Bob Mahoney/The CWWhen mourning the loss of your newborn baby, it's kind of hard to strike up a romantic relationship with your baby daddy's brother. So, we totally understand why Hayley (Phoebe Tonkin) isn't exactly jumping at the chance to kiss Elijah (Daniel Gillies) on The Originals right now. We get it...even if we'd gladly take her place! But does that mean that Hayley and Elijah's budding relationship is over before it even began?
We took that question straight to Tonkin and Gillies themselves, and both promised that while things look bleak right now on the romantic front, that doesn't mean it will be that way for good.
Hayley just needs to adjust to her new life as a werewolf/vampire hybrid. Sounds easy enough, right? Ha! We joke.
"I wouldn't call it cooling off," Gillies told us. "Relationships require work, and sometimes they require space and time and healing. If it is cooling right now I suspect it will heat up again and then cool and then heat up like a parabola, that mathematical graph. They dip and they travel up, and ultimately the graph is traveling up and they're making an ascent overall. And I hope that's the cast because I like them together. I think they're a sweet, dysfunctional, mismatched twosome who found each other in the storm and I love that about their love."
Tonkin explains that Hayley's new vampire senses are making it impossible for her to be rational, and seeing as how Elijah is the definition of rational, they're not seeing eye-to-eye at the moment.
"Hayley's put up a bit of a wall and isn't allowing Elijah to get past that," Tonkin said. "Both of them are dealing with the situation very differently—Hayley's being destructive and Elijah is being logical and she doesn't like that. She wants everyone to be angry and wanting revenge and she's disappointed that he's behaving so calmly about everything. Also I think she's terrified of being hurt again and doesn't want to show who she really is to him now that she's a hybrid. It's a tragic love story right now. They're both putting up walls and are being defensive."
And it doesn't help matters that Hayley needs to rely on Klaus (Joseph Morgan) right now instead of Elijah, since Klaus is the only one who knows how to live as a hybrid.
"Klaus is almost going to be her mentor in how to be a hybrid and vampire," Tonkin said. "They still feel very hostile towards each other but they have a mutual respect because they both want their baby to come home. They don't want to be enemies. They want to be able to live peacefully together as parents to their child. So I'd say that they're more than friends. At this point they're like family."
Gillies said he was proud of the way that Elijah was able to put aside his own feelings and get Klaus to help Hayley.
"He understands that that would be better for her even if he's not happy about it," Gillies said. "He's being gracious. And on a certain level he would rather be the mentor and the shoulder to cry on and be the bedrock for her but I don't think he's so egotistical that it eclipses her needs."
Right now, what Hayley needs to do is figure out her place in the world, supernatural or otherwise.
"She's pretty lost and doesn't know who she is or where she fits in," Tonkin says. "She can't relate to the werewolves anymore even though they're blood and the way her parents intended her to grow up. She's going to start figuring that out while managing her new life as a hybrid. She has to get out her anger and build up her emotional strength and eventually she's going to realize that she needs to be more strategic. Her objective is to make New Orleans and the quarter safe down the line so she needs to work out exactly how she's going to do that and it's not going to be just killing anyone that gets in her way."
The Originals airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on The CW.