Why Ian Somerhalder Asked To Leave The Vampire Diaries During Season 3

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"The Vampire Diaries" may have run for eight soapy, sexy seasons, but star Ian Somerhalder asked to leave the CW drama after just three, according to the behind-the-scenes book "I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of the Vampire Diaries." In an excerpt from the retrospective shared by Variety, Somerhalder and series co-creator and showrunner Julie Plec revealed that the star once met with Plec on the verge of tears, asking to be taken off the show. The reason? He thought Damon Salvatore was going soft.

"All I kept hearing were rumblings like, 'Ian's not happy; Ian doesn't like this season,' Plec recalled. "I have a sit-down with him when I finally get to Atlanta, and that's what he was upset about," she explained. "He just was so sad that Damon had to be the hero and that Stefan got to be the villain and that Klaus was the villain and everybody else was the villain, and it felt like an identity crisis." 

As fans no doubt vividly remember, "The Vampire Diaries" kicked off with the introduction of the immortal Salvatore brothers. Paul Wesley played brooding, romantic Stefan, while "Lost" alum Somerhalder played his playfully sadistic, often villainous brother Damon. Human teen Elena (Nina Dobrev) fell for Stefan but had undeniable chemistry with Damon, and in the third season, the show was finally ready to dig into their dynamic with a surprise role reversal.

Season 3 of "The Vampire Diaries" spent plenty of screen time incorporating the cast of the future spinoff "The Originals," but it also turned Stefan into a heartless Ripper, making Damon the show's unlikely but inevitable hero-to-be. It was a part Somerhalder apparently wasn't set on playing, at least not without some assurances that he'd eventually make his way back to the dark side. 

"I was so upset about the trajectory of Damon, so much so that at one point I was sitting across from Julie in her office in Atlanta almost in tears — actually, my eyes were quite misty — and asked out of the show," Somerhalder said in the book. "I was so angry about it. I wanted off."

Somerhalder went on to explain that he "saw the writing on the wall" and knew Damon was entering firm love interest territory. "I was like, 'They're going to turn me into a sappy character,'" he recalled, noting that he had "a lot of this heat because of this show" and was certain that if he left Damon behind, he could find another role in a "really cool and dark and edgy" project. After reminding him that he was in a six-year contract and was part of "the beating heart of the show," Plec assured Somerhalder that "The Vampire Diaries" hadn't lost its edge. She remembered telling him that it was Wesley's time to play with the dark side, and that "if one [brother is] going dark, the other has to go light."

In the end, Plec chalks Somerhalder's crisis of confidence up to cast-wide "series fatigue," which came in part because she had been spending more time writing for the family of vamps known as The Originals, who would debut their own show alongside "The Vampire Diaries" in 2013. Plec, who told TVLine she's still down for more "Vampire Diaries" stories earlier this year, eventually convinced the star that Damon wouldn't be a "one-trick pony," and he stayed on for the rest of the series run. 

"'This is a one-hundred-episode arc of a man, there are ups and there are downs, and there are times when he's the villain, there are times when he's the hero,'" Somerhalder remembers Plec telling him. "I had to trust in that process." Vicious, funny, and indelible, Damon Salvatore was a bad boy whose arc actually ended up taking closer to 200 episodes. We'll never know what the actor might have done if he left the show early, but Somerhalder got to play both the cold-blooded killer and the romantic antihero up until the very end.