Below is an excerpt: ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The kiss! Why was the time finally right for Damon and Elena to share a kiss that doesn’t involve her actually being Katherine or him dying?
JULIE PLEC: We’ve been building to it all season, and believe it or not, we actually thought that we would get there by the end of the ninth episode. And then when we got there [to the end of November’s midseason finale], it didn’t feel right. It felt like it wasn’t ready to happen yet. And so, even though god knows who’s gonna have tuned in tonight [Laughs], it finally felt right by the time we got to the end of tonight’s story. It felt like their relationship had evolved to the point where it wasn’t something that Elena would necessarily fight off, or push away, or reject, or even regret.
Insider.com: Last night’s episode saw Bonnie have a prophetic dream. Is that a new “power?”
Kat Graham: It’ll happen a little bit more of it in terms of trying to crack the code, which I think it so interesting because you see so much of the supernatural in the actual Mystic Falls world, but you don’t really see it in terms of a subconscious way. I thought it was really cool that they gave Bonnie that.
First things first. Without revealing too much about what goes down tonight, you should know that Bonnie and Stefan will have a lot to do with each other, and that’s something Kat is supremely happy about. “I was like, ‘Oh yay, I get to work with Paul [Wesley]!’ And then I started really thinking about how the character might feel…” And the repercussions on her relationship with Elena. Kat says she knows how the new Stefan-Bonnie development will affect her BFF-ery, but says coyly, “I’m not telling you!” You know what that probably means: Some shiznit’s gonna go down, people. At least, that’s our guess.
You know, it’s kind of an odd pairing — but then not so odd because Stefan kind of comes into a situation where he needs to turn to Bonnie for help. Bonnie is never really forced into anything, and sometimes I think it’s perceived that way because she’s such a sweet character. But this is a choice that Bonnie wants to make for the greater good of all, so she teams up with Stefan to accomplish that.
AX: Were you just hoping that character development was going to come along, did you know that was coming, or was that a big surprise?
WESLEY: No. I told [series producers] Julie [Plec] and Kevin [Williamson], “Look, I’d really love to do something,” and they said, “Great,” and they agreed. We don’t want anything to be redundant – we want to keep it fresh for the viewers.
“She meets Alaric and is fascinated by his ability to recover from medical incidents so quickly,” DeVitto said. “And that professional fascination turns into a romantic fascination.”
Wait… what happens to Alaric?!? Does DeVitto’s Dr. Fell meet him in the ER?
“Quite possibly,” the actress simply teased.
DeVitto said she has watched The Vampire Diaries off and on – she is married to star Paul Wesley, after all – but she wasn’t familiar with Alaric’s extraordinarily bad (read: deadly) history with women to date. Will Mary survive the relationship?
“For the sake of his character alone, I hope so,” she laughed. “Hopefully I don’t burn up in flames or try to kill him or anything. He deserves a better ending than he’s had.”
Here is an excerpt: Me: About how long does it take you to learn your script for each TVD episode?
Ian: “Lucky for me, learning the script doesn’t take long at all! I seem to have been blessed with some kind of photographic memory which comes in handy with my job. The part that really takes some time is breaking down the script so that I feel connected to Damon’s instincts, words, actions, and body language. I’ll spend hours on end working with my phenomenal acting coach, Ivana Chubbuck, going through the script and familiarizing myself with all the nuances woven into each of Damon’s relationships and all the subtext that floats underneath the lines.”
Julie Plec talks with EW about the moments that made her cry in the Vampire Diaries.
Check them all out here.
Below is one:
Anna is reunited with Pearl:
What’s funny is we had talked all along about Pearl perhaps being in that ghost episode, and then when we finally got down to the nitty-gritty of breaking it and needed to tell a story and service a lot of characters, we realized that there was no room to tell the story of Pearl coming back. And so we put it away, and decided not to have her in the episode. Something that organically came out of the process of writing and rewriting the script was this idea of not knowing where anybody is on the other side — and also not knowing if they’re even there at all. Anna says that to Jeremy, and then later, she says, I just don’t want to be alone anymore. I thought maybe I could find my mother, or maybe she’s moved on and I don’t know, because I don’t even know if there’s anywhere to move on to. As we were writing that scene — in other words, I don’t know if there’s heaven, I don’t know if there’s peace — I got struck with such a sense of pain and loss. It just hit me so hard emotionally that I started to sob while I was writing, which doesn’t happen very often. And I thought Ohmygod, this girl needs to find her mother. She just needs to find her mother. The two of them being reunited is the thing that will bring them peace. Even though Jeremy thinks, Oh, we’ll still see each other, no. I think that when she found her mom and those two disappeared, they went off to a very happy place and we’ll never see them again. It just felt so right. That’s the thing that defined her character from the beginning: she came to Mystic Falls to rescue her mother from the tomb, and every bad thing she ever did was in the name of being reunited with her mother. Then in the end of her journey, she got that. Anybody who didn’t watch the series until this season wouldn’t necessarily have any emotional connection to that moment, but I felt as a fan of our own show, who had connected to this girl and that relationship, it just had to happen. And then you put up a bunch of beautiful lanterns and a nice long lens and a great song, and it’s the saddest moment you’ve ever seen. [Laughs] I’ve seen that moment 15 times, and I still cry like a baby every time I see it.
One of the things that’s really come out this season thematically about our show is that being a supernatural creature, and specifically being an immortal, is in its own way the loneliest thing that you can be. And all of our characters, in their own way, are being driven by the desire to not be alone. That’s why our vampires love so deeply and recklessly. That’s why Elena, who’s orphaned and doesn’t have her parents anymore, is seeking and finding love in the most unconventional and untraditional ways. That’s why Rebekah and Klaus have stuck together through thick and thin even though he’s daggered her multiple times. There’s such a terrible fear of eternal solitude that the idea of saying, “Hey, but one day, even for an immortal, if you can die, then you too can find peace” is beautiful and depressing at the same time.
“Tyler and Caroline have a lot to overcome,” Julie says. “Because Tyler, on his own, has a lot to overcome. It’s pretty bleak, right now, and it’s only going to start to get bleaker before it gets better. ”
We’re going to focus on that “it gets better” part and tune out all the rest.
As far as Caroline is concerned, she doesn’t know that she can love someone who is controlled by someone she hates so vehemently. ” I loved what Tyler said to Caroline at the end of the last episode, which was ‘I can’t hate this, because it’s better. Because I don’t have to go through that pain. Because in a way, I feel free, so fight for me, and fight for us,’” Julie reminds us. “She doesn’t know if she can, so when we come back, he’s not happy with her. He’s not happy with anything.”
Wetpaint Entertainment: You’ve already filmed four episodes. Is Mary still alive and well in Mystic Falls?
Torrey DeVitto: Yes. I haven’t gotten an official end date yet. That seems to be the guest star and recurring role path, right? It’s like, you know you have a death date when you join the show.
What’s your character like?
She’s a doctor and she meets Alaric and is intrigued about how he has survived an accident and is medically intrigued by him. Through that they develop a connection and a relationship. And so she’s intrigued by him in more than one way.
The EW has an interview with Julie Plec. 
