#w*

Julie Plec: We had to negotiate for the right to let Nina play Katherine again…. We had to basically beg the network to let us even write story for Katherine and then I think Mark [Pedowitz] was like, “You get seven episodes” or whatever it was. He was very specific about it. It was a whole thing that went on behind the scenes. That whole thing goes all the way back to season 3, which is typically when actors on a hit show are able to renegotiate their contracts. At that point, Dobrev had spent three years making less than Wesley and Somerhalder, despite playing both Elena and Katherine. Nina Dobrev: Candice, Kat, and I were the three lowest-paid series regulars in the first two seasons. It was a bit of a tricky situation because my contract only said to play Elena, but I was playing multiple characters, which doubled my workload. I had to be on set for double the amount of time, I had to memorize double the amount of lines. I wanted to play Katherine, but I wanted to be compensated fairly for that, and I wanted to be an equal to the boys. Although Dobrev was successful in getting more money, she never achieved parity with her male costars, and because the studio then had to pay her whenever she played Katherine, writers were told they couldn’t use the wickedly delicious doppelgänger. Julie Plec: It got really heated, and so it basically got phoned down back to us writers that we were not allowed to write Katherine in at all ever, which of course was not something that I felt was right or fair. Nina Dobrev: They just said out of principle they wouldn’t bump me up to being equal to the boys, and so that was probably the most hurtful because it felt like I was really working hard and we shot eighteen-hour days sometimes, and nights, and I was putting my absolute heart and soul, blood, sweat, and tears into it. I remember feeling like the studio didn’t appreciate what I was bringing to the show, and it felt like they were saying that all the hard work I was putting into it didn’t matter to them and that I wasn’t an equal to my male counterparts, and so that was upsetting to me. Julie Plec: Over time, between Nina being generous and gracious and the tension simmering down a little bit, we were granted a certain number of episodes. [But] I literally think we had to say, “We’ll kill Katherine,” in order to get permission to use her.