For this week’s spotlight interview of Stephen Moyer’s, we’ve reached back in time again, to August 2007 when Steve was interviewed by The Bath Chronicle to promote the premiere of Empathy. This interview occurred at quite the transitional time for Steve, considering he speaks of the financial concerns of a jobbing actor who never knows when the next role would come along. How things have changed for him since then!

Steve as Jimmy Collins

Heaven Help Him—Stephen Moyer is thinking about the paranormal. The 37-year old Essex boy’s latest role in BBC One’s spooky one-off drama Empathy sees him play Jimmy, an ex-con with a gift for seeing into other people’s lives, and while it may sound more fiction than fact, Stephen thinks differently. “If you’d asked me if I believed in the paranormal this time last year I’d have said no,” the tanned actor confesses. “I used to be a very staunch atheist, but I’ve chilled out a bit on that. A couple of things in the past year have made me think maybe there is something to it. One of my best mates has had something happen to him that made me change my whole belief system,” he continues. “When this script fell on the mat I thought, this is my mate’s story. He’s had some extraordinary things happen and he’s been very special to me when I’ve been through some dark times of late.”

Intrigued, I ask Stephen to elaborate. He says that the tale is a long one, and he doesn’t want to name his friend, but does tell the short version of the story. “I was in America and I was pretty down, a friend of mine was dying and I wanted to be at home. I’d got a text message from this friend, but thought I’d read it later. When I got home I sat on my bed with my legs crossed and remembered the text message. It said, ‘When you read this you are going to be sat on your bed with your legs crossed, and this is what’s going on, and this is what you’ve got to do.’ It’s what he told me to do that changed everything. And he’s a hod carrier,” Stephen laughs, not elaborating any further.

The actor, who is probably best known for his role as long- distance lover Michael in Channel 4′s NY-LON, says the experiences of his pal proved invaluable as he researched the part of Jimmy, a father-of-one who discovers on his release from prison that when he touches people, he feels what they are feeling. “He doesn’t think of it as a power, he thinks of it as an affliction,” Stephen explains. “He finds himself in a situation where he could help out in a murder inquiry, but he doesn’t have an alibi. Because of his previous, by putting himself in the position where he says, I know what happened, he puts himself in the frame for the murder. He’s a damaged, flawed, tormented soul. He has lived quite an ordinary life but has a flash point temper.” It’s that temper that landed him in jail in the first place. One day he returned to his home to find his wife had been raped by a neighbour. In a fit of anger, he viciously assaulted the attacker. Because of his violent past, the police are reluctant to believe his ‘visions’ concerning their murder case, and it’s up to Jimmy to prove he is telling the truth.

It’s a pretty dark story, but Stephen says the violent scenes were some of his favourite to play. “I’m not like that in real life, so when I get the chance to punch a bit of air and let out a bit of steam, I love it,” he grins. But does he ever get a bit carried away and actually connect with people during fight scenes? “Stunt men get hurt, and invariably it’s by actors, not other stunt men,” Stephen laughs. “What’s funny is that when you’re with a stunt man who has to say, fall off a stool, he will have elbow pads, a back brace, everything, whereas an actor will say he wants to feel what happens. At first you think they are a bunch of wimps but over the years I’ve started accepting the back brace and I wear a box – I want everything they’ve got.”

Stephen, like most actors, has had his fair share of set backs. “The times that are hard are actually when you’re doing quite well and you’re making a good living,” he says. “You think it’s going to carry on. The problem is you’ve been earning, so you’ve got a mortgage and you’ve got kids and nannies – it’s all money going out. Suddenly there’s none there. You keep spending at the rate you were spending because you think something’s going to come along, but it doesn’t.”

Hopefully Stephen won’t have to worry about such things for much longer. He has just won the lead role in the US show True Blood, written by Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball. And the dream job means he’s set to move to LA, something he’s very much looking forward to. “There’s a bit of a British enclave,” he says of the city. “There’s this Friday night expat community, it’s very weird. You have Robbie Williams and all of his gang, and then Damian Lewis is out there, and Jack Davenport.” So will Stephen be joining Robbie’s infamous soccer team? “I might have to,” he laughs. “I do like a bit of football.”

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