Kevin Williamson, who is well known for writing I Know What You Did Last Summer and some of the Scream movies, and for creating Dawson's Creek almost wasn't part of the series.

"In the beginning when I read it, I didn't want to be involved with it because I felt it was a sort of Twilight rip-off, no matter which came first," He admitted to The Independent.

"The premise was exactly the same: girl falls in love with vampire, and I felt that it had been done and that nobody was going to do another vampire story. But then Julie kept telling me to keep reading the books and then I began to realise that it was a story about a small town, about that town's underbelly and about what lurks under the surface."

Fans of the book series were livid when they learned that Nina Dobrev landed the role of Elena Gilbert. But the truth is that Dobrev didn't impress the showrunners with her audition.

"The funniest story about the first impression of Nina is that she didn't make an impression," Julie explained to EW. "None of us remembered seeing her for the first time. And then she, through her agents and the casting directors, said, 'Hey, listen—I was sick that day, I didn't do my best work, I really really want this part." [She] put herself on tape, which then got sent to us and it was so magical and so perfect that she basically had the job from that minute forward."

The network wanted to be in business with Ashlee Simpson.

Said co-executive producer and director Marcos Siega at a SAG event shortly after the series' debut :

"We couldn't find the girl we wanted. The network wanted us to hire Ashlee Simpson. ...But Nina sent this DVD back and we all were home looking, searching, and we came in the next day saying, 'We should look at Nina again.' We showed it to Peter Roth, and Peter only saw her on that tape and he said, 'That's her'."

Ashley was riding a wave thanks to the success of High School Musical, and there have been many rumors that she was offered the role. However, she is said to have declined to star in the one-and-done Hellcats.

Yup, it seems the producers have a thing for the Ashleys.

"Half of Hollywood I think went out for the role, for all our roles," Nina told E! News of the difficulty in getting the role. "I guess I did something right, here I am. We had to discover and find our characters. Every episode we learned something more and something more, and eventually we created and molded these amazing, awesome characters."