NINA'S NIGHT OUT
The sci-fi superstar paints the town red. Plus, see a day in the life of the actress here.
By Aaron Gell; Photographs by: Jennifer Livingston; Fashion Editor: Joanna Hillman Aug 17, 2017
At the Spotted Pig, the New York gastropub as celebrated for its famous patrons as for its char-grilled burger, the arrival of an actress best known for her work on the CW series The Vampire Diaries normally wouldn’t cause much of a stir. But when Nina Dobrev makes her entrance on a lovely evening in June, heads do turn—and not just because she is channeling Jackie Kennedy in an oversize pink coat by L.K. Bennett and Dior sunglasses. Dobrev’s canine companion, Maverick, an adorable and impeccably well-behaved border collie–Australian shepherd mix, is garnering her own fair share of attention.
“I call her the world’s chillest dog,” Dobrev says as she settles into a corner booth with the puppy, who’s named, of course, after Tom Cruise’s character in Top Gun. She adopted Maverick from a shelter a few months back while still grieving the death of her beloved cat, Lynx (immortalized in many an Instagram post). “She rescued me as much as I rescued her,” adds Dobrev. “I was so lost after Lynx passed, but Maverick brought me back to life.”
"The things I want to do now aren't necessarily the things that are expected of me. I don't want to play a teenager anymore."
The actress, 28, who plays a medical student who embarks on a group near-death experience in this month’s supernatural thriller Flatliners, is feeling under the weather. “I thought it was food poisoning, but today my throat just hurts and my head hurts,” she says, ordering a hot toddy. “I also had an IV this morning,” she offers, showing off the tiny hole in her arm and heartily endorsing the treatment, a nonprescription pick-me-up. “I got an anti-inflammatory, antinausea megadose of vitamin C and electrolytes, and I added B12 and something else.” When I reassure her that she’s the picture of health—angelic, in fact—she shakes her head. “Women are lucky because we get to cover it with makeup. You should have seen me 20 minutes ago!”
Despite years in the limelight—six seasons on The Vampire Diaries and four before that on Degrassi: The Next Generation—Dobrev is intent on maintaining her regular-girl humility. Her family emigrated from Bulgaria to Toronto when she was two, and they struggled financially for years. “We didn’t come from money,” she explains. “In the beginning, we lived with another family in a one-bedroom apartment. My parents had to work really hard.” While her friends all had “elaborate wardrobes,” she says, her family shopped at a local thrift store, Value Village. To take the sting out, her mom nicknamed the store “Versace.” Meanwhile, the adolescent Nina pored over self-help books—“The Secret or something like that”—and willed good fortune to come her way. It seems to have worked. “Eventually I got to go to an actual Versace fashion show and sit in the front row,” she says. “And now I go to vintage stores on purpose. It’s funny how your perspective changes.”
That modest background helped shape her political views as well. “I come from an immigrant family, and I think it’s unacceptable to treat anyone like that,” Dobrev, who now lives in Los Angeles, says of Donald Trump’s “build the wall” rhetoric. “Hopefully he’ll get impeached. Or indicted. Or both. He just doesn’t act like a president. He acts like a reality star on a terrible, horrible show that should never be aired. And he’s responsible for incredibly important decisions for the country that I live in, so my opinion does matter whether or not I had a chance to vote.” Still, Dobrev knows that her vocal support for Hillary Clinton may have cost her a few fans. “Whenever I did one of those posts, I was inundated with negative comments, some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen written,” she says. “But I’m entitled to my opinion, and if you don’t want to see the things I’m saying, don’t follow me.”
Besides, there’s plenty of other material on Dobrev’s feed—most notably the videos of her engaging in various daredevil adventures: skydiving, rock climbing, bungee jumping, swimming with sharks, wakeboarding, and even riding a water-powered hoverboard. During one Vampire Diaries hiatus, she even backpacked alone in Europe and East Asia without having booked a single hotel room or planned an itinerary. “My rule of thumb is, I’ll try anything once,” she says. “I have a healthy—or possibly unhealthy—obsession with trying things for the first time.” Despite the show’s rabid fan base around the world, Dobrev went totally unrecognized. “Nobody imagines me to be by myself backpacking, so they just think, ‘It can’t be her.’”
It’s a pretty bold list of hobbies, especially for someone who says she gets anxious when she’s away from her puppy. But that seeming contradiction—the tension between Dobrev’s grit and her vulnerability—is what makes her so appealing onscreen. Which isn’t to say she’s fearless in real life: She almost bailed on that bungee jump at the last second. “Every cell in your body is like, ‘Why would you do this?’ ” she says. “Plus, unlike skydiving, you can see the rocks clearly and imagine what would happen if you went splat.”
Of course, Dobrev’s most infamous leap into the unknown was her decision in 2015 to leave The Vampire Diaries, sending fans, costars, and network executives into a tailspin. Though it seemed like a surprising choice, Dobrev insists that she never considered staying beyond her six-year contract. “That was the plan from the get-go,” she says. “If anything, the fact that [leaving] terrified me drove me even more. I needed to feel that fear of ‘Oh, my God, what if I never get a job again?’ That just made me want to work five times as hard to make sure that didn’t happen.”
"I have a healthy—or possibly unhealthy—obsession with trying things for the first time."
Her roles since have been sparse (xXx: Return of Xander Cage and the upcoming Crash Pad and Departures), but that’s only because “the things I want to do aren’t necessarily the things that are expected of me,” she says. “I don’t want to play a teenager anymore. I want to play adult roles and be challenged and work with great filmmakers and tell incredible stories, and that has meant being really picky.”
Dobrev has also been working behind the scenes. She’s set to produce one movie and co-write another, and she’s also directing a short film. Meanwhile, she’s in New York to hone her comedic chops, taking an Improv 101 class with the Upright Citizens Brigade. A few days after our dinner, she’ll appear in the final showcase, scrambling with a classmate to invent a sketch on the fly based on a word suggested by an audience member. But even with her bona fides on TV and the big screen, Dobrev is nervous. “It’s scary. I might crash and burn, but that’s how I’m going to get better at it,” she says.
The medical students in Flatliners take some pretty crazy risks too, inducing their own near deaths in order to investigate the afterlife. As for Dobrev, she thinks we’re simply not meant to know what happens when we die. She mentions a widely held theory of reincarnation. “It’s like people say, if you do something really bad, you come back as an animal, but I think it’s the opposite,” she says, giving her puppy’s neck a good scratch.
“Right, Maverick? When you fulfill your destiny and do everything you were meant to do, maybe that’s when you come back as a dog and get to eat and sleep and cuddle all day and have the best life ever!”
Nina Dobrev Interview - Nina Dobrev for harper by Harper's Bazaar