Welcome back to the coolest supernatural school.
Fifteen years after the first book in Richelle Mead's beloved series was released, the Vampire Academy TV series finally premiered Sept. 15 on Peacock.
Created by The Vampire Diaries and Legacies' Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre, the teen drama follows two girls—one a Royal vampire and the other her half-vamp protector—as they navigate friendships, romances and typical teen problems at St. Vladimir's Academy. Of course, they also have to deal with a deadly threat to vampire society.
While Vampire Academy received a movie treatment in 2014 that massively changed elements of Mead's story, fans can expect the new series to remain loyal to the source material while also keeping them on their toes by switching up the timeline, introducing characters early and changing the setting of the school.
And the biggest adjustment came in the series' opening scene.
Check out the biggest changes Vampire Academy made in its journey from page to screen...
Fans didn't have to wait long to see a major change from the book as the opening scene of the Vampire Academy TV series—which sees several members of the Dragomir family killed in a car—takes place before author Richelle Mead's story begins.
"We realized there's a whole season worth of great opportunity right here just in the past," co-creator Julie Plec told E! News. "And so, why not use that as text instead of as memory? Why not begin our story where we can take advantage of some of these great twists and turns?"
Co-creator Marguerite MacIntyre added that viewers can expect to see more changes, but that longtime fans will "see everything that you love eventually."
"What we've done is played with time," she explained. "If you loved something in book six, you might see it in the first season. If you love something in book two, it might be in season five."
The decision to begin the TV series with what were only flashbacks in the books allowed Plec and MacIntyre to deepen the friendship between Rose (Sisi Stringer) and Lissa (Daniela Nieves), the show's most important relationship.
"So much of Rose and Lissa's friendship—what they experienced growing up, the things they saw, the trauma that happened to them, the losses they suffered—was told as part of their backstory," Plec explained to TVLine. "The first thing we did was ask, 'Why would we want to tell that as a memory when we could watch it happen in real time?' So we backed up the beginning of the story in the context of the girls' friendship, while still doing other elements of the story that were specific to the first book."
After creating (and then expanding) The Vampire Diaries universe for years, Plec said she was excited to establish a new supernatural mythology.
"We took all the incredible inspiration from Richelle Mead's books—all her rules, her mythology, her characters—and we folded that into this vampire dominion that we built from scratch," Plec told Entertainment Weekly. "I've never done a world build that intricate before. It was a million times harder than anything I've done."
That includes creating a new language, which was built by linguist Dave Peterson, who previously crafted Dothraki for Game of Thrones.
While St. Vladimir's Academy is set deep in the woods of Montana in the books, the showrunners decided to move the supernatural school to a more international, lush location. Additionally, the vampires' royal court is no longer in Pennsylvania, moving both locations overseas.
"It's in this beautiful, epic setting because we were able to shoot it in Spain," MacIntyre told TVLine. "So you get all this visual candy, plus the whole world comes together in one dominion. Nothing is separate anymore. It's a cool way to tell the story."
In their mission to modernize Vampire Academy, which was first published in 2007, Plec and MacIntyre prioritized diversifying their cast.
"No one told us that we needed to have uniform accents or any kind of cultural uniformity," Plec said in an interview with TVLine. "They let us celebrate casting from all over the world, letting these actors be their true, authentic selves, rather than just casting based on what it says the character looks like in the books."
The series made several tweaks to the relationship between Rose and Dmitri (Kieran Moore), her guardian love interest, including changing their ages "because that was a little something that we might not do now," MacIntyre told J-14. "She's still learning, but she's of age. He's also not her teacher." (In the first book, Rose is 17 and Dmitri is 24.)
While "it's all a little bit different," MacIntyre assured fans that " the romance is there...and actually the depth of their relationship is really strong."
While the character doesn't make his debut until the second book in Mead's series, the show is introducing fan-favorite Adrian early. E! News exclusively reported that Leo Woodall, who will appear in the upcoming second season of The White Lotus, is set to play St. Vladimir's Academy's bad boy.
Adrian will make his debut in episode six, and Peacock described the royal Moroi as "charming, devastatingly good looking, and fun loving," adding that he has "a penchant for art collecting, throwing ragers, and drinking too much…a flaw less to do with addiction than a battle to medicate an inner darkness he tries to hide."
Showrunner Julie Plec also teased Adrian's arrival in an interview with E! News this summer, referring to his signature line from the books, saying, "You might hear the phrase 'Hello, little dhampir.'"
The first four episodes of Vampire Academy are streaming now on Peacock. New episodes premiere weekly on Thursdays.
(E! and Peacock are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)