Photo credit/Ben Watts
Stephen Moyer shares his thoughts on “the Billster” and what keeps True Blood fresh with the fans.
People seem to know a lot about Stephen Moyer these days. Or at least, they think they do. His chiseled face (along with many other body parts) is regularly on full display in the red-hot vampire series True Blood, which just began its fourth season on HBO, and his real-life marriage to costar Anna Paquin has only strengthened the microscope under which he lives his life.
It’s gotten to the point where Moyer is surprised when he meets someone he can shock by simply opening his mouth. Though Bill Compton, his character on True Blood, is a Southern gentleman born during the 19th century, the actor is a bona fide, modern-day Brit, and talks like it.
“Not to sound completely egocentric … but you do so much press and you do so much stuff leading up to every year, [that] when I meet people and they go, ‘Oh my God! You’re English!’ I’m always amazed that it’s still kind of news,” he says. “I don’t say that in a bad way. I quite like it actually, because it means that people believe that character is real and really comes from that place and that makes me feel good about what I do.”
Asked about whether there’s ever been a point when the makers of the show felt they’d finally gone too far — perhaps during last season’s literally head-turning sex scene between Bill and his maker, Lorena — Moyer says it hasn’t happened yet. It’s those can-you-believe-we-just-saw-that moments, in fact, that keep people coming back.
“I think people watch the show to have those kind of reactions, to be taken outside themselves, to be taken to a place where we know it’s not real,” he says. “I’ve had a couple things over the years where I’ve read it and I go, ‘What?’ But you get yourself straight and go, ‘Why are we doing this?’ … ‘What are we trying to get across?’ Then after a couple of conversations with the director and the writer, or [series creator Alan Ball], you go, ‘OK. I get it.’”
“Dark Times for the Billster”
Though Bill has been alive for nearly 180 years, it’s doubtful he’s visited such depths of despair as where we left him at the end of Season 3. Having fallen out with the love of his life, Sookie (Paquin), after she learned Bill’s original intention toward her was in service to Queen Sophie-Anne (Evan Rachel Wood), Bill challenged the queen to a fight to the death. To enter such a contest, against a being much older and more powerful than he, Bill believes he has nothing left to lose.
“[It’s] pretty dark times for the Billster,” Moyer says. “He is pretty much alone. The only one he has left is Jessica [Deborah Ann Woll], his progeny. What we will see is him taking on a more responsible position in terms of looking after her. I’ve been very happy about that, getting to work with Deborah Ann, because she’s just extraordinary.”
Moyer credits the fluid approach to storytelling for keeping the series fresh, both for fans and for the actors. Because, after four seasons filled with 18-hour days — like the one Moyer completed just before our interview — even the lusty, blood-filled world of Bon Temps could grow stale.
“Like all of these things, it becomes a usual day-to-day existence, but it does take on a new life,” he says. “We start the season with the cast of I, Claudius or Ben-Hur, and it starts getting filtered down. At the table read, there will be a chair missing as people leave the show, because obviously it’s a vampire show and not everyone survives. That’s one of those things that when you’re tearing open the brown envelope to read the new scripts, I defy anyone not to have that feeling of thinking, ‘Is it me?’”
One thing this season has not brought Moyer is time to work with his new wife. He and Paquin married in August, but the diverging storylines of their characters haven’t produced a lot of scenes together.
“She’ll be on set with one unit, and I’ll be on another unit, and we sort of pass by, say hi and then go off and do our stuff,” he says. So at least Moyer doesn’t have to watch his wife film any steamy love scenes with another man, since as readers of the Charlaine Harris books on which the series is (sometimes loosely) based know, Sookie starts up a romance with Bill’s nemesis, Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård). Moyer does admit that the Sookie-Eric coupling will be “a very big part of this year’s attraction to the show.”
Moyer notes with a sly tone, however, that Bill has his own “bits and pieces” going on as well. And since we’re talking about True Blood here, he could just be speaking literally.
Read the entire article at Channel Guide magazine.
