“It felt like they were saying that all the hard work I was putting into it didn’t matter to them and that I wasn’t an equal to my male counterparts, and so that was upsetting to me,” Dobrev said of her decision to leave after season 6.
Nina Dobrev is finally pulling back the curtain on why she really walked away from The Vampire Diaries after six seasons.
In Entertainment Weekly editor Samantha Highfill’s new book, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries, the 36-year-old actress revealed she, Candice King, and Kat Graham were the “lowest-paid series regulars” for the show’s first two seasons.
“It was a bit of a tricky situation because my contract only said to play Elena, but I was playing multiple characters, which doubled my work-load,” Dobrev explained, pointing to her doppelgänger role, Katherine Pierce. “I had to be on set for double the amount of time, I had to memorize double the amount of lines.”
She wanted compensation that reflected her workload — and equal pay to male leads Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder.
“It felt like they were saying that all the hard work I was putting into it didn’t matter to them and that I wasn’t an equal to my male counterparts, and so that was upsetting to me,” Dobrev said.
While Highfill noted “Dobrev was successful in getting more money,” she was still never paid the same as Wesley and Somerhalder. Show creator Julie Plec admitted the pay battle got ugly, claiming: “It basically got phoned down back to us writers that we were not allowed to write Katherine in at all ever. Which of course was not something that I felt was right or fair.”
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Dobrev eventually left after season 6 in 2015, though she returned for the 2017 series finale, but only after standing her ground.
“It was just really important to me that at the end of the show, as a woman, I wanted to make sure that I was compensated and that I was an equal to my male counterparts on the show,” she explained.
She even revealed that the studio initially offered her “five times less” than what she made during the series.
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“That’s the only reason why at one point I almost didn’t come back. I needed to be paid parity to the boys,” Dobrev recalled. “I had to put my foot down and say if it didn’t happen I wouldn’t be able to come back. And it wasn’t about the money — I didn’t give a s–t about the money at all — it was all principal.”
I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries is out now.
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