Hot Off The Screen

Jim Colucci

Photography by Cliff Lipson

Styling by Angelique O’neil

 

A brooding vampire.

A freewheeling art thief.

A Conniving high school lothario.

Three troubled new hunks have taken up residence at The CW. Often they mean well—really, they do. But when they’re bad, their shows get good.

As we approach the spring finale season, when small-screen schemes are in full bloom, Watch! caught up with Paul Wesley of The Vampire Diaries, Melrose Place’s Shaun Sipos and 90210’s Matt Lanter to ask what it’s like to take a walk on the dark side under the hot Hollywood lights.

– Paul Wesley –  

The Vampire Diaries’ brooding hero

With his Eastern European good looks and independent spirit, Paul Wesley—né Pavo Wasilewski—seems a natural choice to play a magnetic and enigmatic vampire.

That is, perhaps, until you realize that this so-called creature of the night really hails from the land of all-night diners: New Jersey. “Not so mysterious now, huh?” jokes the 27-year-old actor, who plays heroic bloodsucker Stefan Salvatore on The CW’s hit series The Vampire Diaries.

First bitten by the acting bat while doing elementary school plays in his hometown of Marlboro, Wesley had by age 17 landed an agent and regular roles on Another World and then Guiding Light. “I would show up on set, this naive young kid, and would be so intimidated by everybody who had been doing the show for so long,” he remembers. Eventually skipping so many classes to report to work—and to recover from late nights spent discovering Manhattan—Wesley eked his way through a combination of public and private high schools. But of the three years he spent on the two soap operas, learning to memorize lines and get comfortable in front of the camera, he explains, “those were my study years.”

In 2001, shortly after his move to Los Angeles, Wesley landed the role of a young shape-shifter on CBS’ supernatural drama Wolf Lake. (Later, when he booked his gig as Stefan, Wesley says his manager couldn’t resist the joke when she called to deliver the news. “She said, ‘It looks like you’re going from werewolf to vampire,’ ” he recounts, laughing.) Soon after, the actor—barely out of his teens—was booking ever-bigger recurring roles on such hit shows as Everwood, American Dreams and, most recently, Lifetime’s Army Wives.

But oddly, among the jocks and cops and soldiers he has played, it is Stefan whom Wesley finds the most easily relatable. “Obviously it’s a stretch playing this crazy-fantasy vampire who is 150 years old,” he explains. “But yet he’s pretending to be a high school kid, and sometimes I feel that way when I go back to New Jersey. I was always a little detached from the whole high school scene. I felt a little socially removed.”

Growing up with Polish immigrant parents gave the actor even more of an understanding of the outsider’s perspective. “I remember thinking, ‘I wish we could just be American, and drink soda and watch baseball,’ ” he admits. “Of course, as you get older, you realize how cool it was to be different.”

Similarly, after roles in five failed pilots in the past few years, the actor says he also came to appreciate how nice it is to be steadily employed, on a hot new show with major buzz. Originally having read for the part of the other brother Salvatore, bad-boy vamp Damon, Wesley was brought back in as Stefan after an exhaustive search by the show’s producers. In L.J. Smith’s early ’90s Vampire Diaries book series, Stefan “has long dark hair and green eyes,” the actor explains. “I just have the green eyes,” he says, modestly.

But actually, Wesley has worked hard on landing the right look for Stefan, losing 15 pounds before the production of the show’s pilot— and even more since—to look like a noble vampire who subsists, unhealthily, solely on animal blood. And there’s plenty of time for mental preparation, too, on the Vampire set. Filmed on the outskirts of Atlanta (standing in for fictional small-town Mystic Falls, Va.), the show is far from the bustle of everyday life in Los Angeles. Out in the Georgia woods, he shuts off his cell phone and even shuns too much social interaction with the rest of the cast—“which is very difficult,” he adds, “because I really like everyone.”

It’s all to get in the right, brooding mood to channel Stefan, who, Wesley says enthusiastically, will continue to show “more layers, where he’ll be flawed, and make mistakes, and even experience the dark side a little bit.” All of which, the actor hopes, will give him something tasty to bite into for seasons to come.

– Shaun Sipos –

Melrose Place’s dashing daredevil

Over lunch at a Japanese restaurant near his Hollywood home, Melrose Place star Shaun Sipos orders sushi like an expert. It’s a skill, the actor explains, that he picked up in Tokyo on the set of the film The Grudge 2.

A native of Victoria, British Columbia, the 28-year-old Sipos talks of his love of travel, remembering a particularly impetuous trip he took in the spring of 2009 through Asia with an actor friend promoting a film. That particular excursion, it turned out, is why he almost wasn’t cast on Melrose Place. And then ultimately, it is why he was.

Jet-lagged on his return to L.A., Sipos met with Melrose producers Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer, who were curious why an actor would choose to vacation during the all-important “pilot season,” when casting occurs for new series. “They asked me, incredulously, ‘What have you been doing? Why haven’t we seen you?’ I explained that I’d just gotten back from China, Korea and Thailand, where we were chased by monkeys who had stolen all our stuff,” the actor remembers. “I explained that I thought the trip was more important than pilot season. ‘Besides,’ I said to them, ‘now I’m here and meeting you.’ ”

The cocksure comment convinced the producers, who had already auditioned more than 1,000 guys, that they had found their David Breck, the estranged illegitimate son of original Melrose character Michael Mancini. And indeed, the actor admits, he and David do have a lot in common, starting with their fiery natures.

The eldest of five, Sipos first dabbled in acting in a high school elective, where, he admits, he would find creative ways to “mouth off” to the teacher he disliked during improv exercises. Soon after, the receptionist at his dentist’s office suggested he try modeling—and then, based on his insulted and animated response, acting. She introduced the then-teenager to a friend, the only agent on Vancouver Island; months later, Sipos had won a role on the 2001 WB network sitcom Maybe It’s Me.

The show was ultimately short-lived, but brought Sipos from Vancouver to Los Angeles. He continued to score jobs in both cities, eventually landing a part up north in the film Final Destination 2. But during a fallow spell in L.A., the young actor had to resort to sleeping in the flatbed of his truck. He could have returned to Canada, where his father, an immigrant from Croatia and a onetime title-winning bodybuilder, still runs a successful fitness equipment company. “I guess I’m just stubborn,” he now realizes. “But also, I was young. I was reading a lot of Jack Kerouac, and Hermann Hesse, and Paulo Coelho. I thought, ‘This is an adventure! I’m living in my truck! I can pick up and go wherever I want, and who knows what tomorrow is going to bring!’ ”

Eventually, tomorrow brought ABC’s family-set sitcom Complete Savages, where Sipos ended up being handpicked by producer Mel Gibson, who went on to become a mentor. After that show was canceled in 2005 after only one season, Sipos spent the next four years concentrating on independent film. Then last spring, after that fateful trip to Asia, he decided to line up whatever TV meetings he could, so late in the season. The first was at The Vampire Diaries, where he auditioned for the role of bad vampire brother Damon Salvatore opposite his friend Paul Wesley. Sipos didn’t end up becoming a vampire, but he did land the part of someone nearly as dark and secretive. His Melrose character David, the actor explains, “is very wily, very creative” and, after the death of his mother, “obviously at war with a father he resents.”

In true nighttime soap fashion, Melrose is full of juicy Oedipal plotting between David and his dad. And while he can’t relate to that particular family dynamic, Sipos says he does connect with quite a few aspects of his character. “He and I are very similar in having that mischievous quality, and also in the way we’re both protective of our friends,” he explains. But David’s got some real problems, too—and that just makes it all the more fun for the actor portraying him. “He’s definitely got some walls in terms of his relationships with women,” Sipos observes. And then there’s David’s rebellious side, which he exercises in such a typical young adult way: by breaking into mansions and stealing art.

 

– Matt Lanter –  

90210’s bad boy

Growing up in northeastern Ohio, then Atlanta, Matt Lanter never starred in the high school musical. And he didn’t really watch much TV, either—never mind one of his older sister’s favorite shows, Beverly Hills, 90210.

“I was a boy who was outdoors, playing baseball and building tree forts,” says the newest star of that series’ 2008 reboot. In fact, it was Lanter’s love of sports that brought him to a career in acting. While working as a caddy, the young athlete caught sight of a fax soliciting extras for a movie, Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, about to shoot at the golf course. “I went to the open call, did some background work, and really fell in love with moviemaking. I saw Jim Caviezel on the set and realized I wanted the chance to be the one to bring a character to life.”

After attending the University of Georgia in Athens, Lanter studied and performed at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater and supplemented his income with modeling gigs, which provided a small cushion when he followed his acting dreams to Los Angeles.

“I was fortunate to have a good agent and manager who worked hard to get me auditions,” says the actor, who describes himself as “generally chill,” but constructively aggressive when pursuing a goal. “I was going to classes and studying lines every day and every night,” he says. “I never went out.”

The hard work quickly paid off, first with a guest spot on ABC’s sitcom 8 Simple Rules (opposite The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco), then with a recurring role on Fox’s supernatural drama Point Pleasant. True, his Rules role got cut to one line, and Point Pleasant was canceled before his episodes had the chance to air. But the work begat more work, and soon Lanter was cast as the son of the first female president on the ABC drama Commander in Chief.

That series, which started high atop the Nielsen ratings in the fall of 2005, surprised critics—and, Lanter says, its stars—by flaming out quickly after a series of behind-the-scenes changes. The loss was disappointing, but left the young actor open to other opportunities, such as starring in his first play, Alfred Uhry’s Without Walls at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum opposite thespian heavyweight and current CSI star Laurence Fishburne. As a student who develops a sometimes too-close relationship with his teacher, Lanter worked closely alongside the imposing actor, meeting every few days to discuss ways to keep their performances fresh. “Sometimes he would say, ‘I’m going to throw you a curveball tonight, and I want you to throw one back at me on stage,’ ” Lanter remembers. Mirroring the play’s teacher/student dynamic, “there was so much that I learned from him.”

The high-profile Walls run led to recurring roles on network shows such as Heroes and Shark and to film work including 2008’s Disaster Movie and the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars, in which Lanter provided the voice of hero Anakin Skywalker—a role he still continues in the TV series adaptation. Meanwhile, the producers of the new, hotly anticipated CW version of 90210 had been trying to no avail to find the right guy to play a street-smart New York transplant named Liam Court, a love interest and powerful foil for AnnaLynne McCord’s vixenish Naomi. Once available, the 26-year-old Lanter tested for the CW powers that be, and signed on as Liam in the series’ 16th episode.

Now in Season 2, Liam has been bumped up to “series regular” status, shaking up life at West Beverly High as he bonds with his bros in the surf club—Lanter was happy to learn a few moves out in the waves—and trifles with all the wrong girls. The actor says he doesn’t have much in common with his new small-screen alter ego—for one thing, “I always tried to stay out of trouble,” he says, while Liam clearly doesn’t—but adds that “one of the reasons I was attracted to the character was that he was described as independent, a free thinker.” Whereas, he says, the show’s male characters, in early episodes, often stood by as accessories to the catfighting females, “Liam doesn’t let girls push him around, and is his own man.”

“It’s an opportunity for me to play a character with some edge, and take him to interesting places,” adds the actor, who is clearly enjoying taking Liam’s drag racer out for a vicarious thrill ride. “You can be bad just to be bad, you can be bad because you’re actually trying to help someone else. You can be manipulative-bad, evil-bad. … There are so many different layers and shades of bad you can be.” And Lanter hopes to spend several seasons trying on them all.

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