(TV Guide) True Blood creator Alan Ball says he will be casting the part of a female werewolf named Debbie Pelt whom he describes as “a badass bitch you do not want to get on the wrong side of. She is not going to like Sookie.” Look for the character debut in the third episode of the upcoming third season.

It also sounds like they’ll be plenty of sex in the season premiere, with Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell) ended up in a backwoods Arkansas motel room with a familiar face. “It should be curious and confusing to viewers,” teases Trammell. But Ryan Kwanten says his character, Jason Stackhouse, ups Sam by one. “My character wakes up in the first episode with two women beside him,” Ryan boasts. The actor’s also looking forward to seeing Jason enjoy a more meaningful romance. “He will find love in the werewolf world, and love is a pretty unknown concept for him.”

Alfre Woodard joins the series as Ruby Jean Reynolds, mother to Lafayette and aunt to Tara. Alfre describes her character as “nuts. She’s not going to be a person that the audience loves. She’s not very accepting of Lafayette, which is fun to play.”

and

From the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly via Lori W.

Yes, I know a lot of you miss Michelle and a lot of you are looking forward to Joe Manganiello’s portrayal of Alcide Herveaux. So, I want to thank Lori for sending these to us. Btw, doesn’t Joe look good with long hair.

From Allison C…. who loves Brits!

My husband said, “WOW,” when I showed him Rutina’s picture from January’s Allure. The pictures were supplied by the Fans of the Rutina Wesley page on FB.

Nighty night my lovelies….

~M.

P.S. Did you read the whole Alan Ball article???? They are signed through season 4. We may actually see Quinn and all the drama that weretiger brings.

This interview with Alan Ball was originally published on TV Guide Magazine’s website.

After a wildly successful second season, True Blood executive producer Alan Ball says he and the cast and crew are already sinking their teeth into Season 3, promising that the sexy vampire thriller “just stays big and weird and fun.”

“After last season you would think things would sort of return to normal – but no, that’s not going to happen!” Ball told TV Guide Magazine. “No, there’s just as much weird stuff out there, and we’re going to meet some werewolves for the first time; we’re going to find out some roles vampires played in history, which is interesting and shocking and funny. It’s more of the same.”

I am looking at pictures of locations and looking at models of new sets and stuff, so we’re back,” said Ball. “I have four scripts that I am going, four first drafts, and I’m going over them and making some revisions with the writing staff, and we’ve already cast a major role: the vampire king of Mississippi, who’s going to be played by Dennis O’Hare, which I’m very, very excited about.” O’Hare’s a Tony-, Obie- and Drama Desk Award-winning actor best known to television audiences for his recurring role as Travis March on Brothers & Sisters.

While the rollercoaster relationship of Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) remains front and center, Ball revealed that several supporting characters will be sharing even more of the spotlight. “Definitely Eric has broken out and is a big important character now. Jessica and Hoyt are still trying to deal with everything that happened to them, and Arlene and Terry are going to have a little bit more of a life and more of a presence on the show.”

There’s also room for guest stars, like Evan Rachel Wood’s vampire queen of Louisiana. “She’ll be back,” promised Ball. “Maybe Zeljko Ivanek, who played the Magister in Season 1 – he might be back. And we do have a lot of fun new characters.”

Sam Trammell, who plays the hapless but heroic bar owner/changeling Sam Merlotte, added that Season 3 is “going to explore my relatives and the sort of sketchy, shapeshifter-y people in my family, and that’s going to be more torture for Sam. I’m sure they’re not going to be good people.” But will Sam’s still-burning torch for Sookie also be a source of torment? “Well, I hope he still has a shot with Sookie, but who knows? Probably not.”

Trammell said that the wildly enthusiastic response to Season 2 has left the actors “psyched” to return to work on Dec. 3. “We couldn’t believe the numbers that we got,” he said. “We were just sort of stunned. Yeah, we were kind of working in a bubble for most of last year and certainly year one, because it hadn’t come out. And now we know that people are really into it and on board, so we’re psyched to see they’ve written.”

The creative team hasn’t been overly stressed out about topping the all-out mayhem of Season 2. “We have a great head start in that we have these fantastic books that Charlaine Harris wrote,” said Ball. “It’s not like we have a blank slate and say ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’ So we’re using book three as the model for Season 3. And there’s nine of them and she publishes one every year, so I feel like ‘Just keep ‘em comin’.’

And while Ball admits he felt a twinge of worry when he found out about the real-life romance between stars Paquin and Moyer, he’s thrilled that the couple is rock-solid now that they’re engaged.

“When I first found out I was like ‘Uh-oh – no!’” he laughed. “But by now it’s very clear that it’s the real deal and they’re very, very happy. Anna said to me at a party, after I said ‘You look fantastic,’ she said ‘Well, I’m happy, and happier than I’ve ever been in my life and a lot of it is thanks to you.’ It’s great to know that. I just want everybody working on the show to be happy, and so far they are.

We’ll be saying goodbye to at least one character next season on True Blood, executive producer Alan Ball tells TVGuide.com exclusively. “Somebody is going to bite the dust and it’s going to be really good to see them get what they deserve,” Ball says. HBO: True Blood renewed for third season The only clue the Blood boss would reveal is that “it’s a person we’ll be happy to see go.” The HBO drama is set to return next summer for its third season. So who could this mystery person be? Who’s death will actually make the fans happy? Sound off in the comments.

Chris Ayres – timesonline.co.uk

It’s one of those too-good-to-be-true sunny days in Los Angeles, and Alan Ball is sitting in a dark, chilly office, talking about death. Not just death, actually, but grief: the unbearable pain; the torment of knowing that we’ll all end up as wormfood. It’s the kind of thing that passes for everyday conversation with Ball, as you might expect from the man responsible for creating hit television shows entitled Six Feet Under and True Blood, which starts on Channel 4 next week. “As much as we pretend we don’t get old, that we don’t die, it’s something we all have to face,” Ball says. “That’s why we have this instinct to rubber-neck at car wrecks. Death is the ultimate mystery.” Ball knows of what he speaks. When he was 13, he was a passenger in a car driven by his older sister — it was her 22nd birthday — when she was killed in an accident. “She drove off the highway, there was a blind spot, and she pulled out,” he recalls, still flinching slightly. “The impact broke her neck. It was very bloody. At that impressionable age, Death came and stuck its ugly old face in mine, and said: ‘Hello, here I am.’ ” Ball escaped without a scrape.

It was that terrible event perhaps more than any other that shaped Ball, who ultimately went on to become a playwright, sit-com producer and Oscar-winning screenplay writer — he was responsible for the 1999 Kevin Spacey masterpiece American Beauty — and at the age of 52 has emerged as one of the most unusual and unsettling creative forces in American television.

But as much as he might still look as though the weight of several planets is upon him — on the morning we meet he sports a greying beard with hiking boots, jeans and a woodcutter shirt — Ball claims that True Blood is his way of lightening up. “Six Feet Under was about life in the presence of death,” he says. “But after that show ended I thought to myself: ‘OK, I’m done looking into the abyss now. I’m ready for a theme park ride.’ ”

Based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries novel series by Charlene Harris, True Blood is certainly a change of tempo. The title sequence, set to Jace Everett’s country stompalong Bad Things, features pole dancers, faith-healers and close-ups of blood-red lips and roadkill. The plot centres on a telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and her vampire love interest, Bill Compton (played by the British actor Stephen Moyer, now engaged to Paquin in real life).

He adds that when he first picked up one of Harris’s books, “I promised myself I’d read a chapter before I went to bed, and before I switched out the light I’d read seven.”

The son of a Lockheed quality control inspector from the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, Georgia, Ball clearly has a nostalgia for what he calls the “gothic sensibility of the South”, and it seeps through every beautifully shot HD frame of True Blood.

He contends that in spite of his sister’s death he had a “pretty standard” childhood. That is, if being 19 years the junior of your parents’ first child counts as “standard” (he has two brothers, the other 15 years older than him). Not to mention realising at a young age that he was gay.

“I was always very aware of that,” he concedes. “I mean, when I was 8 and went to see Goldfinger I found myself being turned on by Sean Connery. I was also very aware that it was something I had to keep a secret. I thought it meant you were relegated for ever to the outside fringes of society. I tried to be straight. I even had a teenage girlfriend — who I really ought to apologise to — before I came out in my thirties.”

But it was the aftermath of the car accident, not Ball’s sexuality, that made his early life most difficult. “It blew my family apart. My mother became very religious and struggled with depression — she’d take us to this church where people spoke in tongues — so for a long time it seemed like it was just me and my dad, but he was drinking and withdrew into himself. We’d go out to eat at night and he’d be swerving all over the road and I’d be thinking: ‘Hey, Dad, maybe this isn’t the best thing to do when you’ve got a kid who’s been in a fatal car accident.’

“Then my mother really got into Revelations and the end of the world. When I was 14 I’d come home and the first thing she’d say would be: ‘Well, another prophecy came true today.’ ”

It wasn’t until years later that he was finally able to grieve for his sister. “For six months I thought I was going crazy. I’d walk through the streets crying. It was lucky I was living in New York at the time: in New York no one pays you any attention if you’re walking through the streets crying.”

It was also in New York that Ball founded a theatre outfit, the Alarm Dog Repertory Company, while paying the rent with various artdirecting jobs at trade magazines including Adweek and Inside PR (the inspiration for the souldevouring position held by Lester Burnham, the antihero of American Beauty).

Then one of Ball’s plays, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, caught the attention of the Hollywood producers Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey. They invited him out to Los Angeles to become a staff writer for the sit-com Grace Under Fire, starring the comedienne Brett Butler.

“At first I thought LA was appalling, disgusting,” Ball says. Getting another job writing for Cybill, starring Cybill Shepherd, didn’t do much to change his mind. “After a while I became a bit of a hack. In every episode there was a part where one of the characters would have to learn a lesson from what had just happened. I used to call it ‘the moment of shit’, because it just trivialised everything.”

In the end, Ball stayed with Cybill until its fourth and final season in 1998, becoming the executive producer. “By the third season I really wanted to leave, but they backed the money truck up to my house and I stayed,” he says. “But I felt like such a whore, and at nights I dumped all of my frustration into the script of American Beauty. It’s a very angry script. It’s what you get when you’ve been working with a crazy person who walks into the room and says: ‘I got a bad haircut, let’s write a show about that.’ ”

Everything changed after American Beauty earned Ball an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards (the movie cost £9.5 million to make and earned £225 million). Fortunately, it overshadowed the failure of his first solo television effort, Oh Grow Up — about three male Brooklyn housemates, two straight, one gay — that was cancelled by the ABC network.

Then an executive for the prestigious, subscription-only HBO channel mentioned to Ball at a lunch meeting that she’d always been fascinated by funeral homes. That provided the inspiration for Six Feet Under, a kind of existential soap opera about a family that runs a Los Angeles funeral home.

At first, Ball feared having to write schmaltzy storylines again. But he needn’t have worried: “After HBO saw the pilot, they sent me a note saying: ‘Can you make this more f***ed-up?’ ”

The show became a cult hit, although some critics poked fun at it for its relentlessly bleak plot. “That’s where it needed to go,” Ball shrugs, adding that he found it therapeutic. “It made death and grief less frightening to me. When my mother died I knew what grief was, so it didn’t freak me out.”

Although Ball says his family could never be described as close, he at least came to a kind of peace with his mother before she passed away. “When I came out to her, she said: ‘God has dealt me some blows in this life. I blame your father, because I think he was that way, too.’ But she eventually came around and accepted me, and met my partner. It was tough, but thank God I did it, because we ended up having a real relationship.”

Ironically enough, Ball and his partner didn’t get any such acceptance from their 80-year-old next-door neighbour in the Hollywood Hills: every day he would empty his rubbish into their driveway, until they finally took out a restraining order. The old man has since died and his property was torn down to make way for a mansion, but then the stock exchange crashed and the new owner pulled out. “It’s all wild and overgrown now,” Ball says. “It’s kind of beautiful. There are deer living there.”

Asked about California’s recent overturning of the law allowing same-sex marriage, Ball says it turns gays into “second-class citizens”, but that “it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what’s wrong with America”.

Still, Ball appears to have finally found a kind of of peace in Los Angeles. He says he loves the city now, particularly the space to walk his dogs at Runyon Canyon, a nearby park. He’s also become a Buddhist, because “it’s about love and not denouncing others, like the Christianity of my childhood”.

“I’m a fairly happy person,” he says. “I’m content. I really like my life. But for some reason I still get people coming up to me and saying, ‘Cheer up’.”

Perhaps that’s because Ball’s happiness isn’t exactly conventional: for example, he reveals that his idea of a good night is “a Vicodin [a highly addictive prescription painkiller] and a pay-per-view movie.”

As for his career, Ball has signed a deal with HBO to do two more seasons of True Blood. He also has two other shows in the works, including an adaptation of the British series Bad Girls, along with several movie projects. But his heart seems to be more in the small screen.

“I could never have sold Six Feet Under as movie,” he argues. “It’s just the nature of the medium: a movie is like a short story, while a TV series is like a novel. And what I love about Six Feet Under is that it really touched people, personally.”

Alas, not always in the most obviously gratifying ways. For example, Ball recalls one fan he met shortly after his mother died. “I was at the funeral home and the mortician came up to me and said: ‘I’m in this business because of you’.”

It was enough to render Ball speechless for a moment. “Then I was like: ‘Is that a good thing?’ ”

by Michael Ausiello- ew.com

In what would be a boon to Sookie-Eric fans, True Blood boss Alan Ball isn’t ruling out incorporating a major (and controversial) plot point from the books that, up to now, has only been hinted at in the series (spoiler alert): That Bill came to Bon Temps and seduced Sookie with the ulterior motive of getting her to work for Queen Sophie-Anne.

“It’s certainly something that I found really compelling in the books,” says Ball of Bill’s deep dark secret. “I was like, ‘Wow.’ But I can’t really tell you what I’m going to do story-wise. So much of the appeal of the show depends on the element of surprise.”

Bill-Sookie shippers are no doubt hoping Ball opts not to go there. In addition to driving a stake through the heart of their favorite couple, it could push Sookie into the arms of Eric.

“I try to stay out of how the fans are responding to the show,” says Ball. “I have to tell the story that I think is the most interesting story. Certainly, the main ingredient in drama is conflict and revelations. For every person who loves Bill and wants him and Sookie to just be in love always, there’s another person who’s like, ‘I’m sick of Bill. He’s such a wuss. I like Eric. He’s dangerous.’ Especially when you’re working on a show like this with the kind of palette and the colors you use; you want it to be continually surprising and shocking. Not for the sake of being shocking, but that’s part of the fun.”

What do you think? Should Ball remain faithful to the books and blow Bill’s secret wide open? Or should he overlook the dark twist on account of not wanting to destroy Bill-Sookie? Sound off below!

aceshowbiz.com

Maryann ends her eccentricities in season 2, Sookie is not pure human, and a bad news character is coming to season 3.

Asked whether Eric, who already became a big part of season 2, will finally get together with Sookie, Ball said, “I can’t tell you if they’re going to get together, because that’s going to ruin the anticipation.” He added, “But, if you’ve been following season two, he’s definitely been doing things to make her more vulnerable and more susceptible to him. And he does want her, he’s just not sure why. I think it’s deeper than just, ‘I want her because Bill Compton has her’. Although that’s part of it, because Eric is a total alpha-dog.”

The third season is loosely based on Charlaine Harris’ third novel from the “Sookie Stackhouse” series, “Club Dead”. Ball spilled, “…I’m not giving anything away when I say that we’ll meet the Vampire King of Mississippi, Russell Edgington. And we’ll encounter werewolves for the first time in the flesh; we’ve heard about them, but we’ll meet them. I’m very excited about the character of Debbie Pelt. She’s bad news.”

Ball went further in revealing what season 3 would be like, saying “Everybody is struggling with identity in season three – What am I? Who am I? What is my life? …And some people are like, ‘Am I human? I always thought I was, but maybe I was wrong’. In one particular case, its like, ‘Yes, honey, you were wrong’.” Pressed further by TV Squad, Ball admitted that Sookie is not 100 percent human and that she is aware of it.

Those who will not be back for the third season next summer would be Godric, who is “really dead”, and second season’s villain, Maryann.

by Jane Boursaw -tvsquad.com

Here’s the full transcript of the interview I conducted with True Blood creator Alan Ball (comments can be left under the edited version):

I asked my TV Squad readers what they wanted me to ask you, and one of their main questions involves the books. Some feel the show doesn’t follow the books closely enough. Your thoughts on that?

I think a book and a television show are two different mediums. If I were to follow the books, it would be all about Sookie, because Sookie narrates the story, and the other characters would rarely even show up. Jason would come into the bar and hug her in an attempt to make people think he loves his sister so he can pick somebody up. Tara wouldn’t even have existed until this season, and she’d be white. Lafayette would be dead.

So all I can say to those people is, it’s based on the books, but it’s not a literal adaptation of the books. I’m doing what I think is the best way to turn that story into a television show. Also, if I just stuck to the books, there would be no surprises. You could go pick up the books anywhere and know exactly what was coming. So personally, I don’t see any benefit of making a carbon copy of the books for TV.

I talked to Stephen Moyer earlier this year, and he said pretty much the same thing. So what’s your creative process to figure out which storylines and characters to follow?

Well, Sookie narrates the books, so her story is basically figured out to a great degree already. At the beginning of each season, we go through the books, pick out the points we really love, and pick out the points we think would make a great cliffhanger moment at the end of an episode. Then we start to wrap the other characters in, because even though Anna is the star and Sookie is the central character, it’s an ensemble show. That’s part of what I love about it; there’s so many characters, and there’s somebody for everybody.

Then sometimes we’ll look at something that happens in the book, and we’ll say, “Maybe it might work better if we just change this.” For example, I love the books, and I think Charlaine is a fantastic writer. My hat’s off to her, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next book in the series. But in the first book, when Longshadow attacked Sookie, Eric staked him. There was some vague thing, like “Oh, Eric’s in trouble. He had to go in front of some board.” Well, it seemed more dramatic within the world of our television show to have Bill be the one who staked him. None of that was in the book and had it been Eric, at that point of Eric’s place in the show, I don’t think we would have followed him. Eric was introduced sort of into the periphery of Bill and Sookie, and now Eric’s become a character in his own right.

And you couldn’t have picked a better punishment for Bill.

Right, we came up with the worst possible punishment for Bill, which was having to make a vampire. Now, we have this crazy, formerly Christian, home-schooled, socially inept girl whose been turned into a vampire, which I think is a fantastic character.

Jessica is awesome.

And again, if we had followed the books, we wouldn’t have that. So the people who love the books, more power to you. You will always have the books. We’re not taking any of that away from you.

Will Eric be a bigger part of the show in season three? Will he and Sookie get together?

I can’t tell you if they’re going to get together, because that’s going to ruin the anticipation. But, if you’ve been following season two, he’s definitely been doing things to make her more vulnerable and more susceptible to him. And he does want her, he’s just not sure why. I think it’s deeper than just, “I want her because Bill Compton has her.” Although that’s part of it, because Eric is a total alpha-dog.

Yeah, that opening scene in “Frenzy” [of Eric and Sookie in bed together] was cool, but it kind of made me feel bad for Bill. I’m as big a fan of Eric as the next girl, but between him and Bill, it would be a tough choice!

They’re both vampires, and they’re both deadly, so there’s that. It’s the classic good boy/bad boy. The good boy, he’s great, but the bad boy … you can’t stop thinking about him.

Yes, right. And we kind of all want Eric to grow his hair back, too.

Seriously?

Oh yeah.

He wore a wig on season one, and we thought it looked ridiculous. I got a lot of e-mails saying, “Oh, I wish they’d take that wig off of him,” so we did. We came up with the haircut just to get that ridiculous wig off of him. I think he looks so much better, and it’s certainly loosened him up as an actor. It’s like the wig came off, and he blossomed.

Everyone is just fantastic on the show. I don’t know how you got all these people together who are just perfect for their roles. Did you have certain actors in mind ahead of time?

Not at all. I don’t work that way. For me, the character is enough when I’m writing, and also, at that point, I’d read six books of Charlaine’s that made it pretty clear who the characters were. For me, what’s most important is finding the person who can inhabit that role spiritually, personality wise, and who fulfills the essence of the character, as opposed to whether they’re a complete match for how the character is described in the books. I’m lucky because when you work with HBO, you don’t have a committee of casting people weighing in on every decision. You don’t have people thinking, “Oh, we have to cast people we recognize, because otherwise nobody’s going to watch this show.” So I’m not forced to cast all the familiar faces, which I love because then you’re able to really get to know the characters without going, “Oh, it’s that guy from that show.” Granted, we all knew who Anna [Paquin] was, but I think she sort of reinvented herself.

She has totally reinvented herself. I mean, now I can’t think of her as anyone other than Sookie. I always say in my reviews that in every episode, you have love and lust and sex and tender moments and heartbreak. My hat’s off to you for just bringing it in every episode. There’s no slack there at all.

Well, thank you very much. We work very hard, so that’s really, really gratifying to hear. I really appreciate it.

Is it just total team work that brings it all together every episode?

What’s interesting about this show as opposed to Six Feet Under, is that this show is just fun. It’s so much fun. I’ve never worked on a genre show before, so I think that’s kind of new to me. Certainly, as a story teller, I have so many different doors to open than I had with Six Feet Under. We really LIKE to go to work.

You can tell.

These last few weeks, I’ve been working with the writers on breaking episodes for season three, but these people want to write scripts over their vacation, which is great, because I like to be really, really organized. We’re usually four or five scripts ahead of the game, and I don’t know how to work any other way. I know a lot of shows are like, “here’s the pages,” right before they start filming. I’d have a heart attack. The anxiety would be way too much for me. I don’t have as strong a backbone as those other show writers.

I absolutely fell in love with Six Feet Under, but I practically cried my way through every episode, especially as you got towards the end of the series.

Yes. I mean, it’s about grief and living with grief, whereas True Blood is just escapism. We really try to root the relationships and the characters and make them understandable and psychologically valid with behavior that we can recognize. But, you know, it’s vampires and guys that turn into dogs.

I’m always prepared to be shocked and awed every episode, and I am. Can you tell us anything about season three?

Well, the book is out there, so I’m not giving anything away when I say that we’ll meet the Vampire King of Mississippi, Russell Edgington. And we’ll encounter werewolves for the first time in the flesh; we’ve heard about them, but we’ll meet them. I’m very excited about the character of Debbie Pelt. She’s bad news.

Since I haven’t read the books, who is that?

Debbie Pelt is the ex-girlfriend of a guy who’s helping Sookie try to find Bill, and she is just hard ass, white trash bitch on wheels. She’s so much fun. But there are other great characters, too. Everybody is struggling with identity in season three – What am I? Who am I? What is my life? Is it what I want it to be? How do I make it what I want it to be? What are my real values? And some people are like, “Am I human? I always thought I was, but maybe I was wrong.” In one particular case, its like, “Yes, honey, you were wrong.”

Is that Sookie? Is she part faerie? Can you tell me that?

I can tell you that Sookie is not 100 percent human. She is now aware of that.

After the white-light thing with Maryann.

Yes. She doesn’t know what she is, but she knows that it’s not totally human.

And people just love the story line with Sam and Andy and Jason. They’re like, “Oh, they need their own spin- off show. Just put them on the road.” Are Sam and Andy related at all?

They are not related; however, Andy is related to somebody in the show. He doesn’t know it, but he’ll be shocked when he finds out who it is.

Andy seems to be immune to Maryann’s spells. Can you tell us why?

I would say he’s been immune up until this point.

Ok. And Godric, is he really dead?

He is really dead.

That was such a tender scene at the end of “I Will Rise Up” between Godric and Eric and Sookie.

Yes, I loved that scene. However, Godric and Eric have a thousand years of flashback territory to be mined.

People haven’t really been liking the Maryann storyline. What’s your reaction to that?

I’m baffled because I think she’s a fantastic character and a fantastic actress. I also know a lot of people who really love her. I think people are impatient, you know what I mean? When her story pays off, it is really, really gratifying.

Will she be in season three?

Maryann is not going to be in season three.

When I watch True Blood, I’m sort of prepared to be freaked out, and I usually am, but in a good way. When you’re researching a lot of this stuff, is it kind of freaky to think about and write about, or is it just fun for you?

You mean researching people who eat other people’s hearts?

Yeah, supernatural stuff.

Well, my approach for the show is to make the supernatural something that is a deeper manifestation than nature, than perhaps we are equipped to perceive. But in my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it’s horrifying. But that’s just human nature. That’s just psychology. Psychopaths exist everywhere, and have existed all throughout history.

Do you believe in the supernatural?

I certainly believe that what we perceive as humans is just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t necessarily believe in vampires or werewolves or that kind of thing, but I believe there is definitely a realm we don’t necessarily have access to. I don’t know what it is, and I hesitate to articulate it further than that, because I have no idea what it is, but I know it’s there.

Why do you think people are so big on vampires right now?

Well, honestly, I think it’s a bit of a coincidence that several vampire movies, TV shows, and books all happened at the same time, but I also think vampires are hot. Vampires are sexy. It’s a very primal depiction of sexuality. It’s also fun to fantasize about this creature that’s stronger than we are, taking us against our will in a very sexual and savage way, whereas it’s not fun to fantasize about a human doing that. It makes a certain sort of fantasy about surrender and being ravaged safe, because you know that a vampire is never going to come after you.

Right, and they’re protective, like Bill is of Sookie. Well, some of them are anyway. That’s appealing.

We’re going to meet a vampire in season three who’s not very protective at all. Those who’ve read the books will recognize the name — Franklin Mott.

Can’t wait for season three! Thanks so much for all your time, Alan.

Absolutely. My pleasure.