Fans were shocked during “The Vampire Diaries” backdoor pilot “The Originals” tonight, when the witch Sophie (Daniella Pineda) revealed that Hayley (Phoebe Tonkin) is pregnant following her one-night-stand with Klaus (Joseph Morgan).
Yep — there’s a little hybrid-werewolf baby in Hayley’s belly, and Klaus plans to move his family to New Orleans to protect that child… and to infiltrate and conquer the vampire hierarchy that has turned the French Quarter into the supernatural epicenter.
Unbeknownst to fans, Phoebe Tonkin has been signed on for the spinoff since July, when she first joined “The Vampire Diaries” cast. “To finally have this episode air when it’s been talked about for nearly
twelve months is crazy,” she says. “I’ve been dying to see it!”
But even as she made her appearances on “The Vampire Diaries,” the details of her role in the spinoff were kept strictly under wraps. She didn’t know that Hayley would be pregnant with Klaus’s baby until seven days before filming began on “The Originals.”
“It came completely out of left field,” she laughs. “No one knew anything. Even when Joseph and I were filming one of the other episodes — the episode where they conceive the baby — we didn’t know that we were conceiving a baby! So when Joseph and I were filming, we were like, ‘Maybe this happens, or maybe this happens,’ plotting out our spinoff ideas. We were way off base.”
When Phoebe finally got her hands on the script, her reaction to the big twist was…pretty much the same as our reaction to the big twist. “I’m reading the reactions on Twitter now, and I think I pretty much felt the same as everyone watching it,” she laughs. “I was like, ‘What!?’ — just screaming. Honestly, I think it’s a really cool twist. It’s something I don’t think people were expecting. People are tweeting me, and they think it’s a joke. It’s not a joke.”
The show has been billed as a darker, more mature look at the supernatural genre, and responsibility for a child certainly elevates that. “I was impressed that they would put something like this in a supernatural show, because it totally changes the tone; the stakes of the show, the tone of the show,” says Pheobe. “It puts it in more of an adult field. It’s less high school, and more about maturity, and the next step in your life.”
When Klaus and Hayley first slept together, the reaction from fans was pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that the Twitter and Tumblr posts reached Phoebe. “I’ve never experienced something like that. I read all that stuff, and it got really, really nasty,” she admits. “I wasn’t upset, but I’ve never been bullied, and I really felt like I was getting bullied.”
This time, she’s hopeful that fans will be more accepting of the story. “I found that people were very angry after that episode, but this time around, on Twitter during the episode, I really didn’t notice so much anger. I think people are just shocked. I guess they had some time to cool off a little bit,” she laughs.
Besides, the baby isn’t a harbinger of potential romance for Hayley and Klaus. As evidenced by his incredibly vile words to her tonight — the “disgusting choice” that Morgan teased in our earlier interview — Klaus and Hayley aren’t about to get married and buy a house together. He’s going to make an effort, certainly, but right now, Klaus is not the ideal baby daddy.
“Not. At. All,” Phoebe agrees. “They definitely didn’t see any kind of future together when they slept together. It was very much a liquor-fueled one-night-stand, as Klaus very blatantly pointed out in the episode — such a douchebag. I think that Hayley is feeling alone right now, but hopefully she’ll have Uncle Elijah and Auntie Rebekah around to help out.”
Published April 25, 2013
by Carina Mackenzie
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