Both Joe Manganiello and Kristin Bauer van Straten’s characters have had intense storylines during season 5 of True Blood, so when the duo stopped by The Hollywood Reporter’s Comic-Con lounge for an interview before their panel on Saturday, THR had plenty of questions ready.
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But our highest hopes were exceeded when Manganiello revealed that his character, werewolf Alcide, would be having plenty of sex in the rest of the season.
“I really feel like I’m having the full True Blood experience,” he said. “I get to have sex with a bunch of people. I get around sexually, I kill people. It’s pretty rad.”
Last viewers saw, Manganiello’s Alcide was on a mission to help Sookie (Anna Paquin), Bill (Stephen Moyer) and Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) hunt down the big, bad vampire king of Mississippi, Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare).
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As for van Staten’s character Pam, she’s been tasked with raising a progeny, after turning Tara (Rutina Weasly) into a vampire to save her life. At the same time, her own maker, Eric, has released her, so she’s on her own like never before.
“Everything really is at stake for Pam,” says van Straten. “It expanded this year for me. Pam became totally 3D.”
The actors had just wrapped season 5 of the show on Wednesday, so THR asked if they could say anything about the inevitably insane finale.
“In my world, it’s pretty amazing,” said van Straten. “The authority is wreaking havoc in the vampire world and alliances are shifting, so it’s very intense.”
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When talking about a scene earlier this season where his character finally has a drunken makeout scene with Sookie, Manganiello revealed that there is a much rougher version that was shot.
“It was a nice makeout session, but there’s actually an extended scene on the cutting room floor somewhere that was not so nice,” he told THR. “Well, nice, probably to women in prison.”
“I thought, ‘Man, I’m gonna get a lot of letters from women in prison after this one,’” he joked.
Manganiello revealed that before this season, he had long conversations with showrunner Alan Ball about “what having sex with a werewolf would be like.”
“We both agreed that the girl wakes up in the morning and does that ‘Oh’ thing, and then does the cowgirl walk the whole day,” he said.
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When asked about how they interact with fans, Maganiello said there’s been a new type of fan that goes after him since he starred in Steven Soderbergh’s his male stripper movie, Magic Mike.
“There’s a hybrid fan that’s now been born out of Magic Mike with the combination of True Blood,” he said. “Now it’s like there’s a combination of werewolf stripper.”
As for van Straten, she admitted to being a geek herself about Battlestar Galactica and running into Tricia Helfer, who played Cylon Number Six, at a previous Comic-Con.
“And she hadn’t seen True Blood, and so she went, ‘Oh, thanks nice to meet you,’” van Straten said, adding that Helfer then leaned in for a photo with her, not realizing she was an actor herself, not just a superfan.
“So I have this really awkward photo with Tricia Helfer somewhere,” she said.
Manganiello is a big fan of art. Watch the video above to find out what artist personalized an Alcide-themed sticker for him.
Watch THR’s complete interview above. Find all of THR’s Comic-Con interviews here.
Email: Rebecca.Ford@thr.com; Twitter: @Beccamford
