Vampire Academy Creators On Casting And Changes From The Books

Julie, the “Vampire Academy” TV series has quite a few changes from the books. I know that you were a big fan even before you got into “TVD.” What prompted some of the character changes like Sonya Karp’s new backstory, making Rose and Dimitri British, de-aging Tatiana, and then some of the other changes as well?

Plec: In a nutshell, we wanted to cast whoever was best for the part and not have to deal with dialect coaching and all those things. Some Australians are really good at American accents, and some are not. I didn’t even want to know. I wanted people to be their most pure, authentic selves. 

I wanted to make sure there was really great representation in this show in a way that the book, the last names of everyone in the book didn’t necessarily indicate much outside the area and universe. To the point of a Sonya Karp or even Liz’s family, when you read the first book of the series, there [is] so much incredible rich backstory. There’s so much that happened to these characters in the past that we never got to see. We thought, “Gosh, not only did we have six books to work with, but we have an entire mythology of the past that we could use as story.”

Let’s use it. Let’s tell the story. It’s about taking all the tools in the toolbox and then deciding what order you want to use them in and we can assure fans of the books that if you love something in the books, odds are good you will see it in the series — maybe not in the right order, except for the lust spell, my apologies. That was one of the casualties of updating these books into today’s time — that and Rose’s age, the age of consent, and all those things. Otherwise, we tried to honor the source material while also having fun, adding details of our own.

The first four episodes of “Vampire Academy” release September 15 on Peacock, with subsequent episodes releasing Thursdays.

This interview has been edited for clarity.