Nina Dobrev is opening up about her decision to leave The Vampire Diaries, and it turns out pay parity played a huge role.
The 36-year-old actress starred as Elena Gilbert and her doppelgänger Katherine Pierce for the show’s first six seasons. While many speculated about her exit at the time, Nina recently revealed the real story in the new book I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries.
“Candice, Kat, and I were the three lowest-paid series regulars in the first two seasons,” Nina shared, referencing co-stars Candice King and Kat Graham. “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.”
She explained that the studio eventually told the writers to stop including Katherine because they “had to pay” Nina each time she appeared. Showrunner Julie Plec confirmed the story, saying: “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.”
While Nina did eventually secure a raise, she says she never achieved true pay parity with Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley, who played Damon and Stefan Salvatore.
“They just said out of principle they wouldn’t bump me up to being equal to the boys,” she recalled. “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.”
When she returned for the series finale in season eight, it came with a condition: equal pay. “I was always open to coming back for the finale, and storyline-wise it made sense,” Nina explained. “I needed to be paid parity to the boys. I had to put my foot down and say if it didn’t happen I wouldn’t be able to come back.”
In the end, the studio agreed—but only for one episode. While Nina says she didn’t care about the money itself, she wanted to prove a point: “It wasn’t about the actual dollar amount, it was about being an equal.”
