Legacies Star Chris Lee Teases His Damon Performance in “Salvatore: The Musical!”

Tonight’s episode of Legacies will see the students at the Salvatore School put on a musical, but not just any musical. While most schools take on say The Music Man, the students on The CW series will use musical theater to tell the story of the Salvatore School’s founding — which, of course, means throwing it back to The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. As photos and a recently-released clip from the episode, appropriately titled “Salvatore: The Musical!”, have revealed, several of the students will be taking up some very familiar roles. Among those is actor Chris Lee whose character Kaleb ends up cast as The Vampire Diaries favorite Damon Salvatore, originally played by Ian Sommerhalder. For Lee, the iconic role equated to some big shoes to fill, but as he told ComicBook.com, he did a lot of preparation for the role.

“I mean, that was the fun part, right? You know, the research that I’ve done on the show prior to starting the role of Kaleb was very significant so I knew Damon and I knew how Ian played it and I loved it,” Lee said. “And it’s very iconic, you know, the speech, the joke, I mean, just this nuance and his kind of mysterious, scary vibe, just like his essence is really the thing to capture outside of the specific different faces and other isms, it’s really just about capturing the spirit.”

He went on to explain that it was important for him to craft his portrayal of Damon from the perspective that it wasn’t he who was playing the role, but rather his character, Kaleb, playing Damon.

“And the important thing was that I didn’t want to do too good of a job because to me, that’s more Chris playing Damon than Kaleb playing Damon,” Lee said. “And we don’t know if Kaleb is a good actor. We don’t know if he’s good at that. But what we do know is that he honors and respects the crap out of Damon Salvatore like being the vampire of vampires. And so I think that Kaleb’s objective was truly just to prove he deserves to play Damon. So, I really focus as Chris on just capturing the essence just the vibe until when you’re like ‘Oh yeah, that’s some Damon stuff like that. Yeah, that’s exactly it.’”

But it wasn’t just research into the character that Lee went into the episode with. He also has professional experience in musical theater, something he said made making “Salvatore: The Musical” that much more enjoyable.

“I’m definitely a musician. I make music, write music, producing, and I also come from musical theater. That’s my intro into the performing arts and it was something that I’ve missed greatly. And I didn’t even realize the extent of that feeling until we started,” he said. “Really, until we started shooting the performances that like just being on a, even though it’s like no audience there except for the camera crew, just being on stage and the costumes and having to hit marks and the lights and just singing is was ‘Oh man!’ And performing this other guy… the fun part is I’m playing a dude performing another dude so it was a real treat for all of us that were involved. Scary for some, but definitely thrilling for others and maybe both for a couple of people as well. So we had a lot of fun.”

Legacies airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT following episodes of Walker. “Salvatore: The Musical!” airs tonight, February 4th.