How long did you know this was coming?
We knew when we made the decision to make Elena a vampire that we needed to get her to the place of utter and complete loss and tragedy and darkness so that we could take her down the road of being a vampire without humanity. And so we knew that we were going to be sacrificing somebody we loved when we started the season, and very early on in the season, we made the decision about who that was going to be. Then we asked ourselves a lot of questions and debated but ultimately stuck to it.
Did you anticipate most of the fans writing off Jeremy’s death as a fake-out? Many of them were actually like Elena, now that I think about it — total denial.
That’s what we wanted to do, truthfully. We wanted to end the previous episode with Jeremy’s death, but I said as I was writing the script that [I knew] the ride I wanted the audience to be on in this episode. The instant that episode 14 was over, the very first thing somebody was going to say is, “No, wait! Was he wearing his ring?” Then somebody else was going to say, “Wait, the ring doesn’t work anymore.” Then somebody else was going to say, “But what if it does? You never know.” And we wanted to dramatize all those questions because on this show, death is not always final. And we do have this sort of reputation for turning a story on its head and surprising people. So we wanted to play those questions so that as Elena came to terms with reality and what had happened, so too, would the audience. Continue Reading at EW