Self-possessed, unassuming, laid-back–and dead tired after flying all night from the set of The Vampire Diaries in Atlanta, Ga.
This isn’t Nina Dobrev’s thing.
She’s 20 years old, she’s Canadian, her family moved to Toronto from Sofia, Bulgaria, when she was two, she attended Toronto’s Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts and she grew up on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Hollywood? Not her deal. Not really.
Do the red carpet thing, stare back at the paparazzi, smile when told and work hard to look like you mean it and–most of all–don’t affect an attitude. That too-hip-for-the-room, ironic detachment thing is sooo last year.
This is a celebutante who reads, people. Like, actual books. On her official MySpace page– “After numerous fake profiles, I decided to make a real account where I (along with some help)will be occasionally posting new pictures, blogs and filming updates”–she lists Paulo
Coelho’s The Alchemist, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces among her favourite books, along with the obvious–Twilight, the Harry Potter series–and not-so-obvious: Nova Scotia writer Ami McKay’s The Birth House.
Her heroes: Rachel Mc-Adams, Meryl Streep, child rights advocate (and fellow Canadian) Craig Kielburger.
Her favourite TV shows: Heroes, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Nip/Tuck, So You Think You Can Dance and, like, you know, Gossip Girl.
Movies? The Notebook, Knocked Up, Rent, Juno, Schindler’s List and–wait for it–Transformers.
Don’t try figuring her out, in other words. She’s complicated and normal, all in one.
In The Vampire Diaries, she plays Elena Gilbert, the proverbial good-girl-on-the-cusp-of-adulthood torn between two vampire brothers, one saintly, one more in tune with his dark side.
Thanks to the pop-cultural hysteria over Twilight, Elena Gilbert was the most sought-after role for young actresses since, well, Bella Swan in Twilight, right?
So the audition process was a fight-to-the-death, and Dobrev only managed to land the role by the skin of her teeth. Right?
“Actually,” Dobrev says matter-of-factly, “The Vampire Diaries was my first audition for a pilot. I came to L. A. for the first time in January. I read the script, and I loved it. Loved it. Thought it was really cool. I’d just gotten off (Degrassi), so obviously I was trained and ready. I knew the drill and everything that goes with it. The character was great. I guess something happened, and they liked what I was doing.
“And so, yeah, the fact that I’m Canadian, maybe that had something to do with it.”
The small-screen adaptation of The Vampire Diaries is different in several important respects from L. J. Smith’s series of young adult novels, none the least of which is Dobrev’s soul-stirring central character.
“Elena has a lot of myself in her, and I feel I’m a lot like my character. But she has to be innocent. She’s a very different character in the books. We really wanted somebody who had a vulnerability and had a reliability and looks for the good in everyone. Things aren’t good for her right now–she’s in a tough place; she lost her parents; her brother is on a downward spiral–but she’s still trying to find the good in everyone and fix things and be optimistic. She’s trying to cope.”
Dobrev is only too well aware of the inevitable looming comparisons between The Vampire Diaries and Twilight.
“I read the Twilight books way back–well, really, it wasn’t that long ago, but it felt like a long time ago. It was before the whole vampire Twilight craze, this Rob Pattinson obsession with everyone in the world, so I was unaffected, in that sense.
“And I liked them. I really liked them. I mean, there are similarities. There are vampires in both shows. But they’re different. And as the series goes on, it’s going to get more different.”
The Vampire Diaries pilot episode was filmed in Vancouver, but the series relocated to Atlanta — in part because of Georgia’s more competitive tax incentives –and nearby town Covington. Dobrev has embraced her new small-town home with open arms, despite the long hours spent flying.
“I literally shot until 7 p. m. last night, went straight to the airport, got here at 2 a. m., went to sleep, woke up maybe an hour and 45 minutes ago. At Comic-Con, we shot until six in the morning, arrived maybe at 10 a. m., went to Comic-Con, then went to the cast party thing, and were back shooting at 6 a. m. It’s crazy. But I’m having fun.”
Tonight? Fly back on the red-eye, learn lines on the plane, snatch an hour’s sleep–two hours tops. Vampire hours.
As for the vampire fad, Dobrev says, “It’s not really a fad. It’s timeless. Don’t you agree? Vampires are . . . they don’t die. They’re always around. They’re eternal. It just seems, right now, people are really responding.”
As for whether she would go for the good boy or the bad boy– “Nina or Elena?” she says, with a quick laugh.
Speaking for Nina, “I don’t think I can really make that decision,” Dobrev says. “I love these boys –Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder–but they’re like my brothers.”
As for Elena, Dobrev says, “Stefan (Wesley) is the man who tries to reach out to her soul. He cares about her, and he takes care of her. Whereas Damon (Somerhalder) has that bad-boy quality, and every girl likes a bad boy at the end of the day. So it’s a toss-up. They’re both great guys; I’ll tell you that, though.”
Dobrev may play a high schoolgirl torn between vampire brothers in The Vampire Diaries, but she has no desire to be immortal in her own life.
“I don’t know if I’d want it,” she says. “I live a pretty cool life, so I’m happy where I am.”
Source: Catergory Herald
