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Nina Dobrev’s co-stars from The Vampire Diaries recently jumped into action to stop a stage backdrop from falling on her.
The 35-year-old actor, who played Elena in the hit CW series, took the stage at Epic Con’s “I Was Feeling Festive 2” panel in Covington, Georgia, on Friday (December 6). She was joined by her former co-stars Candice King, who played Caroline, and Kat Graham, who played Bonnie.
At one point, a backdrop nearly fell on Dobrev while she was speaking on stage, prompting her friends to come to her rescue.
In a viral video of the incident shared to X/Twitter, King and Graham could be seen jumping out of their seats and pushing the backdrop up so it didn’t fall on Dobrev. Meanwhile, Dobrev quickly got out of her chair and took off her leather jacket, seemingly confused by what had happened.
Graham and King helped push the backdrop up into its correct spot, before walking back to their seats.
“Not today, not today!” Graham hilariously told the audience, in response to the stage piece nearly falling on Dobrev. “I don’t want to see any ‘Bonnie Saves the Day’ memes, alright… I don’t want to hear it.”
The Love Hard star then hugged King, before explaining why she took off her jacket amid all the commotion.
“I thought it was a spider!” Dobrev said, prompting laughter from the audience.
Despite Graham’s attempt to avoid memes, fans have reacted to the viral moment by poking fun at how she and King saved Dobrev — much like their characters Bonnie and Caroline often saved Elena in the supernatural TV series, which ran for eight seasons.
“They’re always saving Elena to the point it’s breaking the fourth wall,” one person quipped, while another wrote: “Decades later and they are still protecting Elena.”
“Not this being an actual representation of the Elena, Caroline, and Bonnie dynamic????” a third person wrote.
Others quipped about how Dobrev took off her jacket when the backdrop fell.
“She dropped her coat like it was on fire or an unwanted boyfriend,” one user wrote, while another added: “Was the jacket holding her back? She slipped outta that thing real fast.”
During Epic Con over the weekend, Dobrev took to Instagram to share a video of herself at the event with King and Graham. In the clip, Graham stood in between her two friends, as they recreated a picture from their days on the set of The Vampire Diaries.
“We’re still just kids,” she wrote in the caption of the clip, which was set to Simple Plan’s song “I’m Just a Kid.”
The Vampire Diaries reunion comes weeks after Dobrev announced that she and her longtime partner, Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, are engaged.
In an interview with Vogue last October, White explained how he wanted to surprise the actor when popping the question, so he sent her a fake invitation from CFDA/Vogue, which asked her to get dinner with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour.
“He made the invite look so legitimate,” Dobrev said.
However, when she opened the door to the restaurant, she discovered that only a photographer and the professional snowboarder were there. “I went into shock. I just froze and stared at him,” Dobrev said.
According to the Perks of Being a Wallflower star, she doesn’t remember how the proposal occurred. However, she could recall that when it happened, White “said all the right things.” Once she said yes, the pair were joined by the rest of their friends and family, and they all had champagne to celebrate.
“Eventually we realized, other than the caviar, we hadn’t eaten anything. So we ordered Shake Shack and dumplings to the Golden Swan,” Dobrev said.
