Watch! Magazine: Paul Wesley about portrayal of Stefan Salvatore

среда, 07 апреля 2010

21:29

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A brooding vampire.

A freewheeling art thief.

A Conniving high school lothario.

Three troubled new hunks have taken up residence at The CW. Often they mean well—really, they do. But when they’re bad, their shows get good.

As we approach the spring finale season, when small-screen schemes are in full bloom, Watch! caught up with Paul Wesley of The Vampire Diaries, Melrose Place’s Shaun Sipos and 90210’s Matt Lanter to ask what it’s like to take a walk on the dark side under the hot Hollywood lights.

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– Paul Wesley –

The Vampire Diaries’ brooding hero

With his Eastern European good looks and independent spirit, Paul Wesley—né Pavo Wasilewski—seems a natural choice to play a magnetic and enigmatic vampire.

That is, perhaps, until you realize that this so-called creature of the night really hails from the land of all-night diners: New Jersey. “Not so mysterious now, huh?” jokes the 27-year-old actor, who plays heroic bloodsucker Stefan Salvatore on The CW’s hit series The Vampire Diaries.

First bitten by the acting bat while doing elementary school plays in his hometown of Marlboro, Wesley had by age 17 landed an agent and regular roles on Another World and then Guiding Light. “I would show up on set, this naive young kid, and would be so intimidated by everybody who had been doing the show for so long,” he remembers. Eventually skipping so many classes to report to work—and to recover from late nights spent discovering Manhattan—Wesley eked his way through a combination of public and private high schools. But of the three years he spent on the two soap operas, learning to memorize lines and get comfortable in front of the camera, he explains, “those were my study years.”

In 2001, shortly after his move to Los Angeles, Wesley landed the role of a young shape-shifter on CBS’ supernatural drama Wolf Lake. (Later, when he booked his gig as Stefan, Wesley says his manager couldn’t resist the joke when she called to deliver the news. “She said, ‘It looks like you’re going from werewolf to vampire,’ ” he recounts, laughing.) Soon after, the actor—barely out of his teens—was booking ever-bigger recurring roles on such hit shows as Everwood, American Dreams and, most recently, Lifetime’s Army Wives.

But oddly, among the jocks and cops and soldiers he has played, it is Stefan whom Wesley finds the most easily relatable. “Obviously it’s a stretch playing this crazy-fantasy vampire who is 150 years old,” he explains. “But yet he’s pretending to be a high school kid, and sometimes I feel that way when I go back to New Jersey. I was always a little detached from the whole high school scene. I felt a little socially removed.”

Growing up with Polish immigrant parents gave the actor even more of an understanding of the outsider’s perspective. “I remember thinking, ‘I wish we could just be American, and drink soda and watch baseball,’ ” he admits. “Of course, as you get older, you realize how cool it was to be different.”

Similarly, after roles in five failed pilots in the past few years, the actor says he also came to appreciate how nice it is to be steadily employed, on a hot new show with major buzz. Originally having read for the part of the other brother Salvatore, bad-boy vamp Damon, Wesley was brought back in as Stefan after an exhaustive search by the show’s producers. In L.J. Smith’s early ’90s Vampire Diaries book series, Stefan “has long dark hair and green eyes,” the actor explains. “I just have the green eyes,” he says, modestly.

But actually, Wesley has worked hard on landing the right look for Stefan, losing 15 pounds before the production of the show’s pilot— and even more since—to look like a noble vampire who subsists, unhealthily, solely on animal blood. And there’s plenty of time for mental preparation, too, on the Vampire set. Filmed on the outskirts of Atlanta (standing in for fictional small-town Mystic Falls, Va.), the show is far from the bustle of everyday life in Los Angeles. Out in the Georgia woods, he shuts off his cell phone and even shuns too much social interaction with the rest of the cast—“which is very difficult,” he adds, “because I really like everyone.”

It’s all to get in the right, brooding mood to channel Stefan, who, Wesley says enthusiastically, will continue to show “more layers, where he’ll be flawed, and make mistakes, and even experience the dark side a little bit.” All of which, the actor hopes, will give him something tasty to bite into for seasons to come.