The word “wild,” scrawled in jagged letters across many walls on the West Hollywood set of True Blood, is stagehand slang for a piece of movable scenery, but it’s a pretty good description of the action going on within them too.
On a recent Friday, on a soundstage representing a New Age shop in Shreveport, Louisiana, another sign warned “Live panthers on set,” but those terrifying predators were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Sookie Stackhouse, the mind-reading, vampire-attracting waitress portrayed by Anna Paquin, and her friends Tara (Rutina Wesley) and Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) were cowering in fear of a sinister Wiccan, played by Fiona Shaw, who appeared to be carrying on a conversation with herself — or maybe with someone else inside her.
When Paquin visited behind the cameras during a shooting break and sprawled herself across a director’s chair, she playfully declined to explain what exactly had transpired in this scene from the next-to-last episode of the coming True Blood season.“Would you want to know what you’re getting for Christmas on Christmas Eve?” she asked. “There’s something about anticipation that makes it more exciting.”
Photo: Bloomberg
And what is True Blood, the fourth season of which premiered on HBO on Sunday, if not a joyously macabre exercise in gratification so long-delayed it sometimes exceeds your lifespan?
What began as the tale of a virginal Louisiana blonde infatuated with an undead hunk has evolved into a saga of natural and supernatural desire, where vampires yearn for fairies; men who turn into dogs lust for women who turn into horses; and the Freudian underpinnings of a stake through the heart have never been more vivid.
While True Blood has grown into an increasingly popular and crucial part of HBO’s lineup, its center has always been Paquin’s performance as Sookie, a beacon of curious, increasingly cynical humanity in a world of werewolves, witches and thousand-year-old beefcake.
As the series has chronicled Sookie’s passage from innocence to experience, it has provided a parallel journey for Paquin, on which her maturation as an actor has come with unforeseen benefits.
Comparing herself to her character over a Saturday morning breakfast, Paquin said: “She doesn’t know just how big what she’s getting herself into is, so she proceeds with full-force Sookie energy. That’s something she and I have in common — completely different circumstances. If I’d known what I was getting myself into, would I have charged full-steam ahead? Who knows? I love where I am now.”
On this morning, three hours after she wrapped the previous day’s shoot, Paquin, 28, was in a Venice Beach cafe, near the home she keeps with her husband, Stephen Moyer, who plays Sookie’s vampire paramour, Bill. Her bleached-blond hair was pulled back tightly, but a certain inner feistiness still shone through.
Paquin has lived in the US almost as long as she lived in her hometown, Wellington, New Zealand, and her accent has become localized, though Kiwi vowel sounds slip out when she gets excited or turns sarcastic, which is often.
SEEKING SOMETHING DIFFERENT
When she was presented with the True Blood pilot script, adapted by Alan Ball from Charlaine Harris’ first Southern Vampire Mysteries novel, she was looking for a metaphoric change of scenery.
She had a reputation as an accomplished, preternaturally professional actress — winning an Academy Award at the age of 11, as Paquin did for The Piano, will do that — but sought something different.
“There’s different,” Paquin said, “and then there’s almost, like, multiple-personality, full-on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who the hell is that person? Sookie is about as radically different from me and a lot of the work I’ve previously done as you could possibly come up with.”
Ball, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty and Emmy-winning creator of Six Feet Under, said that when he learned Paquin was interested in True Blood, his reaction was: “Really? That doesn’t — huh. She wants to do this?”
“At the time Anna was dark haired, and certainly her body of work didn’t lead me anywhere near Sookie Stackhouse,” he said.
Paquin, whose eclectic resume also includes Almost Famous, She’s All That and three X-Men movies, said she expected to be told: “She’s just not blonde enough as a person. Which, by the way, apparently is a thing, which I have heard before.” But with some tenacity, a few auditions and the help of a celebrity colorist, the role was soon hers.
True Blood had its premiere on HBO in 2008, when the network had recently lost signature shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, and in its first season went from about 1.4 million viewers for its debut to almost 2.5 million for its season finale; it now draws about 5 million viewers for new episodes.
Those numbers — stronger than those drawn by a critical darling like Mad Men, not so huge as phenomena like The Walking Dead or Jersey Shore — point to True Blood as a show that has built its audience through positive word of mouth and, perhaps, the curiosity stoked by a provocative Rolling Stone magazine cover. It has taken a little longer for its critical reputation to catch up. True Blood received its first Emmy nomination for outstanding drama only last year.
Over its first two seasons Sookie vied with a serial killer and an orgy-inspiring maenad; she was romanced by Bill and eyed lasciviously by a rival vampire, Eric (played by Alexander Skarsgard); she screamed a lot and got naked without much hesitation. “It certainly would be a bit of a buzz kill,” Paquin said, “if Sookie never took her clothes off, considering how often she has sex on the show.”
Ball said Paquin’s commitment to what could seem a ghoulish affair was essential to his vision, that it not be bodice-ripping “lady porn,” as romance novels are sometimes unfairly branded, but “about the terrors of intimacy.” And, he said, “it certainly helped that she and Stephen were falling in love in real life over the course of the first season, in helping sell that romance because it was so genuine.”
Paquin and Moyer, 41, announced their engagement in 2009 and were married last year as production wrapped on the third season of True Blood. Those milestones buried gossip about whether they were dating, but if they did not quite quell the whispers that they were too far apart in age or should not be together because they are coworkers, Paquin said she could take that trade.
“You find happiness where you find it,” she said. “And if you’re too scared to take it with potential downsides, I don’t think anyone gets into a relationship that doesn’t have potential difficulties. And if the worst one is that people are going to be staring a little bit more at us in the supermarket, well, it’s a high-class problem.”
Sookie Stackhouse seemed to be undergoing a transformation around this time too, from a perpetual damsel in distress to a take-charge heroine, unafraid to go undercover in werewolf bars or to battle with Russell Edgington, the extravagant vampire king played by Denis O’Hare.
“She has matured into a modern, canny fighting machine,” Moyer wrote in an e-mail. He added Paquin had retained “Sookie’s old-fashioned simplicity whilst having to experience sensations far crazier that most people could have possibly imagined would be thrown at her.”
Paquin’s True Blood colleagues who do not go home with her at night agreed that Sookie’s trajectory had much to do with her demonstrating that she could handle more challenging material, and at times demanding it.
WHAT SHE WANTS
Michael Lehmann, a True Blood director, said Paquin respected her collaborators but was unafraid to let them know what she wanted. “If I ever told her something that I thought needed to be explained,” he said, “but to her was absolutely obvious, she would just look at me and say, ‘What do you think I’m doing here?’”
Lehmann added that Paquin was often the first to make wisecracks about a given scene: “And then I find she’s already thought it through, and she’s got tonnes of ideas on how to make it work. She just couldn’t resist pointing out how ridiculous it is.”
Wesley, whose character is Sookie’s no-nonsense best friend, said: “That girl’s strong. Don’t let her fool you. She can hold her own.”
On the set Paquin showed no signs of being intimidated by Shaw, the awe-inspiring Irish actor and director who is playing this season’s central villain. After a long stretch of convulsing and babbling to a camera Shaw asked Paquin, “Did it look barky enough?”
“You looked like a loony,” Paquin slyly replied. “It’s the up-the-nose shot.”
Harris, whose novels serve as loose inspiration for each True Blood season, said that while Paquin did not quite fit her mental portrait of the character — no one could — she had learned things about Sookie from her performance.
“Anna’s Sookie has always been somewhat angrier than the Sookie I wrote,” Harris said in a telephone interview from Arkansas, where she lives. “So that leaves me wondering if I wrote her angrier than I realized, or if that’s a younger person interpreting my words in a way that makes more sense to them.”
The new season of True Blood will further explore the budding relationship between Sookie and Eric, as Harris’ novels have already chronicled, though cast members were wary to say just how far that exploration would go.
Skarsgard said in an e-mail that there was “definitely more” to Eric’s attraction to Sookie than his taste for her blood, “but I don’t think Eric knows what it is.” He added: “Eric exists in constant darkness, and the only way he can feel the sunlight on his skin is with Sookie’s blood in his veins. How is that for a metaphor?”
For the True Blood creative team a latitude to explore and indulge comes with certain perils. The plenty-Gothic show took a downright baroque turn in Season 3, as it delved more deeply into the hierarchies of its vampire characters and sent O’Hare skulking around with a jar of his deceased companion’s entrails. And as new episodes promise to expand the show’s pantheon of not-quite-human characters, flash back in time to the 1980s and the Spanish Inquisition, and look further into Sookie’s own lineage as a fairy, it’s easy for audiences to identify with her exasperation, seen in a trailer for Season 4, as she exclaims: “Oh, great. Now I have to deal with witches?”
No matter how far off the deep end True Blood may seem to go, Paquin said, Sookie will remain a mouthpiece for viewers.
“She is the character that will say, ‘No no no no no, not my problem,”’ she explained. “It gives the audience the opportunity to address whether or not they think it’s ridiculous.”
Without giving up any plot-sensitive details about what Sookie will undergo this year, Paquin said: “It is nice when she gets to be a little more in control of her life. It doesn’t mean that life doesn’t smack her upside the head just as hard.”
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