I just caught up with The Vampire Diaries stars to talk about that insanely good season finale and what’s ahead for season two. So why were we talking about Melrose Place’s (RIP) Ashlee Simpson appearing on The Vampire Diaries?

Turns out, Ashlee was the CW’s first choice for Nina’s role of Elena/Katherine.

“We all independently looked at a bunch of [audition] DVDs,” co-executive producer and director Marcos Siega told the crowd at a recent Screen Actors Guild event for TVD. “We couldn’t find the girl we wanted. The network wanted us to hire Ashlee Simpson…But Nina [Dobrev] sent this DVD back and we all were home looking, searching, and we came in the next day saying, ‘We should look at Nina again.’ We showed it to Peter Roth, and Peter only saw her on that tape and he said, ‘That’s her.’”

“Half of Hollywood I think went out for the role, for all our roles,” Nina tells me. “I guess I did something right, here I am. We had to discover and find our characters. Every episode we learned something more and something more, and eventually we created and molded these amazing, awesome characters.

Eonline.com