Years trapped in a prison world didn’t teach him a thing! Chris Wood returns as Kai, the Vampire Diaries villain fans love to hate, during the Thursday, February 6, episode of Legacies. The hour, titled “Kai Parker Screwed Us,” marks the actor’s first appearance on the spinoff.
Kai will find himself at odds with his nieces, Josie (Kaylee Bryant) and Lizzie (Jenny Boyd), as well as almost brother-in-law Alaric (Matthew Davis) as the Saltzmans deal with the fallout of being sent to the prison world where they trapped him years earlier. Meanwhile, last viewers saw Hope (Danielle Rose Russell), the tribrid was attempting to retrieve her found family via a broken ascendant.
“[The reunion] is every bit as confusing and full of anger and spite as you would imagine that it would be,” Wood, 31, told E! News in an interview published on Thursday. “Kai loves nothing more than a toy, and for him, someone to play mind games with, to torture, to trick. I mean, that’s when he feels things. So that’s his one fuzzy place is ruining people’s equilibrium, so it’s full of that.”
However, Kai may meet his match in the form of Josie. “Kai at first still views her as that little kid, the one death that got away. He at first thinks it’s going to be easy, and that she’s stupid, and he can just get her to do whatever, and then I think there’s a weird pride that eventually comes up when he starts to see her fight back and trying to outsmart him,” the Supergirl alum explained. “But, you know, it’s the Kai Parker brand of pride because it still involves wanting to chop her head off.”
As for how the character fits into the world of Legacies, Wood hinted at how he differs from the other villains terrorizing the magical students. “Honestly it was so great to be that sort of unique monster because the show has a very different approach to this Salvatore-based universe,” he said. “Kai is very different from anyone they’ve ever dealt with, and also he has, you know, not to quote the title of the show, but he has this deep legacy where all the characters there have heard the horror stories and know how awful he was. It just presents a really different interaction with a monster because he is a monster, just one in human form.”
The Containment alum did not miss a beat stepping back into the role either. “He has kind of no boundaries in terms of what is OK, and what is normal behavior, and he’s such an eccentric that he’s very freeing as an actor to play him,” he revealed. “No choice is really wrong with him, and the wrong choice would be not making a big one, so that part was easy to rediscover because it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. I can do whatever I want.’”
Wood made his Vampire Diaries debut in season 6, which aired in 2014. His character was last seen returning to the prison world against his will in the final season in 2017.
Legacies airs on The CW Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET.
