“I needed to be paid equally to the boys,” she recalled. “I had to put my foot down. It wasn’t about the money. I didn’t give a s*** about the money at all. It was about the principle.”
Nina Dobrev in 'The Vampire Diaries'
Nina Dobrev is finally sharing the story behind her battle for equal pay during her time on ‘The Vampire Diaries’.
The actress, who played both Elena Gilbert and the mischievous Katherine Pierce on the hit CW show, revealed that the journey to being fairly compensated was anything but easy.
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Dobrev starred alongside Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder for the first six seasons of the supernatural teen drama. While she was the female lead, she also doubled as Katherine, a role that added twice the workload, but not twice the paycheck.
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In a recent interview for Samantha Highfill’s ‘I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries’, Dobrev explained that she, along with co-stars Candice King and Kat Graham, were the lowest-paid regulars in the show’s early seasons.
“It was a bit of a tricky situation because my contract only said to play Elena, but I was playing multiple characters, which doubled my workload,” Dobrev said. She described the challenge of memorizing double the lines and being on set for longer hours.
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“I wanted to play Katherine, but I wanted to be compensated fairly for that, and I wanted to be an equal to the boys,” she added.
The actress claims that when she asked for fair pay, the studio responded in an unusual way. They asked the writers to stop writing for Katherine. Essentially, Dobrev had to fight just to have her second role appear on the show.
Despite eventually securing a higher salary, Dobrev was never paid the same as her male co-stars, Wesley and Somerhalder.
“I remember feeling like the studio didn’t appreciate what I was bringing to the show,” she said. “All the hard work I was putting in didn’t seem to matter, and it felt like I wasn’t seen as equal to my male counterparts. That was upsetting.”
After six seasons, Dobrev left the show but returned for the final season. Her comeback, however, reignited the pay dispute.
“I needed to be paid equally to the boys,” she recalled. “I had to put my foot down. It wasn’t about the money. I didn’t give a s*** about the money at all. It was about the principle.”
Dobrev explained that this was her second attempt at making her point clear. “It wasn’t about the actual dollar amount; it was about being an equal. They really didn’t want to give it to me, so I politely declined the offer.”
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