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The Untold Truth Of Nina Dobrev Revealed

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Long before she was staking vampires in Mystic Falls, Nina Dobrev was doing back walkovers on a gymnastics mat in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Nina Dobrev’s path to becoming one of The CW’s biggest stars started thousands of miles from Hollywood, in a household that valued art, athletics, and hard work in equal measure. By the time she landed her breakout role playing a doppelgänger trio on ‘The Vampire Diaries’, she’d already logged years as a competitive gymnast, a ballet dancer, and a Toronto sitcom regular. Here’s what the record actually shows about how she got there — and who she dated along the way.

• Born Nikolina Konstantinova Dobreva in Sofia, Bulgaria, on January 9, 1989, she immigrated to Scarborough, Ontario, at age two and grew up bilingual in Bulgarian and English before also learning French.
• Dobrev broke through playing teenage mother Mia Jones on ‘Degrassi: The Next Generation’ from 2006 to 2009, working alongside co-star Aubrey Graham — better known today as Drake.
• On ‘The Vampire Diaries’, she played three separate doppelgänger characters — Elena Gilbert, Katherine Pierce, and Amara — across six seasons before exiting the main cast in 2015.

A Childhood Built On Gymnastics And Ballet

Dobrev’s parents raised her in a home split between art and logic — her mother worked as an artist, her father as a computer specialist — and that mix showed up early in her extracurriculars. Before she ever auditioned for a acting role, she competed as a rhythmic gymnast, trained in ballet, and studied visual arts, discipline that came from years in the gym rather than a drama classroom. She carried that training into Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Scarborough, the same performing-arts high school that has produced several Canadian entertainers, before briefly enrolling in a sociology program at Ryerson University in Toronto.

College didn’t last long. Dobrev dropped out of Ryerson to chase acting full time, a decision that paid off almost immediately once Canadian television came calling.

From Degrassi To Mystic Falls

Dobrev’s first real break came on ‘Degrassi: The Next Generation’, where she played Mia Jones, a teenage mother navigating high school in Toronto, from 2006 to 2009. Her co-star on that show was Aubrey Graham — the actor who’d go on to become the rapper Drake — giving Dobrev an early front-row seat to a co-star’s transformation into a global star of his own.

That Canadian television grounding set up the role that made her internationally famous. In 2009, Dobrev joined The CW’s supernatural drama ‘The Vampire Diaries’, where she spent six seasons juggling three characters born from the show’s doppelgänger mythology: doe-eyed Elena Gilbert, scheming Katherine Pierce, and the ancient Amara. Playing all three inside one series is the kind of range that would fit right in among the lookalike double-takes covered in Celebrity Doppelgängers Who Look Freakishly Alike, except in Dobrev’s case, one actress was doing the work of three. She departed the main cast in 2015 as the show moved toward its later seasons.

Three characters, one actress, six seasons — the doppelgänger plot that turned Nina Dobrev into a CW franchise unto herself.

Life After Mystic Falls

Dobrev didn’t stay locked into the CW ecosystem. She moved into features with ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ in 2012, followed by the buddy-cop comedy ‘Let’s Be Cops’ in 2014 and the horror-comedy ‘The Final Girls’ in 2015. In 2019, she took a shot at network sitcom work, joining CBS’s ‘Fam’. The stretch showed a deliberate attempt to shed the Elena Gilbert label and build a résumé that wasn’t tied to one franchise.

Relationships On And Off Screen

Dobrev’s most talked-about relationship was with her own ‘Vampire Diaries’ co-star, Ian Somerhalder, whom she dated from 2010 to 2013 — a real-life pairing that fans spent years hoping would translate into the show’s central love triangle staying together. After the split, she had a brief romance with Derek Hough, which came with an unusual footnote: it didn’t end her friendship with Hough’s sister, Julianne, with whom Dobrev has remained close. That kind of relationship crossover isn’t unheard of in Hollywood — it’s the same territory covered in Inside Megan Fox’s Relationship History — but Dobrev and Julianne Hough kept their bond intact regardless.

More recently, Dobrev began dating Olympic snowboarder Shaun White in early 2020, pairing a ‘Vampire Diaries’ alum with one of the most decorated halfpipe riders in X Games and Olympic history.

Dobrev’s run on ‘The Vampire Diaries’ ended in 2015, but the show she left behind is still the reason casting directors keep handing her scripts where she has to play more than one person at once — which, for an actress who started out doing back walkovers in a Sofia gymnastics gym, is about as on-brand as it gets.