PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT REISE

“I hope fans aren’t like, ‘Something new?! NOOO!’” laughs Zane Phillips. It’s a Thursday afternoon in the UK – morning in the US – and I’m speaking with the latest addition to The CW’s fantasy drama Legacies over Zoom as he takes a rare day off from being gutted, ripped apart and flayed alive as his character Ben, aka Prometheus. The rising actor says he’s “nervous” about how the demigod – literally, he’s thousands of years old – has been perceived by fans, in spite of the countless fan accounts championing his character’s relationship with resident werewolf Jed (Ben Levin), which – fun fact! – made history for the expansive Vampire Diaries Universe as the first MLM (man loving man) romance. “Honestly, it’s been overwhelming, almost,” says Zane, who looks as far removed from Ben as possible with a backwards baseball cap and glasses, albeit still deity-like. “I’ve always just been nervous, but what’s really cool is that it has shaken things up, but hopefully in a positive way. This is fresh. This is what people have been asking for.”

First introduced in the ninth episode of season four, Ben/Prometheus was born circa 3000 B.C.E to a mortal mother and a divine father. He was later damned to eternal torture after harnessing and stealing magic to aid his best friend and lover, Ashur. After spending thousands of years savaged by monsters, Ben emerges in the present day – badly charred with no tongue, gruesome yes – and finds refuge at the Salvatore Boarding School for the Young & Gifted. If you’ve ever tuned into The Vampire Diaries Universe, you’ll understand this is just another regular, mundane day at the office. (“Give this man a sword,” Zane jokes. “Let him do some fighting back!”) There, he immediately bonds with Jed, the former bully of Legacies and werewolf alpha who’s been with the show since its inception. “He had this one person who he loved and considered his only love for 5000 years, and suddenly there’s someone else who is approaching that place in his heart,” Zane says of his perplexing arc. “As much as he doesn’t want to try and force anything, it’s taking a lot for him to be like, ‘This is the one. This is actually someone who could help me heal from 5000 years of trauma.’” 

The Vampire Diaries Universe memorably launched back in 2009 with the Nina Dobrev-led series of the same name and has, so far, spawned two monumentally successful spin-offs: The Originals and Legacies. Over the course of 17 turbulent seasons with witches, werewolves, hybrids, doppelgangers, leprechauns, mummies and other bloodcurdling forces of darkness, the franchise has proudly flown the flag for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and pansexual communities, although a major romance between two men hasn’t been depicted until recently. What makes this particular pairing groundbreaking, also, is its rejection of harmful LGBTQ+ tropes and stereotypes that have plagued queer characters for decades on-screen. Instead of the classic “coming out” storyline with the inevitable attached trauma (there’s trauma in Legacies, of course, due to the plethora of nefarious beasts that plague their world but that’s besides the point), Ben and Jed’s identities are simply accepted by the other characters and it’s never presented as an issue within the narrative which is – and I cannot stress this enough – how it should be. “I think that’s really effective,” Zane tells me, “and I think that’s what I really like because television shows, especially fantasy, oh my god, you have so much room to say, ‘You have power in so many different ways.’ As much as I joke about giving Ben a sword, there’s so much more power than just swinging around a sword and using spells and breaking people in half. There is power in trust. There is power in creating family. There’s power, as trite as it may sound, in love – and to say that love actually empowers us is a very queer sensibility.”