Joe Manganiello teases werewolf-centric Season 5 via TVLine
Move over, witches. True Bloodis trading sorcery for a whole lot of howling.
And hair.
The HBO drama’s upcoming fifth season will be packed with werewolves, and the man beast leading the resurgence — Joe Manganiello (a.k.a. Alcide) — is champing at the bit to get started.
“Oh my god, I can’t f—ing wait,” he enthused to TVLine at the after-party for this year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show (airing Nov. 29 on CBS). ”The fact that they’re basically busy casting an entire new pack of werewolves is unbelievable. There’s going to be like a werewolf show within the show this this year, so I’m like a kid about it!”
Among the lycanthropes making tracks to Bon Temps: late pack leader Marcus’ mother, Annie (played by Winter’s Bone standout Dale Dickey); a hot young she-wolf named Rikki; and a hard-bodied fiftysomething named J.D. who sounds suspiciously like Alcide’s never-before-seen father.
“It may not be what you expect,” teases Manganiello of the character, adding, “Alcide’s dad is in [Charlaine Harris’ fifth Sookie novel]. Whether or not he makes an appearance… well, that’s a question for [executive producer] Alan [Ball].” (With reporting by Matt Webb Mitovich)
More hunky Alcide…I’m totally in!!
True Blood Season 5-Villan Revealed? via BoomTron
It looks like a new baddie will be rolling into Bon Temps for True Blood Season 5 and this vamp could be all kinds of bad news because she’s bringing a heaping helping of crazy with her.
Italian actress Valentina Cervi might not be well-known in the States right now but that’s getting ready to change, especially where Trubies are concerned. TVLine brings word that Cervi is joining True Blood during Season 5 as a season regular, only there’s nothing regular about this chick.
Cervi will portray an ancient vampire named Salome, described as being a “world class seductress and fiercely intelligent.” She also happens to have “quite a lot of madness in her.” As if a crazy vampire wasn’t dangerous enough, Salome is also savvy enough to hide her powers when it’s called for so nobody knows exactly how dangerous she is until it’s too late.
Nobody connected with HBO’s True Blood has actually referred to Salome as the new villain for the season but it seems like a safe call to make, considering how she’s described.
Cervi’s presence on the show should definitely shake things up because, once again, True Blood has deviated from the Sookie Stackhouse source material. There isn’t a Salome in the popular Charlaine Harris books so there’s no way to tell how events will unfold on the HBO series, but it sounds like things will be very interesting.
True Blood returns in the summer of 2012.
Ryan Kwanten on “Griff the Invisible” via Craveonline
American audiences know Ryan Kwanten best as the affable Jason Stackhouse in the hit HBO series True Blood, but this year he broke out of that lovable goofball mold with Griff the Invisible, a strange and extremely endearing Australian dramedy about a young man who survives the workaday world by entering a superhero universe of his own devising. Director Leon Ford has a deft hand in the film, which finds Kwanten struggling between “growing up” and living the life of his choosing with fellow dreamer Maeve Dermody by his side. I was a big fan of Griff the Invisible upon its release this past summer, and was very excited to get a few minutes to talk to Ryan Kwanten about the film while he was on his lunch break to promote the film’s DVD and Blu-Ray release this week.
I really loved it, but it had a small theatrical release so I have the feeling that some of our readers don’t know a lot about it. I was wondering if you could start by explaining it in your own words.
Yeah, sure! I feel like everyone knows this guy. I feel like everyone has wanted to be like him, wanted to sort of experience that kind of a life. And by “that kind of a life” I mean to explore the better version of who you are. What if I can do this, I can do that? If I can do all those things and put it into a world, what would that be like? This is a guy who’s actually done that, and is living that, and chooses to live in that world as opposed the world we all live in, and ultimately who’s to say that the world that he chooses to live in is any better or worse than how we choose to live.
I really liked the way it played with the idea that it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong or even crazy.
Yeah, me too. That was one of the most intriguing things. It didn’t feel the need to [give the] audience any answers or anything. It sort of leaves the audience in the driver’s seat. It leaves it up to you, in terms of everyone gets something different out of it.
I choose to believe it’s taking place in a parallel dimension that only cats can see.
[Laughs] Yeah, that’s the beautiful thing about it. To me, personally, there’s definitely some sort of therapeutic nature in playing it. Because I was very much a loner that was verging on sociophobic growing up. This film very much embraced some of the ideas and illusions that I had when I was a kid. It was a nice exploration into, say, as adults why we’re told to suppress our imaginations, to sort of be… more serious? I guess that’s what it means to be an adult?
We’re supposed to “put away childish things.”
Yeah! And it’s funny, because being an actor requires me to be emotionally vulnerable and wear your heart on your sleeve. I have very much chosen a profession where you have to embrace that sense of imagination every day. It’s nice to be able to feed it out into the world, I guess.
I think a lot of your ‘True Blood’ fan are going to be surprised by how mild-mannered you are in ‘Griff the Invisible.’ Were you looking for something that was so different Jason Stackhouse or was it just a great movie?
Oh, first and foremost it’s the writing. But nothing could be more uninspiring than playing another character like Jason. I love playing it, but I’m looking for challenges in life, and no great achievement was ever easy. So it’s nice for me to jump into another character’s skin and convince myself that that world exists just as much as Bon Temps, that city in Louisiana. It’s all part of acting, and I love sort of…
Were you able to do a lot of the superhero stunt work yourself?
Yeah, most of it! I’m a pretty agile sort of a guy anyway, and I kind of pride myself on doing pretty much most of it. There was one stunt that I didn’t do, but outside of that most of it was all mine. And that was in-and-of-itself a real experience, putting on the suit. The suit took a couple of hours to put on. A wardrobe girl had to help put it on, and literally sew me into it piece by piece. You really do get a sense of… You could do anything if you’re in the suit. If I heard a woman screaming off in the distance, I felt like I should there to help her.
It’s very liberating to have that kind of costume on.
I highly recommend it everyone out there. It’s funny, everyone gets so excited about Halloween, and for me that’s what I do every day at work. Imagine living like that. And for Griff, that’s every day for him too. Every day like Halloween, it’s sort of like that.
How did you get together with [‘Griff the Invisible’ director] Leon Ford. Had you worked together before?
No, I’d never worked [with him] before, but very quickly we… It was a very easy relationship. It was almost simpatico. I definitely worked my butt off trying to convince him that I was the right guy, but once I’d done that he very much let me craft the character. Fortunately we were on the same page for a lot of it, so there was really no compromise in term of where we both saw Griff going. Yeah, I would jump at the chance to work with him again.
