While the original students and townies have long grown up, the Julie Plec-helmed spinoff focuses on the next generation of supernatural kids in town, which includes Alaric and Caroline’s twins and Klaus Mikaelson’s teenage daughter, Hope (Danielle Rose Russell).

Additionally, over the course of its four seasons, several fan-favorite characters have made brief appearances, including Chris Wood’s nefarious Kai Parker, Steven R. McQueen as Jeremy Gilbert and Zach Roerig’s Matt Donovan, who’s since been promoted to the sheriff of the Virginia small town.

“Sheriff Donovan gets a reference in the first episode as the crazy local conspiracy theorist, the crazy loon in town that thinks monsters are real. That’s kinda a fun role,” Plec exclusively told Us Weekly in July 2018. “Mystic Falls has recovered. They don’t know that they have a boarding school for supernatural kids or that they have a 200-year history of vampire violence so this crazy-ass sheriff. We like to think he’s a little bit like Hopper from Stranger Things, he’s just trying to protect his small town. He knows that all the monsters are real and they have no idea.”

Several seasons after Roerig’s pilot cameo, fans were excited to learn that the Supergirl alum would bring back Kai for a February 2020 episode, titled “Kai Parker Screwed Us,” reuniting with onscreen nieces Josie Saltzman (Kaylee Bryant) and Lizzie Saltzman (Jenny Boyd).

“[The reunion] is every bit as confusing and full of anger and spite as you would imagine that it would be,” Wood teased to E! News at the time. “Kai loves nothing more than a toy, and for him, someone to play mind games with, to torture, to trick. I mean, that’s when he feels things. So that’s his one fuzzy place is ruining people’s equilibrium, so it’s full of that.”

As season 4 began airing in October 2021, TVLine confirmed that Claire Holt would reprise her role as Rebekah Mikaelson in a November episode.

“Hope is tracked down by the one person who could help her — Rebekah Mikaelson,” according to the episode’s synopsis. “Rebekah is fearful of what path Hope has chosen but makes every effort to get through to her.”

One month earlier, the Australia native gushed over her time playing the vampire and hoped to return to the supernatural role.

“I miss Rebekah a lot,” Holt exclusively told Us in September 2021. “I really do. I would love the opportunity one day to play her again. She was just such a dynamic character, and those characters don’t really come around all that often. And it was a character that the fans really connected with, and I loved that. And I loved how I got to sort of go on this journey with them for so many years. It just was such a great experience working with the people that I got to work with. They’re still my friends to this day. Spending seven years of our lives with these characters, it’s like you’re going away to college with them.”

Keep scrolling to see how many beloved TVD and Originals stars returned in the spinoff:

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This story originally appeared on: US Magazine - Author:Miranda Siwak