Also, Joe will be interviewed by AP on Monday, August 2nd, at 3 pm est.

Will you be listening?

~M.

Joe Manganiello has apparently impressed the producers of the popular HBO series so much that they’ve decided to keep him around a bit longer than expected!!!

Hopefully, we’ll get more info at this afternoon’s SDCC panel.

Thanks to Chris for the info!

~M.

P.S. Knowing that Joe will be back next year… what do you think this means for the next season, story wise?

A few days back we reported from an E! interview w/ Joe Manganiello and he stated the following:

Joe elaborates coyly: “Werewolves and vampires don’t like each other to begin with. You will wind up seeing Eric and Alcide together at some point. When I was being cast, I heard that they were looking for somebody as tall or taller than Alex because they wanted somebody who could square off against him. I’ll just say that.”

So, we were wondering  if you were Sookie (in Season 3 of True Blood) who would you choose/root for in a fight?

~M.

Images are from the latest Entertainment Weekly.

TGIF!

Enjoy my lovelies.

~M.

From: TV Guide

Mmmmhmmmm….

~M.

TV Squad – Chances are you aren’t familiar with the name Joe Manganiello yet, but rest assured, once the new season of ‘True Blood’ starts airing, that name is going to be splashed over every Hot List from CNN to TMZ.

The 33-year old Pittsburgh native is no stranger to our screens, having enjoyed recurring stints on ‘One Tree Hill’ and ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ but it is his role as brooding werewolf Alcide Herveaux that has break-out potential written all over it.

In an exclusive interview with TV Squad, Manganiello dished the dirt on his character’s juicy relationship with Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), the story behind Alcide’s homicidal ex, and why those ‘Twilight’ werewolves better “bring it on.”

Spoilers ahead!

We don’t know what it is about Sookie Stackhouse, but that girl manages to attract more prime chunks of supernatural man-meat than any one woman deserves, and Manganiello’s Alcide is no exception. “He’s big, he’s strong, he’s protective,” Manganiello said of his character. “He’s kind of a recluse — he just wants to live his life and be left alone.”

Can we get an “awww”? The actor has previously described Alcide as the “moral compass” of the show, which seems strange, considering how loose ‘True Blood’ is with its morals …

“I’m interested to see how [that] plays and how the fans respond to it, because it really is bringing something new to the show,” Manganiello conceded. “Alcide is this just and moral man, and he sees some things going on that he can’t ignore, and so that kind of throws him into the action. He’s a big, sensitive bunny rabbit inside of this wolf monster clothing … A sheep in wolf’s clothing!”

For ‘True Blood’ fans familiar with the books — or the show’s previously released spoilers — you may already be aware that Alcide is brought into Sookie’s life by that Nordic hunk of vampire, Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) to protect our trouble-prone waitress on her search for her undead boyfriend Bill (Stephen Moyer).

Unlucky for Bill, sparks invariably start flying between Sookie and her furry bodyguard, and forget about a love triangle; Manganiello teased that we’re definitely in line for a “love square” this season. “There’s a fondness and a bond that grows between Alcide and Sookie,” he admitted coyly. “Sookie’s spunk brings him out of his shell and I think he recognizes that he really likes that.”

Does that mean we might see a vampire vs. werewolf showdown that would put ‘Twilight’ to shame? “Vampires and werewolves don’t like each other to begin with,” Manganiello said, choosing his words carefully so as not to reveal too much (shucks!). “And if anyone were to mistreat Sookie in any way, the beast inside of Alcide would be unleashed … ”

And what about those inevitable comparisons to ‘Twilight’? Though the Sookie Stackhouse novels were written years before Stephenie Meyer’s saga was conceived, thanks to ‘New Moon’ and the upcoming ‘Eclipse,’ fantasy fans are already more than familiar with the concept of a human girl trapped between two supernatural boyfriends.

Manganiello wasn’t worried. “I love the fact that the new ‘Twilight’ movie is coming out this summer, I love the comparisons, bring ‘em on!” he said. “I think that one hand feeds the other. For me, it’s a great time to be a werewolf; this is like, the year of the werewolf — I’m just glad that they’re finally starting to get some respect!”

But if Manganiello was teasing about a love square, that begs the question of who the fourth component is. Could it be Eric, who has forced Alcide into this “suicide mission” with Sookie after spending the majority of last season trying to entice our Southern belle away from Bill? Or maybe it’s Bill’s obsessive ex Lorena (Mariana Klaveno), who might be the culprit behind Bill’s kidnapping?

Perhaps we should start calling this love square a love hexagon, because Bill’s not the only one with a nutty ex; Manganiello reveals that when we first meet our pensive werewolf, Alcide is “mourning over his lost relationship,” after his fiancée, Debbie Pelt (Brit Morgan), leaves him. “[Debbie] is a troublemaker for me,” Manganiello explained. “She’s crazy, she’s psycho, she just won’t go away.” Seems like a recurring theme on ‘True Blood’; those exes are hard to shake.

Debbie and Alcide both play a larger part in the ongoing subplot of the series, which — if you’ve seen the newest promo — involves a pack of nasty looking werewolves who catch Sookie’s scent.

“There are some very scary goings on with the members of another pack,” Manganiello revealed of the rival wolves. “Werewolves have lived in hiding for thousands of years without any humans knowing that they exist, and there’s this other pack that comes along and threatens to throw that balance off. Debbie is at the heart of that pack uprising.”

If you’re expecting the werewolves to suffer a similar “outing” to the vampires, however, Manganiello said that might be a little premature. “I think there’s a great fear of that because if the werewolves came out they could be subject to experimentation and stuck in zoos,” he said, before demonstrating a surprising knowledge of the source material. “In Book 9, the werewolves reveal themselves, they call it the Second Great Revelation. I think that would be something for [the writers] to think about down the line, but for right now this bad pack has to be stopped.”

Handsome and well-read — we think ‘True Blood’ is spoiling us. And that’s even before Manganiello revealed that Alcide is shirtless “practically the whole time,” this season. “In this day and age, you can’t be a werewolf and not be in great shape, apparently,” he laughed.

But a more important question than how often Alcide is shirtless, is how long are Alcide and his shirtlessness sticking around? If the books are to be believed, a long time yet. “There have been whispers and rumors and rumblings [about next season],” Manganiello teased. “People ask me how the show is going and my response is always, they haven’t killed me yet!”

Sounds like a good sign to us. We have no doubt that Manganiello’s moon is on the rise, and we’re looking forward to howling at it for many seasons to come.

~M.

POPWRAP:  Today marks the day we can finally say, there is less than one week until the premiere of “True Blood” season three! It’s an event that’s long in the making and one I plan to celebrate by bringing you exclusive cast interviews throughout the week, so stayed tuned for that.

But for now, I’ll give you a taste of my interview with new castmember Joe Manganiello, who plays werewolf Alcide. The actor went all Taylor Lautner for the role, seriously bulking up in order to convincingly bring his character to life … as you can plainly see in the brand new still above

“Vampires can get away with having very slight builds and the audience will still believe that they’re super powerful,” Joe tells PopWrap. “Werewolves are animals and in my mind they should be very muscular. Not an extra ounce of fat on them. Really ripped. I wanted people to look at Alcide and think, ‘wow, he’s a super strong animal.’”

Another difference between playing claws vs. fangs? “It was important for me to get a tan,” Joe says. “Because, well, I can and it would offset my character in relation to the vampires.”

Joe was also determined to make his incarnation of Alcide live up to the version author Charlaine Harris had created in “The Southern Vampire Mysteries” series. “Charlaine went into a lot of detail in the books about Alcide being giant. About having arms that look like boulders, like Sookie could do pull-ups on them,” Joe says.

Luckily the actor had a good head start. “My mom is half Austrian and comes from a long line of giant athletes. I remember my mom doing double bicep flexes and her arms were just ripped. She had like Madonna arms. She would flex and say, “that’s where you get it kid.” So I have my mother to thank.”

As do we all Joe.

MTV – If you thought Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) already had an overabundance of supernatural suitors in the form of Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard) and Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell), you should prepare yourself now for the addition of one more possible love interest. “One Tree Hill” actor Joe Manganiello joins the cast of “True Blood” this year as Alcide Herveaux, a werewolf sent by Eric to protect Sookie as she embarks on her quest to locate and rescue Vampire Bill, abducted by unknown forces at the end of season two.

“He’s kind of a moral compass on the show,” Joe said of Alcide in an exclusive interview with Hollywood Crush. “He’s big, he’s strong and he’s protective. He’s a good person.”

According to Joe, Alcide also has a lot in common with a slinky. Not sure what that means? Click past the jump and we’ll tell you what the actor had to say!

“I describe him as a slinky,” Joe said as he began using an unexpected metaphor to describe his character. “It’s this coiled piece of metal that when it’s coiled a certain way, it can walk downstairs and do these amazing things. But if you were to try and straighten that slinky out, it would cease to be special. That’s kind of how I see Alcide in a way — he’s this amazing creature trying to live within the confines of human society. It’s a lonely existence.”

As “True Blood” progresses through the third season, Alcide uncoils and escorts Sookie through “an underground society of werewolves” in order to alleviate a debt he owes to Eric Northman. Viewers will soon recognize that there’s an attraction between Alcide and Sookie, but the telepath isn’t the only character in this pair with some additional romantic baggage.

“Alcide has a psycho ex-fiancée named Debbie Pelt who’s floating around causing him trouble,” said Joe. “She’s crazy. She’s psychotic. She’s twisted. It’s a fascinating dynamic between her and Alcide. She’s a character on the edge and Alcide’s caught in that spot between letting her go and trying to save her.”