Ian Somerhalder in STATUS Magazine

It’s three in the morning, the witching hour for some; but for me it’s usually the watching hour for television shows. It’s a jungle out there in my neck of the woods. There’s True Blood‘s maenads, werewolves, and werepanthers. There’s The Walking Dead‘s zombies. But it’s Ian Somerhalder playing the vampire rebel Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries who I get to talk to at the dead of the night.

Ian plays the vampire in point to its essence: estranged, cruel, and having persuasive powers potent as poison. Onscreen and through the phone line, he dazzles just the same. He tells me, “Aww, you’re so sweet.” Just imagine the smile on my face upon hearing this. Yes, fangirling is on.

But way before I joined the fang-wagon, Ian was already known as Boone in Lost. Thinking he had everything going for him after the show, he auditioned for the role of Jason Stackhouse in True Blood. Although he grew up in Louisiana where Bon Temps, the setting for True Blood, is located, familiarity with geography still didn’t give him the part. I don’t blame Alan Ball. As far as characters go, Ian doesn’t embody the dirty South, rather he represents the age-old sophisticate. That includes Somerhalder’s ease to Hollywood with a smirk and glare that can stun any onlooker.

As a little kid, Ian already had the glib and gab of a vampire. “I remember, I was so young, I had an imaginary friend named Ian whom my poor family had to deal with probably by a year,” Ian recalls. “Ian liked everything I liked so I asked my mom for this whole pack of gum and then she found me an hour later with my mouth full of it. And my mom said, ‘Wait a minute, Ian. I thought some was for Ian, too.’ And I said, ‘Nope, nope. Ian doesn’t like this kind.’ [laughs] So I used to do things like that. It just kinda made my mom realize that I was meant to be an actor.”

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