After two years of playing Stefan Salvatore, ‘The Vampire Diaries” resident perfect boyfriend and all-around nice guy (who just so happens to be a perpetually 17-year-old vampire), Paul Wesley makes no secret that he loves the murderous turn his character has taken recently.

Now that Stefan has become “the Ripper,” nicknamed as such for the savage way the formerly docile vampire tears apart people’s bodies as he feeds on them (yes, pretty brutal for a CW teen soap), he couldn’t be happier.

“It’s everything I wanted,” he told AOL TV last week when we visited the Atlanta-area ‘Vampire Diaries’ set. “The thing is, it’s a transition. It’s gradual. We open up this season — and I don’t want to give too much away — but it’s kind of like we’re at the precipice of something happening. We’re at this point where he’s still holding on to a bit of that old part of himself.”

But Good Stefan doesn’t stick around for long. “As the story progresses we see his journey, his struggle, his disease take over, this darkness, and it sort of turns into a Stefan that has no morals,” Wesley explained. “That’s really, really fun to play. I get to play a whole new character and I get to do something that I have never done, and the audiences get to see me in a way that they never would’ve expected.”

Cast and crew on ‘The Vampire Diaries’ are notoriously tight-lipped, and rightfully so, since each episode of the series contains more twists than a water slide at Six Flags. But through the cagey responses and deflecting jokes during our interview, Wesley was so certain about one answer that he didn’t even let us finish the question. When asked if he preferred playing Good Stefan or Ripper Stefan, we couldn’t even complete the thought before he responded.

Read more…