Vampire Academy showrunners Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre knew they needed to strike the perfect balance with fans when it came to adapting and “contemporizing” the popular young adult book series written by Richelle Mead. Plec and MacIntyre opened up to PopCulture.com about what was always at the heart of the new Peacock series ahead of its Sept. 15 premiere, as well as what went into finding the perfect cast.
It’s hard to go wrong when it comes to Plec and vampires, as the showrunner is behind the wildly successful series The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Legacies, but she still wanted to be “respectful” when it came Mead’s original series chronicling the friendship between Lissa Dragomir, a princess, and her guardian-in-training, Rose Hathaway, as they weather class issues, romance and much more at St. Vladimir’s Academy.
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“We really wanted to just look at the book series itself and be as respectful to Richelle Mead, the novelist, and to the series as we could while also contemporizing it,” Plec told PopCulture, “making it something that’s taking the themes that she really had dabbled in when she was writing the series back in the 2000s and updating those themes, which were very prescient by the way, and even more important today.”
Writing the friendship between Lissa and Rose correctly was “first and foremost” for Plec and McIntyre. “That friendship between Rose and Lissa is paramount,” Plec explained. “And nothing else matters if you don’t pay the right amount of respect to that.” Layering in Mead’s themes, but “maybe in a different order of importance,” Plec stressed that having a “whole sandbox” of a 10-episode season let the show “live everywhere all at once,” which was “thrilling.”
MacIntyre, who first worked with Plec as Sheriff Liz Forbes on The Vampire Diaries, stressed that the themes of Vampire Academy feel more relevant today than ever. “It does feel like this time and this team came together at the right time to tell the story,” she told PopCulture. “We talk about the class system that is fraying in this series of books [and] the challenge of what to do about it. …It just feels like the best time to tell this story because we all recognize it.”
Casting Vampire Academy was another momentous undertaking, as Plec and MacIntyre searched all over to find an international cast featuring Sisi Stringer, Daniela Nieves, Kieron Moore, AndrรฉDae Kim, J. August Richards, Anita-Joy Uwajeh, Mia Mckenna-Bruce, Rhian Blundell, Jonetta Kaiser and Andrew Liner. “We got so lucky in casting this show,” Plec gushed. “And it was a very similar luck that we had with Vampire Diaries back in the day, which was nobody was saying, ‘Well, who’s going to be your big name, the big star name, the person on the poster that’s going to bring the audience in?’ We had complete freedom from the beginning to find whoever we wanted from wherever we wanted.”
Bringing actors from Australia, the U.K., Canada and the U.S. together for this project allowed the show to make sure “representation was really prioritized” as they sought out the right fit. “We got to do all that work ourselves without a lot of pressure from the outside insisting on something for a business reason,” Plec continued. “And that is the most fun way to do it always.” Vampire Academy premieres Thursday, Sept. 15 on Peacock.
