Ian Somerhalder on Damon Letting Elena Go, Fighting Hard to Bring Bonnie Back 

\'The Vampire Diaries: Ian Somerhalder On Damon Letting Elena Go, Fighting Hard To Bring Bonnie Back

Damon Salvatore found his modern day homecoming wasn't what he expected on "The Vampire Diaries" Season 6, after learning girlfriend Elena Gilbert had no memory of their romance.

"Imagine you're away for four months… you come back and the one woman you want to be with… not even doesn't remember you, remembers nothing, only the bad sh** like, you didn't put the toilet seat down or you slept with her sister, or like all the bad things you may have done, she knows, and so that's going to be invariably difficult to recover from," Ian Somerhalder told reporters on the show's Atlanta, Ga., set on Wednesday of how his character, Damon, is feeling. "I mean… how do you do that?"

Damon has decided to let Elena go and be happy, and Ian said his character believes it's a mature moment.

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"So I think in his heart of hearts, he ultimately realizes, 'Hey listen, you were happy without me,' and I think that it was an actually incredibly selfless thing for Damon to do. Very rare. And so I think he's pretty proud of that, but I think ultimately… he's hurting big time," Ian continued. "But by the way, I mean, karma. Hello? This guy's been an a**hole for most of his life. While he may be a fiercely loyal brother and boyfriend and whatever [he] may be, but this guy's been like major p***k and I think all this is kind of coming down on him now."

Although Damon has turned to fun and frivolity in the past to get over an emotionally difficult situation, this time around, something is different.

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"Any time you go through a break up or you decide to do something like that, it gives you an excuse to go and do a bunch of bad stuff, and I think -- and I never thought I'd say this, but I think the man is evolving a little bit, which may be boring as sh** for the audience," Ian said. "I don't know, an evolved Damon Salvatore may not be any good."

Ian credits the time Damon spent with Bonnie in the 1994 purgatory/Kai's hell for some of the change.

"I honestly think it has a great deal to do with Bonnie. He really has a soft spot for Bonnie and I personally love Katerina Graham," Ian said of his co-star.

Sharing an acting coach with Kat has meant that the two co-stars have been able to discuss the material more often, allowing them to add special details into the recent Damon/Bonnie scenes.

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"It's just this really cool layering of what's really going on and we sort of know our inner work and we share it with one another, so there's just a lot of really cool kind of secret communication happening that's a lot of fun and unfortunately, Bonnie and Damon are ripped apart really early," he said.

But, recently finding a sign that Bonnie is still alive (the teddy bear) has inspired Damon to find a way to get her back.

"[He's] putting his energy into what he thinks he needs to do because he genuinely, genuinely, genuinely feels for Bonnie," Ian said.

Expect to see new sides of Damon as he gets the gang together to bring Bonnie home.

"He's hell bent on getting her back and I think what's cool about that is to watch him because again, he's fiercely loyal and he's a very motivated when he wants to be and sort of to watch that shift of him just being selfish – 'I need this, I need that, I want this, I want that' -- it's different. It's different this time," Ian said. "He's really trying to do the right thing."

"The Vampire Diaries" continues on Thursday night at 8/7c on The CW.

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