Earlier this year The CW leveled a devastating blow by cancelling Legacies and effectively bringing an end to the thirteen-year chokehold that Julie Plec's Vampire Diaries franchise had on audiences. But from its ashes, a new vampire series has been born from the combined talents of Plec and Vampire Diaries actress Marguerite MacIntyre, who came together to adapt another beloved young adult book series for the screen. At San Diego Comic-Con, Collider's Perri Nemiroff chatted with Plec, MacIntyre, and the cast of Peacock's upcoming adaptation of Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy series.
Vampire Academy first arrived on bookshelves in 2007, joining Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, which was published two years earlier, and The Vampire Diaries books, which had been published nearly a decade earlier but were going through a resurgence as vampiric teen novels rose in popularity again.The new Peacock series centers around the dhampir Rose Hathaway (Sisi Stringer) and her moroi best friend Lissa Dragomir (Daniela Nieves) as they navigate the complex and dangerous world of intrigue. Shortly after tragedy strikes, Rose meets the source of her forbidden romance, Dimitri Belikov (Kieron Moore) and Lissa meets her paramour Christian Ozera (Andre Dae Kim).
During the interview, Nemiroff asked Plec about returning to work on another vampire series and how she approaches it as a genre of storytelling. The showrunner went on to explain that she doesn't approach vampire stories as a genre story, but rather she approaches them thematically and emotionally. She went on to say,
"Vampire Diaries was about trying to survive a deep grief. The Originals was about trying to recover and repair [from] the scars of abuse and [a] dysfunctional broken family. Legacies [is]about wanting to, if you're looked at as an outsider, how can you find the power within that and actually grow into your own hero? Vampire Academy is very much [about] what it means to bond together with those you love the most, and then make the change you want to see in the world."
MacIntyre followed up on that answer by discussing her own career path from actor to writer and spoke about the way vampire stories can be used to tell larger stories, separate from the genre built around them. "I love vampires. Who doesn't love a vampire? But it gives us the ability to tell a story and metaphor that sometimes is not as easy to tell in a certain kind of just raw truth." she went on to say, "You can find deeper places, and people can reach to that story and find places in themselves, that are sometimes harder to reach. It's not like reading a newspaper and talking about some issues. It's actually being able to experience them emotionally through these beautiful characters."
Plec went on to discuss how those metaphors and allegories come into play with Vampire Academy. "The way we describe the show to people is that it is both ancient and modern. At the same time, you can have an ancient castle and a burger stand down the street. That really applies to the way that we've approached the vampire lore itself, which of course, we pulled entirely from the books, so we don't get the credit for it. But what Richelle Mead did in the book series, was created this really fascinating species of vampire called Moroi, which is essentially what we call sort of the polite vampire, the clean, the civilized, the white tablecloth vampire, the dainty, elegant, and, unfortunately, maybe a little bit too safe, a little bit too posh, a little bit too stuck in their ways."
She went on to say, "We also get the Strigoi, who are this fierce, primal, almost zombie-esque, ferocious and terrifying vampires, who do feed on blood and will kill you and will live forever, because they are difficult to kill. So we get to kind of have a cake and eat it too. We get to pay lip service to all the great terrifying elements of the genre, but also have this kind of austere, interesting, sophisticated version. Of course, it all becomes [an] allegory for class."
MacIntyre echoed the sentiment, discussing the dynamic between Rose and Lissa at the start of the series, "I feel like now's the perfect time to tell them because it's a class system that is fraying at the edges and should because it's incredibly unfair. So these two young women are waking up to that fact and saying, "Wait a minute. We didn't sign on to this. Is this fair? What do we do about it?" [It] challenges their friendships because they're basically on the opposite sides of the tracks, for lack of a better term."
Before the interview wrapped up, MacIntyre also pointed out that the new live-action series will differ from the books in certain ways, especially with updating the material. She noted that unlike in the books, where Rose and Dimitri have a student/teacher dynamic, to some extent, they've shifted that for the modern audience. "We didn't really want to have the teacher/student relationship, so Rose and Dimitri—he's maybe a mentor, but not a teacher. She's of age."
Vampire Academy will arrive on Peacock this September.