Julie Plec talks about Stefan´s drama

SPOILER ALERT!!
If you haven´t seen Graduation 4x23 don´t read what´s next.


1. Silas has a doppelganger -- and it's Stefan. Yes, the Petrova women aren't the only ones with the doppelganger enchantment in their blood. All of the convoluted twists regarding the legend of Silas, his goals, and his abilities came together. Thanks to a loophole, Silas came back to life, revealing that the immortality spell itself had a loophole: doppelgangers. Silas and Stefan share the same face. Stefan is Silas' doppelganger, and now he's trapped in a safe at the bottom of an ocean.

This is a storyline that has been in the works for about a year. "Last year, when Season 3 was over, we kept a small group of writers and we stayed for five weeks, to try to break the broad strokes of Season 4. Last year, right around this time, we came up with the doppelgänger pitch," executive producer Julie Plec tells us.

There were some complications to introducing another doppelgänger character. In Season 2 and early in Season 3, when Nina Dobrev was playing both Katherine and Elena regularly, she grew worn out, physically. Some of the decision-makers behind "The Vampire Diaries" were concerned that playing two characters could take a similar toll on Paul Wesley.

"We had to convince a lot of different people of how it could work and what could make it work," Julie says. "So that we didn't end up in a similar situation as with Katherine and Elena, where we exhausted Nina to the point of being unable to get out of her bed, because we accidentally overworked her so much. Creatively, everybody was very excited about the Silas doppelganger, it was just a matter of how long it took us to cement it, knowing that's fundamentally what we're going to do."

At the moment, Paul's not concerned about working too hard -- he's just excited to face a new challenge on the show. "He is so happy," Julie laughs. "Playing the straight man hero is not always the most exciting job for an actor, and Stefan, of all our heroes, is the straightest on the show. We get to go deeper into his ripper side sometimes, but for Paul, those moments are just pocket moments of opportunity to dig deeply into his craft, and a lot of other times he feels like he's just grooming his hero hair. So obviously, he's very enthusiastic about this, and has been supportive of it all along. He's been dying for something; to be a jerk, to be evil, to be the bad guy, to be able to stretch his muscles."

And in Season 5, he definitely will.