Stephen Moyer joined cast members Anna Paquin and Alex Skarsgard for a revealing and scintillating article with provocative pictures in the September 2nd issue Rolling Stone magazine. Below is Vanessa Grigoriadis conversation with Steve on the set of True Blood.

Alexander Skarsgard, Anna Paquin & Stephen Moyer on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine

Today, the work goes by quickly and eventually, the actors start clowning around with each other during takes. “You know how on “Glee” they all have to do a nationwide tour? says Paquin, turning to Moyer. “Imagine if we had to do that?”

“Where are we this week?” responds Moyer, loving the joke. “The Arkansas Pavilion!”

“We’d have to do four weeks of rehearsals, and someone would do a tap dance with a silver choker,” says Paquin. “We could put on some sort of freak show.”

“No,” says Moyer, grinning broadly. “I’ve got it: It would be a county-fair sex show. Live sex, two dollars!”

Sex, in fact, is what gives True Blood it’s cultural relevance. It’s a fitting metaphor for the new sexual revolution.

Says Moyer, “If we go from a base level, vampires create a hole in the neck where there wasn’t one before. It’s a devirginization – breaking the hymen, creating blood and then drinking the virginal blood. And there’s something sharp, the fang, which is probing and penetrating and moving into it. So that’s preety sexy. I think that makes vampires attractive.” He laughs a little. “Plus, Robert Pattison is just hot, right?”

Moyer and Paquin started dating a few months into the show. She had just moved to L.A. from New York, he was newly arrived from London, and the network put them up at the same hotel. They started having breakfast together every morning at a cafe in West Hollywood, and they told each other everything about themselves. Their first kiss happened onscreen, but when they took a break in filming, they found that they wanted to keep talking on the phone at night. “It was like, “That would be all right, wouldn’t it?’” Moyer says. “Nothing has to happen here! It’s just one puff!” Within a few months, Moyer’s girlfriend in London was out of the picture. Now, the marriage is impending – Paquin is wearing an engagement ring, a rustic diamond in an antiqued platinum inset, even though she’s not a “jewelry girl.” “I’ve pretty much consider ourselves married now, even though we aren’t yet,” says Moyer over lunch, then takes a beat. “Doesn’t it make you a little sick in your mouth?”

Moyer is the opposite of Skarsgard – he’s perky, flirtatious and open, referring to every woman under 80 as “darling.” He might not feel great about Skarsglird rubbing up naked against Paquin, but he deals’ with it. “I do wear a sock in my scenes, but I’ve got nothing to hide,” he says, sniffing a little. “I just think it might be embarrassing for the crew.” At 40, he’s been an actor for almost 20 years since he left Essex, where he grew up the son of a secretary and a double-glazing salesman – “although he did have a pet company called Petarama, but that was a pet project, wah-wah-wah.” He loved buying records, and was never more upset than when Elvis and John Lennon died. He tried piano and trumpet, btu ended up the head of the local choir in his adolescence, and he formed bands with his friends, including “Rod, Jane, Freddy and Mike” (a play on the Seventies band) and “BP.” “Our logo was the same as British Petroleum’s, except we added a pair of boys’ fronts and changed it so BP stood for ‘Bulging Pants,” Moyer says.

Moyer got the callback for True Blood the same day his apartment was burglarized. “When you have things stolen, you become much more aware of what’s important – fucking take the camera if you want, but don’t take the tape that’s in it. I lost all those sex tapes, the ones of me giving head when I was young. That was supposed to be my meal ticket.”

In conversation, it becomes clear that Moyer enjoys the sexual peculiarities of the show. He loves that vampires are a method of sexual liberation for Sookie. “It’s about taking things to the point where normal frames of society wouldn’t think that was an OK thing for a young Southern girl to do,” he says, then becomes lost in a fantasy. “It’s interesting to think about sex as the search for a moment together which is a glorious combiliat ion of orgasm and the sexual oneness that might lead to death. Have you ever read William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night? People fuck while attached to nooses on elastic, and when ejaculation happens the floor falls away.” He smiles a little. “But Bill would be able to bring her back, wouldn’t he? Hmmm.”

Soon after sharing that daydream, he’s out the door. “Got to go find some cherubic, virginal flesh. See you later!” he says.

So there you go. Here’s some evidence that a beautiful love story can flower in the midst of a TV show about vampires.

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