R. J. here, hanging out at the Young Hollywood Studio with Ian Somerhalder. Hello. Now, Vampire Diaries has some pretty rabid fans. Are they trying to bite you?

No, they're not biting me. They want me to bite them though.

So Halloween's coming up. What what have we got going on for Halloween? You figured out what you're going to be?

We're going down to New Orleans. Um have you ever been to New Orleans on Halloween? It is the coolest place on Earth.

Really?

For that night. Yeah, I mean it's bizarre. New Orleans is going to be a whole parade and a million people in the streets. It's pretty cool.

Halloween Gra, maybe we can call it. I like that, Halloween Gra. And what do you think the fascination is now with vampires? Because it's everywhere, you know, a few years back you wouldn't see much. It would pop up and now like that's the hot thing right now.

I think it's Everyone's just really bored.

Yeah?

No. I think it's just um just a good basis for storytelling. And they're hot. Remember when vampires were were the sort of social outcasts, sort of physical anomalies, you know. That's all gone. But also too is that it you can modernize it. It's it's a genre that actually changes, you know. You see this vampire sending a text on their iPhone.

Right.

You know. Like Christopher Lee Can you imagine Christopher Lee sending a text on his iPhone or William Dafoe in Shadow of a Vampire. No, no, no, no.

And I want to hear when when you got the role because I heard this story that like you were, I mean a lot of people in this story, you were in Vegas and you almost missed the audition. I was in Vegas. But what's the real story? What really happened?

Well, no idea. The story was um I I realized that I had screwed up and not met Kevin Williamson on the show and and call my agent. You know, my agent of 10 years. It's actually more than that, 12 years. Because I'm a big brother. He tells me what's on his mind. I hear it. And he's yeah, yeah, you're an idiot. I mean it was 9:00 at night. Funny. And I and I figured it out and I said, you know what? This is this opportunity's probably gone, gone, gone. Let me just see. Let me just see. He called me back 5 minutes later, he goes, yeah, you can get in there but you have to be you have to be in L. A. tomorrow by 11:00 in the morning. And there's eight or 10 pages that you have to work on. I got up at 5:00 5:00 in the morning and taped all the pages together. And uh, drove across the desert. Trying to work on this character and sort of bring as much life into it. In the 5 hours or whatever it actually took me to get here with traffic and everything.

Right.

And uh, and got to the meeting at exactly on time. Like a minute before and a matter of hours later got the offer. But that's not an offer. That's an offer to to test. Then you have to go, you know, there's a whole the whole process. People think it's so easy. You just walk in, you get the part and there you are. Getting a television show is it it's basically this was seven or 10 days of hell for me.

Right.

I got through the studio part. Um and I remember looking this guy Peter Roth who's the head of the studio. He's one of the coolest dudes in the world. He's always been so supportive of me. He looked at me in the He looked at me after I did my studio audition and he It was like, you nailed it. That was good. I know what Mason Lockwood? Werewolf thing aside, the guy's a surfer. He's got to be using him. He has to be. Cut to going into the network situation. Whether you have too much coffee, too much B12, whatever.

Right.

Dead. Killed it. In a bad way.

Oh, in a bad way?

Yeah. Where Kevin Williamson walked out the first take and he goes, Yeah, that wasn't so good, was it?

You actually said that to you?

Yeah. And I went, yes, that's exactly it. And and I just, you know, we ended up making it happen.

Right.

But um, it sucks.

Isn't that crazy how that one moment like could change your life forever? One 30 second block of time. The life of an actor, right? Could uh make or break it. It's pretty bizarre. Yeah, that that's intense. So you just have to deliver. And you delivered, which is good. Not the first time.