It's Paul Wesley week on The CW! The Vampire Diaries alum directed the episode of Roswell, New Mexico that airs Wednesday night (aka tonight), and Thursday he returns to Mystic Falls as the director of the Vampire Diaries/The Originals spinoff Legacies. As you might imagine, the artist formerly known as Stefan Salvatore brought a lot of expertise to the table, and it was especially fitting that his Legacies episode focused on young vampires MG and Kaleb.
As The Vampire Diaries Universe queen Julie Plec noted, Paul Wesley was able to give the newbies some tips on old school feeding:
It was nice to have him, and the writer was laughing because it was an episode that had a lot of vamp feeding, and she said that Paul was able to express the tricks of the trade to the actors on how to do a proper vamp feed very well after years and years of experience.
Nice! As Julie Plec suggested in her talk with TV Guide, Paul Wesley was the perfect person to to direct this episode. In particular, it's ideal that he would be on set to potentially give some Ripper tips Milton/MG actor Quincy Fouse. As Legacies fans will recall, MG has shown signs of possibly being a Ripper, and Stefan was an infamous Ripper -- ultimately a recovering Ripper -- on The Vampire Diaries.
In this March 7 episode directed by Paul Wesley, "The Boy Who Still Has a Lot of Good to Do," a spontaneous road trip to visit MG's parents leaves MG and Landon missing. So Hope, Alaric, and Kaleb set out to find them before it's too late.
Kaleb must still feel some guilt for encouraging MG to feed on a human. He didn't know MG would have Ripper tendencies, but Dorian pointed out that MG had all the signs.
Paul Wesley directed this episode of Legacies in late 2018 and said he had a great time coming back to his old stomping ground in Atlanta, and working with Vampire Diaries' Matt Davis (Alaric Saltzman) again. He told Entertainment Weekly one of the things he welcomed most about Legacies was the humor -- with little winks to the audience -- as compared to Vampire Diaries. That tonal difference was something that Josie Saltzman actress Kaylee Bryant had pointed out as well.
Paul Wesley told EW his biggest challenge when directing this episode -- and every TV episode -- was the time constraint:
You can’t go over a certain amount of hours and I’ll tell you, I’m super proud of Legacies, everyone loves it, but man there were times when I was like, “I’m not going to be able to finish my day.” I ended up finishing all my days and didn’t go over but it’s not easy when you have six, seven people in a scene, stunts, and fight sequences. Listen, I can shoot anything but in order to make it good you need some time and making something good on a short amount of time, that’s the greatest challenge.
Paul Wesley told EW he was most proud of the way his episode of Legacies ended, leading into the March 14 Episode 14:
I really like the way it ends. As far as in general as a director, I’m not so sure. There’s a handful of scenes that I’m really proud of. There’s a few on the Vampire Diaries that I thought were probably some of my favorites. But I can’t quite recall at this point. It’s all blended in into one giant supernatural CW mix-up in my mind.
Yeah, Paul Wesley directed five episodes of The Vampire Diaries and also two episodes of Shadowhunters, plus these two new episodes this week. He is cornering his own little market on supernatural directing. (Is Supernatural next?) But he recently announced some other new projects that show his ambitions go far beyond the supernatural world.
Paul Wesley's former on-screen brother Ian Somerhalder (Damon Salvatore) is doing something similar. His Netflix show V-Wars is meant to debut later this year, and Somerhalder shared a video showing his intense directing style on set. The Vampire Diaries stars are just taking over all over the place, and it's fantastic.
The episode of Legacies Season 1 that Paul Wesley directed airs tomorrow, Thursday, March 7 at 9 p.m. ET on The CW. That's Episode 13 of the 16 planned for Season 1. Hopefully he'll return to direct more episodes in Season 2, since The CW has already renewed the show to return for 2019-2020. Here's what else is airing on the small screen during midseason 2019.
