Love the pics especially Nina’s!
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TV Guide has an interview with Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec.

Check it all out here.

Here is an excerpt:

SPOILERS

TV Guide Magazine: Your first season included so many great theme episodes — like the bloody Halloween party and the Miss Mystic Falls pageant. Can we expect more of these events?

Williamson: The CW is very event-oriented, but I was initially very resistant of it. Last season was all built around Founder’s Day. And this year we’re considering three events as our big lead-up to the season finale.
Plec: We do have a carnival in our second episode, and in the third episode, Elena and Damon and Alaric travel together to Duke University, where Isobel, Alaric’s wife and Elena’s birth mother, met and lived together. She studied the paranormal and was an expert in the anthropology department which is how she disguised her vampire research. She had become obsessed with Mystic Falls and dug deep into the history of the town. So on their trip, they dig into her dusty files to see what she may have known that they don’t know.

From the EW:
SPOILERS:
Question: Vampire Diaries scoop, pretty please with a Smurf on top? —Randi
Ausiello: New-blood alert! The show is casting the potentially recurring role of Vanessa, a very attractive, smart, young grad student who assists Damon and Alaric with their werewolf research at Alaric’s alma mater, Duke University.

Steven R. McQueen

Ian Somerhalder

Paul Wesley

Nina Dobrev

Matt Davis

Kevin Williamson

Source

Julie Plec

Kevin Williamson

Paul Wesley

See Nina Dobrev’s Interview here.
See Matt Davis’s Interview here.