Alan Ball: Get Ready for Flashbacks!
Showrunner Alan Ball says one of his favorite things about True Blood is delving into his characters’ distant, distant, distant past.
“On ‘True Blood,’ when you have characters who are thousands of years old and you can do a flashback,” he tells the New York Times. “It’s not to 1980 — although we do have a 1980s flashback this season — but it can be to the 9th century. We go to the Spanish Inquisition a lot this year. That’s really, really fun.”
(Is it? The old-school holocaust is really, really fun? We feel like you’re cruising for an Anti-Defamation Leaguing, Alan. Just a heads up to maybe choose a different term.)
Alan also enjoys some stuff we can unreservedly get behind, like Sookie’s transformation to a glowy-fingered badass. “She’s fighting, yeah. And now it’s just clear in the writers’ room that Sookie is a force to be reckoned with,” he says. “She has come into her own. She has her own powers, which she’s gradually becoming more and more accustomed to. She still can’t totally control them. But, yeah, she still looks like that sweet girl next door but if you try to kill her, she’ll kill you first. Which is kind of fun, to have a character like that.”
It is! Now THAT is a thing that is fun! Please, Buffy her up!
Among the other revelations from Alan’s interview (the whole thing is totally worth reading) is how hard fought Anna Paquin (Sookie) for the role of Sookie. “My casting director got a call from Anna Paquin’s people. And I said, ‘Really? That doesn’t — huh. She wants to do this?’ Because at the time Anna was dark-haired, and certainly her body of work didn’t lead me anywhere near Sookie Stackhouse,” he remembers.
“But she aggressively pursued it. She came in and read. A lot of actresses of much lesser accomplishments were like, no, it has to be an offer. Or their agents said that, probably without ever even telling them they were putting them up for this role, because that’s what agents do. I think what’s been fun for her is that she a legitimate reason for doing something that she would never have done on her own, which is go blond and spray-tanned.”
You don’t think Anna Paquin would adopt the trailer park lifestyle on her own? Yeah, probably not.
Source: New York Times
