Longtime collaborators Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre bring Richelle Mead’s bestselling Vampire Academy books to life with the new Peacock series premiering on September 15, 2022. Creator, writer, showrunner, and executive producer Julie Plec’s no stranger to the world of vampire TV shows after being the guiding force behind the long-running The Vampire Diaries as well as its spinoffs The Originals and Legacies. Writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner Marguerite MacIntyre’s credits include consulting producer on Legacies’ first season and three seasons as writer/producer on The Originals. She also had a recurring role as Sheriff Liz Forbes on The Vampire Diaries.
Teamed up for interviews at the 2022 San Diego Comic-Con, Plec and MacIntyre discussed adapting Richelle Mead’s popular books for the series. They also talked about making a few changes to characters, pulling in storylines from more than one of the Vampire Academy novels, and whether they’re ready for social media to be flooded with new “ship” hashtags.
How difficult was it to take the existing property and make it accessible for viewers who haven’t read the books?
Julie Plec: “About 11 months worth of difficult. We can laugh now, but we did tell ourselves at the very beginning of the process that we were going to try to work all the rules of the world build and the universe organically into the show so that the audience could be challenged to, you know, ask and answer their own questions, to pick things up along the way. We said we would never be those hacky sellouts who put a saga sell at the beginning explaining everything.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “We have a saga sell.” [For those unfamiliar with the term, a saga sell is an opening narration – either spoken or text – that explains the show’s premise.]
Julie Plec: (Laughing) “We do, and it’s like really helpful and it’s really good.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “It’s great.”
What was in the books that you had to make sure you absolutely captured in the series? Was there a certain relationship you felt you had to nail? Anything, in particular, you knew you had to get in there to satisfy everybody?
Julie Plec: “Yeah. I mean, like when I read the books, obviously I was deeply moved by the power of the friendship of Rose and Lissa. And I was deeply, deeply moved – in other ways – by the power of the intense attraction and love story of Rose and Dimitri. So those, for me, were the two things that were most important to make sure we got right. I felt like if I fail Rose and Dimitri – if I personally fail Rose and Dimitri and Rose and Lissa – I should not have done this. I will write a very deep apology letter to Richelle the novelist because I just wasn’t going to mess that up.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “Well, the same for Lissa and Christian as well because it’s these three love stories. One is the best friend story of women friendship, young women finding their way through life and they’re so different and that’s what makes it even more wonderful. They’re challenged… everything that happened.
But I also think, yeah, Christian and Lissa is such a different relationship. I actually think that’s one of the things that makes me love Dimitri and Rose so much too because we have such different love stories being told. And we also have additional love stories in the series that were not in the books.”
Julie Plec: “Yeah. We love creating new couplings that weren’t in the books. You know, there was no queer representation in the books at all so we definitely had a good time deciding which of our characters would be in that community and what their love stories would be. So, there’s a lot of fun there too.”
Are you ready to take on another franchise with a lot of “ships”?
Julie Plec: “Yes, because if we did our jobs right that will be the outcome of this experience and that means people love it and that makes me happy, you know. And I’ll just avoid the yelling at me, you know. I’ll just keep my comments off for a little while.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “I think we are going to win a lot of people over too. I feel when I watch it, I’m really drawn into all these love stories so much. Even if someone doesn’t love it, they are going to be like, ‘No, I get it.’ They are just going to have to be honest with themselves because it’s really working.”
Julie Plec: “It works on that level that I always discovered well after the fact that Vampire Diaries and The Originals worked, which is that a woman would sit down and bring her boyfriend in or her husband, or a daughter would bring her father or whatever, and suddenly the men are so deeply invested in the show because it does give you that strong emotional foundation of family and of connection. But, also, there’s a lot of really cool mythology and a lot of great vampire eye candy and great action sequences.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “So much action.”
Julie Plec: “Tons of action. So it kind of does…you know, it’s not a recipe that we are trying to fulfill by any means but it really does tick a lot of boxes for a fully fleshed out audience.”
You changed the backstory for Sonya Karp. Was there a reason why and what can diehard fans from the books expect from her going into the season?
Julie Plec: “All I can say on the matter without being a little spoilery is that when we went back and reread the first book, we realized that so much cool story had already happened. Sonya’s story has already been told; it was long gone and forgotten, right? The story of Lissa’s family, of Andre her brother, had already been told, and we thought, ‘Well, for television when you can see the pictures and not just read the words, that’s actually wasted opportunity.’ So we did a lot of telling stories in a different order than you might think. So just because something seems like it’s not being represented, doesn’t mean it’s never going to be represented.
[…]There’s little hints in there that tell you like maybe what we are doing with her.”
Did you stick with just the first book for the first season or are you bringing in other events from Richelle Mead’s other Vampire Academy books?
Marguerite MacIntyre: “There’s elements from all of the books, actually. We pull some stories from way before because one of the things we liked telling about telling the story now in the ‘why now’ of it is because it’s about a society that’s kind of coming apart – a class-based system that’s not working and it’s challenging everyone. That’s really resonant now and so the political stuff that’s deeper in the series got pulled forward. But there’s still all that other story to tell.
So, again, you’ll see it all. It will just be rearranged. So, yeah, it’s not in the order of the books.”
Julie Plec: “Yeah. We like to make the promise to the fans that like if there’s something that you love about the books, most likely in the run of this series – if we are allowed to tell the stories as long as we want to – you will see it.”
How long do you want to?
Julie Plec: “Well, I mean, look, without being spoilery about the books for those of you that haven’t read it, but those who have, book three tells a very, very, very good story. And you don’t want the show to end at the end of book three and you don’t want book three to be season two necessarily either. So we are at least trying to follow that timeline a little bit.
Again, I’m being coy just because I don’t want to ruin it for anybody else. But I think that we could take it through three, into four, and then depending on the world even beyond that.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “There’s a lot of story to tell.”
Julie Plec: “Let us not forget there’s an entire spinoff series.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “Richelle Mead is a very busy writer.”
How do you find that balance of giving the fans what they want and also telling your own story?
Julie Plec: “It’s because we are fans of the material, so we are giving ourselves what we want. We are making decisions for ourselves about what maybe doesn’t feel right. I mean, little things like in the books Rose is not the age of consent, right? So, as hot and smoky and steaming as her little illicit affair with Dimitri was in 2007 or ’08, it doesn’t really feel like anybody needs to see that. We’ve seen that time and again in television; it wasn’t really interesting to us to tell that story, so we made changes there.
There’s a lot of sort of episodic kind of Gossip Girl frolicking and fun that would drive the plot of the first two books almost entirely. We reduced those down to scenes or moments, parties, as opposed to driving the whole story of a season. In doing that we made up a lot of new story or pulled a lot of new story forward.
So, we’re following our own instincts as storytellers who have all these great story cards on the wall as though a writers room sat and broke story for a year and a half. So, we have an embarrassment of riches of good ideas and now it’s just about the storytelling math of where they’re all supposed to lay out.”
Can you talk about shooting the show in Spain and why Spain?
Marguerite MacIntyre: “Well when Julie… Actually, she read the books before reading Vampire Diaries and we were on vacation together back in the day during Kyle XY, and I ended up reading the books, too. And when Julie got them and wanted do them with me, one of the things she had was a ton of locations that had be sent to her because she knew she wanted to do them in Europe. And I was like, ‘That’s great. That’s the perfect place, but then where?’
And out of these tons and tons of pictures that came I was like, ‘There’s this one town in Spain. What is it…Olite?’ She was like that’s the one I like. We both had the same idea and the same vision. As you would say (talking to Julie), it’s like castle and next to it is a burger joint.”
Julie Plec: “Not an actual burger joint, but a great dive bar with a really good chicken sandwich.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “And some really nice fish, as well. Then when we were there and we were scouting, we were up in the turret of this castle and we went, ‘What is that building?’ They were like, ‘It’s a monastery. It’s empty and we’re trying to sell it.’”
Julie Plec: “That’s our boarding school.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “So everything was serendipity for all that. And wanting to expand the world, make it bigger and combine the world too from the books. They’re in Pennsylvania and Montana. They are split from each other, and the pressure could come way higher on that.”
Julie Plec: “It was really important just for story reasons that it wasn’t just a show set at a boarding school because I just did that on Legacies. And I loved all the Bridgerton opportunities of the royal court but in the books, they only go to the royal court very periodically. So, the first thing we did was let’s put it all under one roof and that’s why we went to Europe. Because once we decided that a boarding school and a castle and the entire royal court of this dominion needed to be all together, we realized we can’t find that in Montana, you know?
So, we went surfing in the UK…you know, Edinburgh and looking at all the Harry Potter castles. And then somebody from Shondaland actually who is friendly with Emily Cummins, another producer on this project, said, ‘You guys ever thought about Spain because we shot Star-Crossed there and had the time of our lives?’ And lo and behold, when we looked into Spain this setting that now we shot the show in was one of the first things that our eyes were drawn to.”
Marguerite MacIntyre: “It was really unique and it didn’t look like something you’ve seen before.”
Julie Plec: “It didn’t look like Harry Potter. It didn’t look like a world that you’ve lived before at all, and that’s why we loved it.”
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The Vampire Academy Plot, Courtesy of Peacock:
In a world of privilege and glamour, two young women’s friendship transcends their strikingly different classes as they prepare to complete their education and enter royal vampire society. This serialized and sexy drama combines the elegance of aristocratic romance and the supernatural thrills of the vampire genre.
