‘True Blood’ stars Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, and Alexander Skarsgard to present at Emmys
True Blood‘s Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, and Alexander Skarsgard will serve as presenters at the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards on Aug. 29.
Toby Whithouse on vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and ‘Being Human’
Can you talk about the evolution of it and specifically how you sold it to BBC?
Toby: Basically I was approached to devise a show about three college graduates who decide to buy a house together. And the series would detail the stresses and strains that this puts on their relationship. I was pitched the idea and I thought, “Well, that is possibly the dullest idea I’ve ear heard,” but completely unbidden… and believe me it never normally works like this… but completely unbidden, I had these ideas for three characters and they arrived completely formed and just as I was about to turn the job down, there they were. Mitchell was a recovering sex addict, Annie was a kind of borderline agoraphobic and George was this very anal house-proud guy who had anger issues and liked to compartmentalize all these aspects of his life and so on. I was really pleased with these characters, and I wrote pages and pages and pages of bios for them, and we were very happy with the way they were all working and sitting together. But for the life of us, we couldn’t come up with an idea for the first episode. So we decided we were going to have one last meeting and then if nothing came of that, we were going to call it a day. In the meantime, I was always a huge comic book and sci-fi and horror fan, and that was always secretly the kind of show I wanted to write. So we were getting towards the end of this meeting and nothing was working, so then in a slightly kind of a kamikaze move I said, “What we could do is turn George into a werewolf because if nothing else that would give us a story for the first episode.” And then from that moment it seemed a very natural progression that if George was a werewolf then Mitchell, the recovering sex addict, could be a vampire and Annie the agoraphobic could be a ghost rooted to the house. What it meant was that the bedrock of the show was character and the supernatural archetypes were added later on. And I think had I been approached to write a supernatural show, I don’t think we would have ended up with anything like “Being Human.” I think we would have ended up with something perhaps not quite so textured.
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