’s not doing it.” So I took him out in the hallway and I was like, “Dude, you’re blowing it.”
IAN SOMERHALDER: The door closes and he goes, “Well, that sucked.” I said, “I know! I don’t know what’s going on!” He’s like, “Just do what you did in the studio test, have fun, be in control, you’re Damon, this is your role. You gotta do this.”
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JENNIFER BRESLOW: I was with Kevin when we gave him that pep talk. I think Kevin pulled him out once and tried, and then Kevin and Julie did one round, and then he came back in and did it again. I have such a specific memory of him pushing his sleeves up. It was so distracting, and his nerves were getting in the way. And I remember Kevin coming up to me and being like, “Okay, go. I want you to go talk to him and see if you can bring him down.” I remember looking at him and saying, “Don’t get in your head about it. Literally stop acting and just be yourself.” And he went back in, and he still did not nail it.
LORI OPENDEN: He wanted the part so badly, and he tested three times, which is very unusual. But our casting department and I felt so strongly that he was the right guy.
JULIE PLEC: The network wanted Travis Van Winkle. Ian was always our Damon, but he famously flamed out in his audition, so there was a lot of talk of him not being Damon. He had a lot of fans on the inside at the network rooting for him and fighting for him to get a second chance.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: I just would not go down that road. I said, “Will you please take a breath, think this through, and just go in there and own it? This is your part, it really is.”
IAN SOMERHALDER: This guy they were testing had been out drinking all night, he was super cocky and trying to psych me out. I looked at him and was like, “There’s no way you’re getting this, brother, it’s just not happening.”
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: And Ian came back in and he blew it. They said, “I’m sorry, we need to see a little bit more before we can say yes to him,” and it was the only time in my career where I said, “If he doesn’t get the part, I’m going to have to leave the show.”
GREG ORSON: [Ian] had to step out of the room, and that’s where we had a discussion and Kevin just would not let it go. Ian really understood Kevin’s dialogue. Kevin’s writing is sharp and it’s full of depth and it’s fun and it’s quick.
LESLI GELLES-RAYMOND: Ian just embodied that, and we all saw it. We just had to get the network to see it.
JENNIFER BRESLOW: I walked into Dawn’s office very boldly. It was the first time I’ve ever done this. I walked into her office and I said, “Ian is our Damon, and I want you to consider trusting me on that decision.” I said, “I’ve read the books, I need you to put your faith in me. This is what you pay me to do. I promise you that it was just nerves in the room. I will have him deliver on the day.” And she looked at me and she said, “It’s your neck, kid.”
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: I was like, “I know the other guy gave a better audition, but this role is Ian, and I can write for him in a way in which I cannot write for this other guy. Please trust me on this. Because if you can’t see it, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to continue on with the show.” Julie stood with me, and Peter Roth, the president at Warner Bros. Television, said, “Let’s go with Kevin.”
IAN SOMERHALDER: I got a call from my management saying, “So you wanna be a vampire?” And the rest is history.
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