Tina Rowden/The CWAnother The Vampire Diaries star is stepping behind the camera tonight!
Ian Somerhalder is set to make his directorial debut with tonight's episode, "The Downward Spiral," just like his costar Paul Wesley and showrunner Julie Plec have done before him. But when E! News spoke with Somerhalder about what the most challenging part of directing an episode of TVD was, he gave a surprising answer: "Nothing."
"I am going to sound like such a prick right now, but actually nothing was challenging," Somerhalder tells E! News. "It wasn't challenging because—and that's the operative word, 'because'—I've been on this show for so long, I know it through and through. It's my baby, it's my heart and love. I've been living on this thing for six years of my life. Because I know the story very well, I know the actors very well and I know the crew very well, there weren't many steps that I didn't know. I took a lot of guidance from what I've learned from Peter Roth and Mark Pedowitz and [executive producers] Julie and Caroline [Dries] and our on-the-ground crew in Atlanta."
Somerhalder can't wait to share the final product of all his hard work with the fans.
"It is really exciting. It's a really cool thing to be able to do," he says. "I'm so thankful for the studio and the network and all of our producers and everyone who made this happen."
It also helps that Somerhalder got to direct an episode that was so juicy with plot, as viewers will finally get to see what no-humanity-Caroline (Candice Accola) looks like.
"When people break up, they do some pretty gnarly stuff," Somerhalder says. "When you lose your mother and the man you love at the same time, there's no telling what you'd do, especially if you have super speed and super human strength and the ability to senselessly murder people. S--t gets a little gnarly. Watching her grab the reins and actually make that leap and that transition is pretty incredible."
And expect Caroline's new outlook on life to affect the people around her "a great deal to say the least," Somerhalder teases.
Caroline's not the only one going through a tough time. Bonnie (Kat Graham) recently returned to the real world after spending a long time on her own and it's safe to say she's gone through some changes.
"Bonnie's going through a huge transformation after coming back from this prison world," Somerhalder says. "This whole episode is about shutting down. Caroline and Bonnie are shutting down in different ways and the question is, ‘Is it better to not feel at all or to feel too much?'"
But wait, there's more! Let's not forget that Damon (Somerhalder) just found out that his mother didn't actually die of natural causes in the past, but is actually stuck in another prison world for reasons he doesn't know...yet.
"The two most important people in his life, Katherine [Nina Dobrev] and his mother, abandoned him. They left him," Somerhalder says. "Imagine what that does to someone. He's thinking about the irony of it. What are the chances of one man, over the span of 150 years, learning that both of the most important people in his life basically didn't love him. It's a really big deal. As an actor, that's really juicy to play with. It's intense and it crushes him. He can't imagine that this is really happening but it is, so how he deals with it, he's going to have to come to terms with it."
Because the source material was so much heavier than usual, acting in the episode was more difficult for Somerhalder than normal.
"It wasn't all that fun, because it wasn't an episode where Damon has control over everything and is funny and powerful like he normally is," Somerhalder says. "It was him, for lack of a better term, getting his ass handed to him and worrying about getting information about his mother and going to his best friend Bonnie and trying to curb Caroline."
The Vampire Diaries airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on the CW.