Paul Wesley Recalls Losing ‘The O.C.’ Lead and Fitting ‘Vampire Diaries’ Fangs with Ian Somerhalder

Paul Wesley is best known as Stefan Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries, but on a recent episode of Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy podcast, the actor traced a career that almost didn't happen — and revealed that his most enduring Hollywood relationship is with his former TV brother, Ian Somerhalder. The conversation ranged from his single-episode turn on The O.C. to the origins of Brothers Bond, the bourbon company he and Somerhalder built together, and the viral Q&A videos that have lately turned him into an unlikely TikTok fixture. Wesley's through-line, insisted on repeatedly: none of it was planned.

His big break, he explained, was nearly a bigger one. Wesley auditioned for Ryan Atwood on Fox's teen drama The O.C. — a role that went to Ben McKenzie, now a close friend — and was devastated to lose it, until producers called back with another idea: Donnie, a one-episode part he says was basically himself. The character left an outsized impression, returning with a gun and shooting Luke, a moment fans still bring up to him more than 20 years later — along with the thick Jersey accent he says required no acting whatsoever.

Long before Mystic Falls, Wesley got his training on daytime TV. At 16, he joined CBS's Guiding Light opposite Brittany Snow, playing boyfriend and girlfriend, and credits the soap with teaching him how to work a camera and feel comfortable on set.

The paycheck funded a West Village apartment he shared with his childhood friend Ricky — and Ricky's Pomeranian — across two twin beds, an era of fake IDs and partying he calls the best time of his life. He also retold a story Snow herself has shared publicly: their first on-screen kiss turned out, per her mother, to be her first kiss ever — the start of a friendship that endures today.

The emotional center of the interview, though, was Somerhalder, whom Wesley described as his longest relationship — colleagues turned best friends turned brothers turned business partners, nearly 20 years in.

They first met at a Burbank dental office for fang fittings after both were cast as the Salvatore brothers, and on the flight to the pilot shoot in Vancouver, Somerhalder predicted the show would be a hit — a welcome confidence from a man who had already watched eight of Wesley's pilots fail. Once The Vampire Diaries was picked up, the two committed so fully that they rented apartments next to each other in Atlanta to study lines together, stepped off the plane in accidentally matching outfits, and later swapped the set's prop bourbon for the real thing.

That bourbon habit became Brothers Bond, which the pair developed during COVID lockdown by blending batches in Somerhalder's Topanga kitchen — Wesley likening his co-founder's measuring-cylinder setup to a mad scientist — and naming the brand 15 minutes before a Walmart pitch after rejecting Somerhalder's first idea. The episode also untangled Wesley's other accidental venture: during lockdown, a team member signed him up for a close-friends app, his casual question-and-answer sessions got screen-recorded and spread across TikTok, and a phenomenon was born without him realizing it. Between the elaborate sleep setup that gives his wife Natalie the ick and the fan who once appeared in his driveway with suitcases and a perm bowl, Wesley made the case that his post-Vampire Diaries chapter is thriving — entirely by accident.