Kat Graham as Bonnie, Ian Somerhalder as Damon and Chris Wood as Kai in ‘The Vampire Diaries’ (The CW)
Although he’s only made a few appearances so far on The CW’s Thursday night drama “The Vampire Diaries” as Kai, actor Chris Wood has grabbed our attention.
Stuck in the purgatory-style place with Bonnie (Kat Graham) and Damon (Ian Somerhalder), he’s been having quite a bit of fun with his first companions in some time, teasing and tormenting the duo. He played games with the pair in the supermarket (even giving an unsuspecting Damon some Vervain), refused to share information until Damon revealed details about what the date they’re all reliving in 1994 is really about (to Damon), and then scared them (and the audience) by revealing he’s been put there because he murdered his witch family.
Chris spoke with Access Hollywood about piecing together Kai, “TVD’s” new big bad villain and hinted at what Kai has planned for Bonnie and Damon.
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AccessHollywood.com: What was the description they gave you of this character [when it originally came up]?
Chris Wood: It was similar to – when Julie [Plec] and Caroline [Dries] have talked about the character before the season even began I believe it said, ‘ a true psychopathic villain. He is charming and flirtatious and dangerous,’ I believe was sort of the vibe.
Access: Have you ever played a character like that before?
Chris: Yeah, I played a psychopath last year as a guest star on ‘Major Crimes,’ the spin-off of ‘The Closer.’
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Access: How do you get into the headspace of somebody like that, of somebody who — their way of thinking and their framework for thinking about things is completely different to normal, decent humans?
Chris: Yeah, it’s all about perspective and the way that he is emotionally affected, or unaffected, rather, as a sociopath. When someone says something to him, it affects him differently than it affects you and I and most people. So it’s finding justification for his goals and his actions and even in the most horrific crimes, if you watch interviews, which I’d spent a good deal of time watching, studying serial killers and psychopaths, and you really find that when you watch them, they’re justified. They don’t villainize themselves. They don’t agree with the perception that other people have of them because in their own minds there’s a misfire happening where they truly believe that what they’re doing is right and if they know that it’s wrong, they know that they like it enough to justify it and they don’t bother with the moral humanity of it and they’re too busy with enjoying the kill to stand aside and process that the wrongness of it is more what needs to be remembered. And so, I think that’s sort of a staring place of the work, and it’s fun. This is one of my favorite types of characters to play is someone whose mind processes information differently than mine because you really get to build from the ground up. It’s a nice change of pace from Weaver on ‘The Carrie Diaries.’
Access: He was fun too, though.
Chris: Yeah! Oh my gosh, he was a great character.
Access: You said you watched videos. Did you read up on psychology books or anything like that? Is that too deep to get into when you’re putting a character together?
Chris: No, there’s a certain point where a certain amount of work is gonna get you too in your head about it and at a certain point you know when you’ve researched enough that you get it and you don’t need to complicate it any further, but I like to do my work until that boiling point because I feel like the more options you’ve found in your research, the more you have to play with when you get going. And once the drafts come… there’s not enough time to be doing the research while doing the work on the individual episode and scenes. So, I spent about a month really reading about serial killers and finding what made them tick and how they justified things that happened, and he’s a little different. We’ll find about his past, exactly what brought him to this place, this prison world and also to why he killed his family and everything, and I think he’ll become a little more clear as we reveal more about him.
Access: [He killed his family] — except for one family member, who is still out there. Should we know who Kai’s family member is out there in the world?
Chris: Oh no, I think that’s just a interesting little angle. It shows his sociopathic nature that he says he’d a soft spot for one of his sisters.
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Access: What are we going to get to see this week, because we know that you can take magic, even though you can’t create it yourself, in this mysteryland, and obviously, Bonnie and Damon really want to get back to their loved ones, and I think they’re willing to maybe make a trade in order to do that.
Chris: We’ve seen that Kai’s got the answers and they don’t. In this upcoming episode, we learn more specifically that Kai knows how to get home using the eclipse, the ascendant and Bonnie’s magic and he’s going to prep them on how it needs to be done and something that happens is that Bonnie, she wants to know the spell, she wants to know how it’s gonna work and he refuses to show her. He’s withholding until the time [is right] because he doesn’t want to give that away too soon and Bonnie and Damon don’t want to comply with him because he’s sort of proven himself to be untrustworthy. In a show of force, Kai uses his ability to drain magic from Bonnie, which we’ve heard – he said he can kill people by overdrawing their magic and that it’s really messy and that it’s terrible and so now that he can do that with them, he’s really demonstrating, ‘I [could] cripple this girl and I can drain her of magic to the point that she dies.
Access: But you know she’s gone through so much already last season.
Chris: I know, poor girl!
Access: All that pain as the anchor.
Chris: Yeah, she’s really been through it.
Access: Bonnie just needs a relaxing massage somewhere!
Chris: I think so! Maybe we should write that in somewhere.
“The Vampire Diaries” continues Thursdays at 8/7c on The CW.
— Jolie Lash
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