Female First Interview with Vampire Diaries star Joseph Morgan

In an interview with Female First, a british celebrity gossip site, recently spoken to  The Vampire Diaries star Joseph Morgan who portrays Klaus in the series about his character and his career.

- And are you working on any projects at the moment?

Yeah I am in Atlanta and I am shooting Vampire Diaries. I am playing the opposite of the food scale on this show; I am the character with the highest status and the most powerful; so I have switched from one end to another.

But it is great fun as I am playing the main villain on the show – I do a lot of tearing out hearts and breaking necks and things like that. So that is a tremendous amount of fun. I am a geek for all of these fantasy genre films and TV stuff so I love the opportunity to put in some fangs and play with that whole idea.

- Season 3 of The Vampire Diaries is in the middle of airing here in the UK so can you give us any little hints as to how we are going to see Klaus develop through to the end of the season?

We are going to start to see a little bit more of his humanity, we are not turning him good, but he is going to develop an attraction to a character in the show, so there is going to be a love interest introduced.

And because of that we are going to start to see a more caring and therefore a more vulnerable side to him. This is really interesting for me to play as I am not trying to change the character I am just trying to evolve it.

 So I have got to build on top of all of these horrible things that he has done and all of the silent murders that he has committed. I need to build in the motive for that and how he can be vulnerable and how he justifies those two sides to him.

So it’s a really interesting challenge but I am really enjoying it. We have got some great writers on the show I have to say, which has been a blessing as they always keep me busy.

- There has been huge hype surrounding this series ever since the beginning so how have you found being part of such a massively popular TV series?

I didn’t realise when I joined how popular that it was. For me it has been huge, quite literally life-changing and I don’t think that I am exaggerating when I say that.

Even at The Immortals premiere there were so many Vampire Diaries fans and I think I answered as many question about the show as I did about Immortals, I suppose it didn’t help taking a couple of my co-stars along to the premiere.

It has just been so overwhelming, especially the social media side and the ever growing amount of Twitter followers.

It’s wonderful and I feel that I have really been given a chance to show what I can do and I’m so glad that people are responding to the character so positively because I am having the time of my life doing it.

- Throughout your career you have worked in both TV & movies with the likes of Ben Hur and The Vampire Diaries so how do you find the two mediums compare?

Until recently I thought that they were pretty similar but after doing Vampire Diaries the big difference is with TV there is such a strict time to meet, the show has to be forty two and a half minutes long. One thing I learnt was if you really draw out your speeches and speak slowly they are going to cut away from you because they don’t have the time to sit with you.

 So I got to episode four of season three and I started thinking ‘there is a pattern here with what is happening’ because I am trained I love to taste my worlds and take my time. Then I started rattling things of a little more and being a little quicker and I know it sounds like a superficial thing ‘speak quicker’ but it is a real lesson in American television.

They have six ad breaks and everything is leading up to the hook at the ad break and it has all got to come together, it doesn’t matter if they haven’t got the perfect cut at forty five minutes they have got to cut off two and a half minutes somewhere – and you bet they will take it out of the pauses. So it really has been a learning experience.

- Finally what’s next for you?

We have got the rest of The Vampire Diaries season 3, so I have to see if I am going to live through that. It’s the time where everyone is a little nervous as we are filming episode twenty, there are twenty two episodes, so somebody’s got to die – we are waiting for the scripts wondering who it is going to be.

And they are all plotting to kill me in the show so I am getting nervous every time I read it. If I don’t die I only have a few months free and then I am back again.

I am directing a shot film, which stars Persia White, and that is coming along great; we are well into pre-production for that and we are hoping to start shooting as soon as we finish. My aim is to take that to festivals and so on.

I have been reading other scripts and there are three that I am really interesting in so I am trying to see if I can fit a movie in if I am coming back to the show.  So I am juggling at the moment basically (laughs).

Read more of the interview here