The Vampire Diaries' Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley continue to take their bromance off the screen, now revealing that the two of them actually fought over who would get to die at the end of the series. There aren’t many media depictions that embody the sentiment of “brothers before lovers,” in the way that The Vampire Diaries still does.
The supernatural teen drama ended in 2017 after eight seasons, and the universe continued in the spin-offs, The Originals and Legacies. The Vampire Diaries followed Elena Gilbert, played by Nina Dobrev, who falls in love with vampire, Stefan Salvatore (Wesley), following the death of her parents. Their love story, obviously already complicated by Stefan’s supernatural abilities, gets set further off course when Stefan’s older brother, Damon (Somerhalder), returns to Mystic Falls with motives of his own. Fans watched the love triangle become further entangled for years before Dobrev announced she was leaving the show in 2015. The CW renewed The Vampire Diaries twice after her departure, with the final two seasons following the brothers as they try to survive the world she left behind.
The bonded brothers appeared on Access Hollywood and revealed that they had an argumentative discussion about which character would meet their demise in the final episode of the show. Somerhalder described the characters as destructors who came to Mystic Falls and disrupted people’s lives in a way he apparently viewed as irredeemable. While, ultimately, fans know that Stefan got the privilege of dying, Paul had his own ideas for the fate of his character, saying "We both wanted to die at the end of the show, we wanted the brothers to go out with a bang together."
It is surprising that writers didn’t take the actors up on their request given the tendency of the show to kill off beloved characters in unexpected ways, even if most of them came back to life at least a few more times. Even so, despite Stefan’s death, writers didn’t leave much opportunity for Somerhalder to ever reprise his role as his troublesome older brother. The series finale saw him taking the cure for vampirism, thus ending his immortality.
It’s safe to say that viewers of The Vampire Diaries may not have been able to handle saying goodbye to both of the brothers simultaneously, despite their proclivity for cold-blooded killing. Although, it would be hard to argue against Wesley's point that their characters were irredeemable and perhaps deserved even less of a happy ending. While Stefan was the one who ended up meeting his demise at the end, Ian can be happy knowing that his character will get to die eventually, he just has to live a long, happy life in the meantime.
Source: Seventeen