Exclusive Interview: Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre Talk Vampire Academy

From executive producers, Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre comes a story of friendship, romance, and danger. In a world of privilege and glamour, two young women’s friendship transcends their strikingly different classes as they prepare to complete their education and enter vampire society. One as a powerful Royal, the other a half-vampire Guardian trained to protect against the savage ‘Strigoi’ who threaten to tear their society apart. That is, if Royal infighting doesn’t do the job first.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to chat with Julie and Marguerite about Vampire Academy Season 1, adapting this beloved book series for the screen, and discovering young talent.

PC: Julie, I wanted to start with you. Back in 2015, you tweeted that you hoped that one day you’d be able to bring Vampire Academy to the television screen, and here we are. What was it about this story that you connected with? What has it meant to you to finally bring it to life?
Julie: I read this series when it came out. This was before Vampire Diaries and before I read the Twilight books. Outside of Buffy and Anne Rice, it was the most important entry point I had to young adult vampires. I thought the storytelling was so smart and vivid. I thought the romances were so powerful. This story’s core is a beautiful friendship between two young women. It felt like a story begging to be told, but back then, you couldn’t make that show on TV. There was no streaming services. There was no ability to go fly to Europe and shoot in a castle. It was very much centered around broadcast network, so it didn’t even register in my brain as something I could have done then.

Over the years, as I got deeper and deeper into the Vampire Diaries franchise, it just felt like, “I guess I’ll never get to do that.” Then, lo and behold, somebody asked the fateful question: “If you could make one show that you’ve always wanted to make, which would it be?” When I got to Universal Television, they asked me that question. I said, “It would be Vampire Academy.” There we have it, and here we are. Marguerite’s been on the ride with me the whole way.

Marguerite: The whole way. Including reading the books when you first read them, which I didn’t have any affinity towards one way or another. I thought I would only read one on that vacation that we read them on and then I realized, “I need to read them all.” I devoured them all very quickly. I love them. They’re great books.

PC: Marguerite, you’re known for all the work that you’ve done on screen. How have those experiences lent themselves to the work that you’ve now done as a writer, producer, and co-showrunner?
Marguerite: That’s a great question. It helps. The more hats you wear, the better you are at each thing that you do. I can really feel for an actor and what an actor is going through in any given moment. I can for sure see that side of it. My husband’s a cinematographer. I see the crew side of it. I love all the parts of it. Every time you do one job, it improves all the other jobs.

PC: This is such a beloved story with such a massive fanbase. What was something that you wanted to make sure translated from the page to the screen? What was something new that you brought to it to make it your own?
Marguerite: We wanted that great, beautiful, deep-rooted friendship between these two women to really resonate and ring out. I mean, we’ve been friends for almost twenty years. Female friendship is such a big deal. It’s such a rock. Our lives are improved so much by our female friendship. The beautiful core friendship gets these characters through so much, but friendships are always tested. It’s what you do in those hard times that’s really important. We love how these two young women navigate that hard world that they’re in sometimes.

Julie: We also really wanted to be able to have fun with all this regency-esque. I call it the ball gown and tiara vibe of the show. But that’s really hard to do in this day and age when you’re dealing with things like economic privilege and splits in society. We were able to take all the themes that existed in the book and really boost them. We made this series about a society that does not want these two women to be friends simply because they’re not of the same species. We get to tell a show about something meaningful that matters to the world that we live in today but also get to have all the fun and all that pretty stuff.

Marguerite: The pretty stuff and the fierceness. There’s a lot that we get to play with in this world.

PC: Everybody is so perfectly cast. What was that process like finding these amazing, incredible actors that you have on the show?
Julie: The casting process for this was fun in a lot of ways and not fun in one way, which is that we had to do it over Zoom. It’s fine for a while, but when you’re getting down to the end and you want to do chemistry reads and see how people are together, you can’t do that, which was a bummer. It’s a real miracle when it comes out well on the other side when you haven’t had that access to somebody’s personality right in front of you in real life. We got incredibly lucky. We didn’t have that pressure where we had to cast a name. We got to discover stars. We got to give people jobs who might not have even ever had a job before. We got to find people from multiple countries across the globe. As a result, the representation in this ensemble is so thrilling and something to be really proud of.

Marguerite: With these chemistry reads over Zoom, the actor side of me is like, “Good luck with that.” But these guys did an incredible job. You literally could feel these characters connecting. When one of them is in one country and the other is in another country, it’s morning here, it’s nighttime there, they’re seeing each other on a little video and making magic in front of us. We have an incredibly talented cast. We got the best people. We were so lucky.

Make sure to follow Julie (Twitter/Instagram) and Marguerite (Twitter/Instagram). Watch Vampire Academy on Peacock today.