Michael Malarkey joked he’d like to invite Jeff Goldblum to Mystic Falls to play his dad in season seven of The CW’s The Vampire Diaries. Stranger things have happened on the successful vampire series, but it might be a stretch to think Goldblum would show up for an episode or two. At the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con, Malarkey also dropped a few hints about what’s happening with his character, Enzo, in the upcoming season.
Will Enzo be on a good path now that he’s with a family? “Well, ‘good’ is subjective, you know? For him, if he decides to be on Lily’s side it initially would feel like a good thing because he’s found his pack. And I know he spent a lot of his life being an orphan, being the outcast, being imprisoned in solitary confinement, and so for him, a huge need is to have a community of people he can love and trust and maybe eat people with,” answered Malarkey during roundtables interviews at Comic-Con.
“Yeah, I think it could potentially be a good thing, but that could potentially backfire because he also has loyalties to Damon as well. I think if he were to choose a certain path that was against Damon’s path, that would be a conflict that’s bad for Enzo and good for Michael the actor to play.”
Malarkey added, “I think that’s going to be his big dilemma this season is which side does he choose? Yeah, we’ll see where it goes.”
Malarkey thinks Enzo wants more than just to be part of a family and is still seeking fulfillment. “I’ve got my own ideas of what he’s doing and all that stuff, but you’ve got to wait until you get the scripts in for you to find out what’s really going on. We can only pose so many ideas to the writers and stuff. When every episode comes in I literally just tear it open and go, ‘What’s happening now?’ But yeah, we find out as well that he plays guitar, which is an interesting level of character right there,” revealed Malarkey. “I play; I’m a singer/songwriter. […] I was a musician before I was an actor. I played in punk and hardcore bands and stuff. Then I became an actor later on when I was about 22. Yeah, I released an album last year, Feed the Flames, on iTunes. Doing another one that’s coming out this fall.”
Season seven will include a time jump and Malarkey thinks that’s a terrific idea.
“I think that’s an absolutely brilliant trick because what happens with an audience is when they see that time jump they think, ‘What? How did that character get there?’ And then they start to watch the time real time and start to see what’s going to happen in order to lead to that point. It’s like Memento, the film. And for Enzo apparently is something to do with his love life, that we see him together with somebody – maybe somebody we know on the show. So, yeah, there’s a little spoiler. Everyone wants to know about my love life. I don’t know why. That’s the boring stuff,” said Malarkey, laughing.
The upcoming seventh season could be considered a reboot of the series in part due to the absence of one of the show’s main characters. Nina Dobrev has finished up her time as Elena on The Vampire Diaries, and Malarkey feels that “reboot” is the right description for this upcoming season.
“Absolutely. I think that it’s a fantastic opportunity for the writers to revamp the show…no pun intended. But, yeah, I think what they’re doing with this time-lapse trick is really clueing us into a different kind of framework or whatever so that we can kind of lock into that idea of what’s going to happen. I think people, as much as we’re all going to miss Nina, I think when we read the first episode, we didn’t think about it too much. We weren’t like, ‘Oh, where’s the Elena scenes?’ You know what I mean? And I think that’s a really good sign. I think that’s a strong sign. I’m really optimistic. I think it’s a great opportunity.”
Watch the full interview with Michael Malarkey:
