Characters of Sanctuary - Recurring Characters - Nikola Tesla

For the real life electrical engineer on whom the character is based, see Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla, played by Jonathon Young (recurring) is a member of the Five, where the vampire blood he was injected with activated his dormant Vampiric genes, resulting in him becoming part-vampire, as well as gaining the ability to control electricity. He also has a taste for expensive wine. He despises humanity for destroying the pure-blooded vampires centuries ago. Tesla eventually leaves the Five and goes underground for over 60 years to resurrect his vampiric ancestors. He attempts to get John Druitt to join him, but John refuses. Tesla responds by torturing him, though this unwittingly restores Druitt's sanity. Tesla wants Helen to join him also, but she refuses, even after he kills and resurrects the Cabal members who are hunting them. He is seemingly killed by Druitt before Tesla can kill her. He later regenerates and returns alone to Bhalasaam, the lost city which housed the last of the vampires. He reluctantly joins the rest of the Five in undergoing various trials to gain a vial of vampire blood needed to stop the Cabal's bioweapon Lazarus. In his trial, he is forced to endure a severe electrical charge.

In the second season, he develops a cure for the Lazarus virus and a weapon to neutralise the powers of Vampire-hybrids, who attempt to take down the Sanctuary network. He later aids Druitt in taking down several Cabal cells. Later, Tesla opens a clinic in Mexico, which he uses to infect wealthy drug-addicted teenagers with a treatment that will slowly change them into Vampires in 30 years, after they inherit positions of power from their parents, effectively creating a new vampire age of enlightenment (in Sanctuary, Vampires are responsible for the age of enlightenment before they were driven extinct by humanity at the dawn of The Dark Ages). However, he overlooks the possibility that they may die within the 30-year development. One of his patients dies and subsequently resurrects in a car crash, only to kill all of his friends from the clinic, thereby activating the vampire genes and resurrecting them as well. Tesla teams up with the Sanctuary to reverse the transformation, but loses his own Vampiric powers by accident. He then decides to continue in his efforts to take over the world and also discovers that he now has the ability to control magnetism instead of electricity.

In Season 3, Nikola sends an SOS call to the sanctuary team from the mountains of Colombia where he finds a mutated centipede in an abandoned Cabal research facility that could contain traces of source blood required to become a vampire once again. After Helen rescues Tesla, he and Magnus start deciphering the clues of the map of the underground city of Praxis that Gregory Magnus sent to Helen. To apologize for leaving him at the Sanctuary during the expedition to the city, Magnus takes him to a former Praxian stronghold, where he regains his vampiric abilities from the blood of a surviving vampire queen kept in stasis and loses his reverence for his ancestors when she expresses the desire to enslave the human race. Magnus and Tesla trick her into attempting to read the map of Praxis while they escape the stronghold, and the queen is killed when the vampire failsafe in the Praxian technology destroys the entire complex.

In the fourth season, Magnus discovers that Tesla has been appointed the head of SCIU, the U.S. government's anti-abnormal task force, headquartered at Area 51, in the southeastern desert (the one in Roswell is apparently a decoy), where Tesla defrauds the US government out of research funding intended for an Abnormal final solution, instead focusing on his own pursuits of inventing wireless, limitless electricity from the radiation of the temporal rift. While Magnus is furious with Tesla over assisting the SCIU, he makes amends by sending her the blueprints of the facility. Shortly afterward, he is inevitably fired from SCIU when they discover he is using the research money for his personal science projects. For the remainder of the season he assists the Sanctuary in their stand against an abnormal terrorist cell.

Jonathon Young plays Tesla during a theatrical tour from "The Electric Company", as well as win festivals with it. For his role as Nikola Tesla, Young received a 2009 Leo Award nomination for "Best Guest Performance by a Male in a Dramatic Series", along with Ryan Robbins; the latter won the award.