We've wanted Ian Somerhalder to bite our necks and drink our blood ever since he said, "Hello, brother," on The Vampire Diaries in 2009. We've wanted a relationship like Damon and Elena's since season four, and we were totally jealous when Somerhalder started dating Nina Dobrev in real-life.
We got to see Damon for eight long seasons of TVD, and it was heaven...until the show ended. What do you do when your favorite show ends and there's literally no more Damon-related fanfiction to read? You start watching his other work from before he became Damon, of course. Roles where he's a bit younger and even cuter. Did we mention we're Somerhalder fans?
Only true Somerhalder fans will remember Somerhalder's short, yet lovable, role as Boone on ABC's series Lost. Boone had one of the saddest exits in season one, but we saw him again (with everyone else), right around the time he was just starting on TVD.
Let's take a look at Somerhalder's career before he became Damon.
His First Big Break Was 'Young Americans'
Unsurprisingly and rightfully so, Somerhalder was a model in his early career. At age 16, he was making more money than doctors and that scared him. So when he turned 17 he decided he wanted to go into acting.
His first big role came when he was 22 years old, in the show Young Americans, which was the spin-off of the show Dawson's Creek. He played Hamilton Fleming, the son of the dean of the school. Somerhalder only played eight episodes in 2000.
A year later, he had a small role as Josh in Life as a House, alongside Hayden Christensen, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas.
In 2002, he had a bigger role in Changing Hearts, appeared on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and got his next big role in The Rules of Attraction, as the bisexual character Paul Denton, who definitely had some Damon vibes. He starred alongside James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, and Jessica Biel.
Somerhalder entered the CW, in 2004, when he played Adam Knight for six episodes of Smallville, the coming of age story of Superman, played by Tom Welling. Knight was a resurrected teenager that Lex Luther turned bad to use him to spy on Clark Kent.
That same year, he worked on a couple of shorts until he got his biggest role ever, Boone Carlyle.
Boone Was The First Major Character Death But Always Remained In Our Hearts
If you were a Lost fan, you probably have some really great coping skills to watch some of the most stressful scenes on television. Between the horrific opening scene of Oceanic Flight 815 breaking in half mid-flight, the tons of life or death moments with polar bears, weird dark cloud-like creatures, and the Others, Lost truly tested our nerves. To this day we're still not sure what happened in the series or how to explain it.
Before the show got really complicated though, Somerhalder's Boone Carlyle was a part of the group of survivors that mysteriously lived through the plane crash. Boone was the pretty rich boy who was flying with his step-sister Shannon, who was the typical spoiled brat.
In flashbacks, we saw that Shannon used Boone for his money because she knew he was secretly in love with her. When he realized Shannon would never love him, he became John Locke's apprentice and helped him on various missions throughout the island, and eventually found the Hatch. After Locke had a dream about a small plane sitting on a cliff above it, he ordered Boone to climb into the plane to push it off the cliff to help open the Hatch. When he does the plane falls off the cliff and Boone gets injured.
During the 20th episode of season one, and after a slow painful death, Boone is the first major character to die. Through flashbacks, Boone has cameos throughout the series until the very end, appearing in 31 episodes.
The character pushed Somerhalder through the door and soon he was getting more roles that would lead to Damon. He has one regret about his time as Boone though.
"I often think back to why they killed me on Lost,” he said in 2015 at the convention Wizard World. "People like to see conflicted people, but through humor. Humor is a medicine for pain. It’s a Band-Aid. Boone, unfortunately, and this was my fault as an actor, Boone was a little (expletive). Boone was a spoiled, rich little bastard who couldn’t smile to save his life.
"I’m pretty funny, as far as my friends go. They say I’m typically a pretty funny person. Why on earth, living in Hawaii, having so much fun, skinny dipping with our cast three days a week, why didn’t Boone (expletive) smile more?"
During Elle's Thirst Trap Somerhalder said that if he had to say no to doing TVD or Lost he would have said no to TVD because he was barely on Lost, and wanted to make more of it. But he did reveal that he used Sawyer as inspiration for Damon later on.
After his time on Lost, Somerhalder appeared in the films Pulse, The Sensation of Sight, The Lost Samaritan, and The Tournament. He might have even been cast on a completely different vampire show, in 2008, though, when he tried going up for Jason Stackhouse in HBO's True Blood.
It would have been cool to see him in his home state fighting vampires and werepanthers, but instead, he got Damon. So it all worked out in the end. Now Somerhalder can't even escape vampires. Recently he played Luther Swan, in V Wars, where people are turned into vampires. If he doesn't act fast he could be pigeonholed and eventually cast in a reboot Dracula film. But would that be so terrible?