Bob Mahoney/The CWWith The Vampire Diaries heading into its eighth season, it would be natural for Ian Somerhalder to start reflecting on the past seven years of his life. But the man also known as Damon Salvatore hasn't begun to do that just yet.
It does, however, occasionally occur to him how amazing it is to have filmed 154 episodes of TVD. Yesterday morning, in fact, he took an extra second to pause before heading out for a bike ride with his wife. "I looked at myself in the mirror and I said god, man, 154 episodes, seven years of your life you've navigated through this, wow," he tells E! News in a chat about the CW show's next episode, which he directed (more on that next week). "It was just a quick moment of reflection."
But anything more than that is not in the cards.
"The reason I'm not reflecting going back is that I'm staring down the barrel of another season and I really want to make sure that we get to go back to the basics," he explains. "What made people fall in love with this story was its characters, not 40 of them, like eight of them, six of them—this core group of actors, of characters that really move you."
He hopes that season eight will focus on those core characters as the show winds down—whether that's at the end of next season or in the future.
"We don't know where that's going to go but leaving the audience with the fact that by that time they will have spent eight years of their life with these people, I want the audience to feel closer, more afraid, more in love, more in tune with these characters than they ever have been."
The Vampire Diaries returns Friday, April 1 at 8 p.m. on The CW.