On the CW's breakout hit The Vampire
Diaries, Ian
Somerhalder plays a nearly 170-year-old man who — perhaps
unwittingly — became a vampire as a teen. Though the actor's luck has
been indisputably better than that of his character, Damon Salvatore,
both have had the same response to the twists in their lives: outright
glee.
For Damon, that giddiness manifests itself in the smirky, wanton
torment of the people who surround him. In Somerhalder, fortunately, it
takes a more gracious form.
"Right now, where I am, doing what I'm doing, it's exactly where I
want to be," he says.
See
photos of Ian Somerhalder's career
As Vampire Diaries wraps up its first season (Thursday at
9/8c), look to learn even more about Damon's tortured past, as he teams
up with vampire hunter Alaric to prevent a massacre at Mystic Falls'
annual Founders Day celebration. He won't be entirely successful, and
the subsequent tragedy will change Damon in the second season.
From Somerhalder's start in modeling to nabbing the lead role in a Bret
Easton Ellis film adaptation to a TV hit, he's always managed to
convey joy and pain at once.
In L.J.
Smith's young-adult horror novels, on which the series is based,
Damon is complicated and misunderstood. When he acts out, it's only
because he's hurting inside. Somerhalder's version of Damon seems to be
having more fun than his literary counterpart. He pounces on his quarry
with almost sadistic delight.
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The real-life fun started early for the Louisiana native, who started
modeling at age 10. After a brief sabbatical, he got an agent at 16
and, within a week, he says, shot a 12-page spread for L'Uomo Vogue
with fashion photographer Steven Meisel. He's grateful for this early
success, which gave him the opportunity to travel between New York and
Europe. "The best education is seeing the world, understanding how other
cultures work," he says. "It's a blessing and a curse [living in the
U.S.]. We're cursed in the sense that kids don't leave, a lot of them
don't get a sense of the world around them."
Somerhalder began taking acting classes in New York in 1998 as part
of a two-year program. Entourage's
Adrian
Grenier was a classmate. The then-20-year-old slogged through
hundreds of auditions during just the first year of the program, without
much success.
But his modeling background worked in his favor. In the spring of
1999, he went to Los Angeles for a shoot for Guess? when he caught the
eye of writer-director Steve Antin,
who wanted him for the cast of Young
Americans, a Dawson's
Creek spin-off the WB was developing about a Connecticut boys'
school. (Kevin
Williamson, the creator of Dawson's Creek, is the executive
producer of Vampire Diaries.)
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The show lasted eight episodes, but it was crucial to Somerhalder's
later progress. "Even at that point, I knew it was for a reason," he
says, pointing to the subsequent success of his co-stars Kate
Bosworth, Michelle
Monaghan and Katherine
Moennig. "It moved me to L.A. and launched my career."
Next came movies, and Somerhalder started big, with one of the three
lead roles in The Rules of
Attraction (2002). Roger Avary's
adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel featured a slew of young stars,
including James
Van der Beek, Shannyn
Sossamon, Jessica
Biel, Fred Savage
and Bosworth.
"I read the first three pages of the script [which details a clever, Rashomon-like
sequence the audience sees three times from different perspectives] and
I called my agent and I said, 'I don't care what it takes, what I need
to do, I'm getting this film. I promise you,'" he recalls. "'I know I'm
completely unknown, and [the studio is] going to want a name actor, but
no f---ing way. I'm getting this role.'"
Vampire
Diaries' Ian Somerhalder on Elena vs. Katherine
Somerhalder plays Paul Denton, who is in an unusual, unrequited love
triangle with Sossamon and Van Der Beek's characters. Avary's shiny
young cast takes on some not-so-shiny moments in Ellis' gimlet-eyed,
drug- and sex-soaked look at college life. "James was coming off huge
amounts of success, he was flying back and forth every few days to do Dawson's
Creek. The rest of us were young and we were crazy, man. There was
a phenomenal amount of partying and insanity that ensued on that set.
And if you watch the movie, that's exactly how it should be. It was such
a rare moment in time."
It only got better for Somerhalder when he was cast as one of the
original castaways on ABC's Lost, but his
tenure was short-lived. His character, Boone Carlyle, was the show's
first major casualty. The news that Boone would be killed was definitely
a shock to the actor, but he handled it with his characteristic
optimism.
"You go the whole gamut of 'What did I do wrong? What didn't I do
right?' It's something that's impossible not to take personally, but you
can't," he says. "Actors always think it's about them, but it's really
not. It's about the story."
Somerhalder recently returned to the Hawaii set of Lost to
film a few cameos for the show's final season. He reports that Boone
will get a proper ending in the series finale, an experience to which he
assigns several adjectives, including cool, simple, emotional and
beautiful. "Wow, man, it was gratifying," he says. "Watching people
who've become like my family, seeing what it would be like for Boone to
be this certain way." Not surprisingly, he doesn't elaborate what "this
certain way" might be.
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After Lost, Somerhalder had a small part in HBO's Tell Me You Love
Me, an intriguing, experimental series about the sex lives of
several couples. He plays Nick, the "rebound guy" for a woman who
recently broke off her engagement. The part required total nudity by all
the main characters, something the actor says he wasn't entirely
comfortable with at first. "The first time you go to [re-record
dialogue] and you walk into a soundstage and there's a 20-by-20-foot
screen in front of you, and your balls are like the size of taxicab
tires, and you're sitting there looking up and you go: 'Oh my goodness,
really?'
"At the end of the eight-hour shooting day, being naked all day, it
wasn't the fact that it was the nudity. I wouldn't say it was
gratuitous. I just thought that there's got to be another way to tell
this story. And then I thought to myself, 'No, you moron, that is
the show.'"
Network television, for now, is allowing Somerhalder to remain fully
clothed. The actor explains that the only nakedness in his current
acting style is emotional, as he taps into his own experiences to create
a realistic life for the character. As Damon changes, so does
Somerhalder's method in playing him. "As far as the shift, the only
thing that's really changing is what I'm taking out of my life," he
says. "Sometimes you have a lot of big what-ifs. You don't have the
experience; crazy, supernatural things don't happen to us."
Some might argue that Somerhalder's career has included its own
degree of magic, and of that, he's appreciative. "I never thought I'd be
on a vampire television show," he says. "We're the luckiest kids in
Hollywood right now."
