Bob Mahoney/The CWWarning: Do not read the following article if you have yet to watch tonight's episode of The Vampire Diaries. Seriously, if you choose to read on and then complain about spoilers in the comments, you are the opposite of Batman.
Tonight, we were Miley Cyrus and The Vampire Diaries was that darned wrecking ball.
The CW hit surprised its audience yet again with a major reveal about Katherine (Nina Dobrev): Nadia (Olga Fonda), the mysterious Traveller who has been hunting her down all season, is the daughter she was forced to give up when she was a human in Bulgaria back in 1490. Talk about the mother of all TVD reveals!
We chatted with Olga Fonda about the huge reveal and what's next for the reunited mother and daughter on the CW hit series. Plus, she reveals when she learned Nadia's backstory and how she and Nina Dobrev prepared for tonight's emotional scenes...
When you first auditioned for the show, did you know that Nadia would be revealed as Katherine's daughter or did they keep you in the dark?
They kept me in the dark. The sides that I auditioned for, they were non-existent. So when I came here, I had a slightly idea of what things they were looking for, but nothing to what actually she'd turn out to be.
So did the casting call kind of say a slight resemblance to Nina Dobrev would be preferable?
[Laughs.] No, not really, no. We didn't have that conversation. I had no idea of any slight resemblance to Nina whatsoever, but when I came here, I've heard a few times, because the first two weeks, so maybe when we were kind of hanging out, having coffee outside, I had a few people coming back from behind me and saying "Nina?" And I turn around and I'm like, "No, it's not me." But we have the same kind of hairstyle, and the same hair color, and the same kind of skin color, but I didn't even think that way that we had some sort of resemblance until people started talking about it.
So when did they loop you in?
I actually didn't find out until I received the script from production. The producers and writers are very careful about story lines, and for a good reason! On set, I had some speculation, but it wasn't confirmed until I read the script for that episode.
The scenes between Nadia and Katherine, both when they were testing each other and when they finally came clean, were really great. Did you and Nina prepare a lot before shooting the big reveal?
Nina and I ran lines, but didn't talk about the relationship together before we filmed that scene. We both worked on our characters independently, but because of that, it made the scene more genuine. That moment, was the first time we were experiencing each other's emotions and hearing each other's lines, which plays out perfectly for the scene. Nadia and Katherine don't have a relationship beforehand, so preparing it in that way really helped once we got to set.
Can you talk a little bit about the emotions of that reveal scene, especially when Katherine tells Nadia she went back to Bulgaria to find her?
It was an important moment for both characters, but in Nadia's case it was something that she was looking for for 500 years! Turning herself into a vampire to find her mother just shows us how important Katherine is to her. I can only imagine what it must be like to grow up without your biological parents. You have so many questions of where you came from, who you are, your past, who your mother is, and why you were abandoned. It is obvious that Nadia felt that there was a piece of her missing and she wanted to fulfill that void by getting answers. In the scene before the big reveal, Nadia was testing Katherine to see if Katherine is the woman everyone says she is, or the mother that she has imagined. In that conversation, Katherine does not turn out to be what Nadia expected, but when she finally opens up and lets her guard down, Nadia begins to have hope.
What's your working relationship with Nina like?
Nina is great to work with. I respect her so much as an actress and there was so much emotion going into that scene that we really had to rely on each other's energy. After we finished filming that scene, we were both so tied up into the moment that we hugged each other. The writers are great at developing these characters and you can get really lost in the moment.
Now that Nadia has finally revealed who she really is, where does their relationship go from here? Does Katherine try to make it up to Nadia or are they butting heads?
I can't say much, but as you can imagine, it's just like the saying; "Like mother, like daughter." They definitely are cut from the same cloth, so that may cause some drama. I can tell you that they do have a lot of catching up to do!
We really like how Nadia is able to manipulate people, just like Katherine.
Well, the apple doesn't fall far away from a tree. Is that the American sentence? [Laughs.] I think they've always been a pretty good match. Nadia has that ability of where she's a very strong-willed character and she's smart; I'm sure she had a training of five hundred years of how to get things the way she wants it and find a way of manipulating emotions or manipulating conversations or physical manipulation. She gets what she wants.
Now that she's found Katherine, what do you think Nadia's ultimate goal is?
At this point, her ultimate goal is to find her mother, so I would assume that from now forward – I'm not sure where the writers are going to take it, but I think she would want to know who her mother is and her ultimate goal to me would be find out all the answers and questions to what she was missing. Obviously having the agenda of meeting her mother was so strong and so important to her that she was missing a piece of her that had to be fulfilled, and it became her entire life purpose, and now that she got that life purpose, I'm sure that she has a lot of questions to fulfill the answers to.
The Vampire Diaries airs Thursday at 8 p.m. on the CW.