If you love Ian Somerhalder in The Vampire Diaries, he wants you to check out his new show, V-Wars. He won’t be the smoldering vampire this time around, but he put his heart and soul into creating this show and even ended up in the emergency room because he worked so hard. 

Back in his days of TVD, he would fly back to LA. to work with his acting coach over the weekend before he started the next episode. He put that same kind of work ethic into every element of this show, right down to how it looked. 

“Weeks, months finding the color palette that would advance with the story so when you start, where there aren’t any problems, everything’s nice and normal colors,” Ian says. “As the story unfolds in a downward spiral, the color is sucked out.”

Anyone who knows Ian and his foundation shouldn’t be surprised that his new show talks about climate change. The vampires in V-Wars are sick because of a disease that is exposed because of melting ice. 

Now that Ian has the world set up, there’s a lot of real-world topics he wants to cover from borders to racism, to politics to the fear of politics. 

The source material from Jonathan Maberry plays right into this. Ian says one story he would love to tell is about a young Latina girl in a border town that’s beaten and raped. He also praised Maberry for bringing in other writers so he could get these stories just right. 

“That’s what’s so brilliant about Maberry’s approach,” Ian says. “It takes balls as a writer to not want to take all the credit. Mulberry is so cool and so smart he’s basically ‘look I’m a white guy, I live in San Diego, but I want to tell a story about a young girl in a border town.” 

He’s excited for his fans to see what he’s been working on for over a year and he’s ready to expand the V-Wars world. 

“It’s going to be fun, check it out and share it with your peeps and let’s get into expanding this world and creating some unique social juxtapositions that just flip us upside down and build a community around it.”

V-Wars premieres on Netflix, Friday, December 6. Check out the entire interview with Ian: