VAMPIRE ACADEMY: Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre on Diving into a New Vampire Franchise

For more than a dozen years, THE VAMPIRE DIARIES and its spinoff series THE ORIGINALS and LEGACIES was one of the most successful vampire (and supernatural-centric) franchises in modern television.

Now, Julie Plec—who co-developed TVD, and executive produced all three TVD-universe shows—is looking to bring another beloved vampire book series to life: Peacock’s VAMPIRE ACADEMY, which is inspired by the Richelle Mead book series. (It previously was adapted as a film.)

In VAMPIRE ACADEMY, two friends are on the cusp of entering vampire society under very different circumstances: Rose (Sisi Stringer) is a vampire-human hybrid, whose role in the Guardian class is to protect the Royals; Lissa (Daniela Nieves), meanwhile, is a Royal Moroi vampire, who has the pressures of high society. (The ensemble also includes Kieron Moore, André Dae Kim, J. August Richards, Anita-Joy Uwajeh, Mia Mckenna-Bruce, Rhian Blundell, Jonetta Kaiser, and Andrew Liner.)

In crafting the show alongside co-showrunner Marguerite MacIntyre—the long-time friends wrote together on THE ORIGINALS and LEGACIES, as well as Plec’s series CONTAINMENT; MacIntyre also was an actor on TVD and KYLE XY—Plec was cognizant of the pressures that came along with bringing the world to the small screen.

“We knew, fundamentally, that we could not mess up the pieces—and there are so many—that made the book series so successful,” Plec tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “We were fans [of the] the books first, many, many years ago, before we even dreamt of making it a TV show. And we wanted to treat the source material with that respect, and we wanted to tell the stories very much like how Richelle Mead told the stories. We just found ourselves telling them sometimes in a different timeline or a little bit of a different order, which will be fun for the fans to experience as they see how their stories are unfolding as they know them versus what we did.”

“But as far as you know, separating it from old vampire shows, [the priority] was just it was not relying on our bag of tricks,” Plec continues. “It was not cannibalizing our old way of doing things just to make it easier.”

“And it’s inherent in the book series,” MacIntyre adds. “Richelle…has a really creative, beautiful book series that it’s very unique. And so we were lucky enough to have that as our jumping off space.”

In addition to having different vampiric rules between the two shows, in VAMPIRE ACADEMY, “the class system is very evident and very different and unique and very resonant today,” MacIntyre notes. “So all of that was really appealing.”

“Then, making the visuals be as lush and sumptuous as we were allowed to by shooting in Spain,” MacIntyre continues. “So we were shooting in castles and showing these beautiful, beautiful locations everywhere. And we have great, great artists helping make this visual world, so it’s sort of some different rules. It’s coming from a different place. It looks different. And we were determined…if we’re going to do another vampire show, have it be unique. And it feels like it feels like that.”

Check out the video for more from Plec and MacIntyre, including how their frequent collaboration and real-life friendship impacted how they worked together on VAMPIRE ACADEMY…

VAMPIRE ACADEMY, Series Premiere, Thursday, September 15, Peacock

RELATED:

• VAMPIRE ACADEMY: Peacock Releases New Trailer, Photos of Upcoming Book Series Adaptation
• Peacock Sets Premiere Dates for PITCH PERFECT: BUMPER IN BERLIN, VAMPIRE ACADEMY, Season 2 of ONE OF US IS LYING, and More
• Peacock Reveals First Look at ANGELYNE, VAMPIRE ACADEMY, PITCH PERFECT in New Promo

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