Nina Dobrev is done with Vampire Diaries. Despite the best efforts of Executive Producer Julie Plec to get her star to stay, Nina Dobrev had a six-season contract. Her time is up, and she is moving on.

There are rumors that Nina Dobrev may be looking to get into a film series, perhaps a superhero franchise or a Young Adult series to launch her film career.

In a recent interview with TV Guide, Nina Dobrev revealed that she did not realize how big a phenomenon The Vampire Diaries had become in the earlier days of the show.

“It wasn’t until we started doing press tours and began traveling across the globe to promote the show that we realized how popular it was and how big the fandom was. Also, I don’t feel any different and I surround myself with people who don’t treat me any different. So I know the show is very popular, but I don’t have people who give me special treatment by any means.”

In fact, Nina Dobrev says that it was a high school kid who first clued them in to just how big a deal the show was to kids.

“But I think one of the first few times I realized was when a friend of a friend’s kid in high school said our poster from the show was on their locker and all over their rooms. I was like ‘Really?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, unless you watch The Vampire Diaries on Thursday nights you have nothing to talk about on Fridays.’ When somebody told me that I was like, ‘We’re a pop culture reference now; that’s so cool!'”

That kept-in-the-dark feeling stayed with Nina Dobrev throughout the series. She reveals that it was not just Julie Plec’s choice, but her own choice to know as little about the arc of her character ahead of time as possible.

“I never knew what was going to happen more than an episode in advance, let alone during the course of the series! And I liked it that way. After a few years Julie trusted us a little more and would tell people more, but I never wanted to know more than what was happening in that episode because it helped me go through what the character was going through. I wanted to be just as shocked when I read it for the first time when she felt that heartache or pain or whatever it was.”

In fact, she has not even seen the final episode that she appears in yet.

“I felt like there was closure for me and there will be closure for the character. And now the adventure begins for both me and the show, and it’ll have a different vibe and energy, but I’m looking forward to how Julie does it because she does it so well.”