Vampire Diaries: Marguerite MacIntyre remembers Liz Forbes

With one season left in The Vampire Diaries’ run, we decided it was time to start collecting everyone’s final diary entries. Every week during the final season, EW is asking those involved with the show to look back on one of their favorite moments from the series. So grab your tissues and join us on this trip down a vampire-filled memory lane.

This week, Marguerite MacIntyre looks back on her time as Sheriff Liz Forbes…

I enjoyed so much of what I’ve done. It’s been really silly and fun to go from being a character who knows nothing to being somebody who finally knows some stuff, and it turns out both her daughter and her best friend are vampires. That’s a good road. That’s pretty fun stuff.

By the time that Liz died, I felt like she died early, but she died a very contented woman. If she had died in season 1 or 2, she would’ve felt a bit like a lost soul dying, not having ever really gotten a lot of what she wanted out of life. The way that she grew through those moments with Caroline — it grew Caroline, it grew their relationship, and it grew Liz a lot.

I could not have loved Liz’s death more for a lot of reasons — what it did for Caroline, what it meant for that community of people to be powerless over this one thing that they seem to be the most powerful over: death. There’s so much death in that series over the years. One of the most shocking, and to me moving in a weird way, but just so shocking was Mayor Lockwood with Klaus. It’s so sudden when he drowns her, and it’s terrifying — but that felt human. It felt like a murder. There’s a lot of different kinds of death, but they’d never really played that slow, human, it’s-just-not-going-to-get-better illness before Liz, and it grounded the show for a little while in this different reality in a way that I thought was great. To me, it felt like a beautiful way to end that character’s journey.

Listen, I always thought, there’s a world where this show ends where it’s just me and Matt at the Mystic Grill, we’re the only ones alive in the entire town being like, “I don’t know what just happened, but cheers.” We dodged so many bullets! (And also in my case shot a few misaimed bullets as well, poor Jeremy. I took a lot of heat for that.)

I thought I was going to be doing the show for a few episodes in season 1, and it ended up being six years. That was obviously thrilling because I was madly in love with everybody and really enjoyed doing it.

When I think about the show, the biggest thing that I always think is when I first come back to set after I’ve been gone for a little while and what a fantastic thing it is. It is like a reunion every single time. It’s such a homecoming. I could not love those people more. You don’t always have really warm and wonderful experiences on sets. That’s going to be a tough one to top.

For Liz, I hope somewhere in some alternate universe she’s having a bourbon with Damon and yucking it up. Because that sounds like fun.

—As told to Samantha Highfill

The Vampire Diaries airs Fridays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.