Julie Plec, executive producer of "The Vampire Diaries," shockingly announced that the show was losing its series regular star Steven R. McQueen. The 26-year-old actor plays Jeremy Gilbert and had been on the show since its initial launch in 2009.
Plec told Entertainment Weekly that McQueen's character will make his exit after episode 14. Details surrounding his departure remain a mystery, but a new report claims that the actor might have left because he was finally offered a superhero role.
According to Comicbook.com, some fans are speculating that McQueen, who has been very vocal about wanting to play a superhero, could have been cast as Nightwing in TNT's upcoming show "Titans." It was previously reported that the new series is expected to start working on a pilot at the beginning of 2015.
When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Plec said that McQueen would always be welcomed back to "The Vampire Diaries" unless he "gets his wish to play a superhero and he's unavailable."
"His final episode will be 614, and the episode leading up [to it] will be him grappling with whether or not it's time for him to say goodbye to Mystic Falls," Plec said. "Every year we look at which characters we feel like are ready to move on, whether to better things in life or to the Great Beyond. This year, we realized that Jeremy has truly grown into a man, and as a victim of so much pain at the hands of the supernatural universe, we felt like it was time for him to go out on his own and start a fresh new life - with a twist."
Plec also told Entertainment Weekly that fans could see Jeremy during special occasions like "weddings, funerals and series finales."
"We're in the third act of our storytelling of the show," Plec said. "Everything that we're doing is moving towards the end. Over the course of the next few years, we will need to start having the characters make choices about what they want with their lives and say goodbyes to some people. It's all part of moving toward the end, however long that takes."
