Warner from Legally Blonde Grew Up to Play Elena’s Guardian on the Vampire Diaries, Then Spent Years Pitching the Writers on a Hookup and Posting R-Rated Fan Fiction About It Under a Fake Name

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I was today years old when I realized this was the same man…

Matt Davis played Warner in Legally Blonde, then landed on The Vampire Diaries as the history teacher who dates Elena’s aunt Jenna and moves into the Gilbert house as her guardian after Jenna dies. Then he started pitching the writers on a scene where Alaric and Elena hook up. The showrunner shut it down on a live stage, calling the campaign “totally unacceptable.”

Julie Plec used the phrase on stage at PaleyFest in 2012. Matt Davis had been lobbying her to write a romance between Alaric Saltzman and Elena Gilbert, the teenager his character was written to protect.

The problem was the family chart. Alaric had been married to Elena’s biological mother, Isobel. He dated her aunt Jenna. After Jenna died, he moved into the Gilbert house and became Elena and Jeremy’s legal guardian. Fans who called it “stepdad shipping” were describing the canon.

Davis didn’t hint at it. Days before that PaleyFest panel he told TV Guide, “There’s a lot of sexual tension between Alaric and Elena; you can’t deny it. I’m surprised he hasn’t snuck into her bed already.” He was also writing the pairing himself, posting mini-fic under the Twitter alias Ernesto Riley, some of it sexual enough that Plec refused to read one piece aloud because it was “actually R-rated.”

Young man with slicked-back brown hair wearing a grey blazer smirking in the back seat of a car. — A young man in a grey blazer flashes a smug smirk from the back seat of a car in a scene from Legally Blonde.

He came back to it. In a 2016 cast interview he floated an Alaric, Elena and Bonnie threesome while his colleagues sat stunned. Reddit called it “icky.”

Two men in black jackets sitting at a dark bar, one with light brown hair looking sideways, the other with dark hair staring forward. — Two men in black jackets lean against a dimly lit bar together in a scene from The Vampire Diaries.

The writers gave him romance, just never that one. They paired Alaric with Jenna, then Meredith, then Jo, with Elena set up as the matchmaker. The Legally Blonde connection runs 20 years deep: Davis was 22 when he shot Warner Huntington III, the boyfriend who dumps Elle Woods because a future senator needs to marry “a Jackie, not a Marilyn.” He’s said Warner “cemented that image of myself in people’s minds as the waspy douche bag,” and that for years strangers just called him “that asshole from Legally Blonde.”