- Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley drank so much tea during "Vampire Diaries" they had "anxiety issues."
- The cast and crew eventually realized the solution to their problem was switching to decaf tea.
Filming the first season of "Vampire Diaries" wasn't a cakewalk for Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley, who drank so much caffeine it harmed their mental health.
While shooting scenes for the CW supernatural drama series, the cast knocked back loads of tea pretending it was whiskey. But all that caffeine over the course of a season had a negative effect on them.
"We had the most insane anxiety issues because there was so much caffeine," Somerhalder told Page Six.
Wesley recalled doing "take after take" with copious amounts of tea.
"You're drinking 20 to 30 cups of tea, so by the end of the day you're, like, 'Ahh!,'" Somerhalder added. "We didn't [sleep]."
After shooting the first season in 2009, the cast and crew realized the solution to their anxiety issues was actually pretty simple.
"We switched to decaf, so we felt a lot better," explained Wesley, adding that they drank "herbal tea."
Somerhalder and Wesley, who played Damon and Stefan Salvatore on the show, would eventually go on to shoot eight seasons of "Vampire Diaries."
During an interview with TODAY, Somerhalder recalled the moment he knew the show was a hit with viewers.
"We were trying to leave the hotel," he said. "And there was, like, 1,000 people on either side of this little hotel where we used to stay at all the time. And we had to go through secret entrances and we had multiple cars. Two dummy cars, one we were in, one we weren't. One for full security and the guy at the time who's the head of Warner Brothers International just said, 'The only time I've seen this, like, this was the launch of 'Beverly Hills, 90210,' believe it or not."
While the show's two stars picked up multiple People's Choice Awards for their work, perhaps the most important thing to come out of the experience was a lasting friendship. The two also formed a business partnership and launched the bourbon brand Brother's Bond Bourbon in 2021.
"The amount of times and the amount of screen grabs I have of Stefan and Damon bonding over a bourbon…and, you know, it's so cool to be able to, like, re-create that in a sense, you know?" Wesley also told TODAY. "This is our reunion."