Back to School

Candice Accola, a Lake Highland grad, plays a catty high schooler on The Vampire Diaries. By Jay Boyar

When Candice Accola is performing in a scene on The Vampire Diaries—playing high-school student Caroline Forbes—she often thinks about Orlando.

Specifically, the 22-year-old actress thinks back to the days when she was a real-life high-school student at Lake Highland Preparatory School. In fact, she says that reflecting on “the dynamics of the girls” in her old classes helps her to figure out how to play her mean-girl character on the CW television series.

“In every high school there’s going to be cliques,” Accola explains during a recent visit home from Atlanta. “Some people are a little more snarky than others. They say one thing to your face and then another thing behind your back. I’ve definitely had experiences with those kinds of girls, and now I’m playing one.”

Accola is the very picture of all-American girlhood. Shiny blonde hair. Big, sincere eyes. Gentle, Suzy Creamcheese smile. Dressed in a soft pink jacket, pencil-thin jeans and stylish gray boots, the articulate actress looks more like a popular cheerleader on a shopping expedition than the catty outsider she plays on TV.

Accola grew up in Edgewood, south of Orlando. Her parents and teenage brother live on Lake Jessamine; her father, Dr. Kevin Accola, is a top cardio-vascular and thoracic surgeon in Orlando.

At Lake Highland, Candice played Daisy Mae in a middle-school production of Li’l Abner. But her focus in those days was more on music than acting.

“When I was 8 or 9 years old, I came home and told my mom that I was starting a girl group and that we were going to be the next Spice Girls,” she recalls in a voice that’s both girlish and precise. That group, called Girl Zone, sang at retirement communities and holiday parties.

In her early teens, Accola found an agent in California. Then, in the middle of her junior year at Lake Highland, she moved to Los Angeles. Six months later she had a deal for a CD called It’s Always the Innocent Ones. (She finished high school through correspondence and graduated with her class in 2005.)

That CD led to touring as a backup singer with Miley Cyrus and to roles in such films as Juno and on such shows as How I Met Your Mother. When she snagged one of the leads in The Vampire Diaries, which is in its first season, she moved to Atlanta, where the series is based.

Her character on the show is not a vampire and, in fact, doesn’t even know that vampires inhabit her town. That, among other things, may change.

“What’s exciting about Caroline is that there’s so much room for her to grow,” Accola says. “And there’s room for me to grow with her.”