PHOTO BY JACK SIEGEL

The type of stranger approaching Joe Manganiello on the street has changed recently, from devotees of the CW’s One Tree Hill (an apparently fanatical and legion population), on which he played bartender Owen for two seasons, to rabid True Blood fans eager to get close to Manganiello’s latest character, the werewolf Alcide Herveaux.

During a visit to New York, Manganiello found time to talk to us about the thrill of being cast on his favorite show, and his tips for playing a werewolf, which include ab work and connecting with your inner child.

MCKENNEY: Tell us a little about your audition process for True Blood.

MANGANIELLO: My first audition was for a different werewolf role–it was me, ten inches away from the casting director, growling in her face. It felt great. They called me back in and said they wanted me to read again, but this time for the part of Alcide. Since I was a fan of the series and had already read all the books, I knew this was a bigger role, and was totally overwhelmed when I got it.

PHOTO BY JACK SIEGEL

MCKENNEY: Werewolf and vampire roles have gotten so ubiquitous that I’ve heard there are classes in L.A. that specialize only in this type of acting. How would you teach Werewolf Acting 101?

MANGANIELLO: I mean, I feel like I’ve been pretending I was a werewolf since I was a little kid. But it takes work. It’s about dialect work… I’m not going to lie–it’s about going to the gym. It’s a lot about letting it all go, remembering when you were a crazy primal kid running around and screaming. I wouldn’t tell anyone to study werewolves–I studied wolves, how they moved, their tendencies and sensibilities.

MCKENNEY: Originally, you were only meant to be in six episodes, but Alan Ball expanded your role for the fourth season.

MANGANIELLO: My character is in all the books, but there was no assurance that the show would follow that, so it was exhilarating to find out I was going to be a regular character.

MCKENNEY: I have to imagine you have been exposed to a new kind of fan. How was attending Comic Con?

MANGANIELLO: I mean One Tree Hill had some rabid fans–you’d be surprised–they’re almost in a class of their own. But the level of hysteria at Comic Con was intense–a very generous response. It was totally overwhelming; it’s definitely the closest I’ll ever come to knowing what it was like to be a Beatle. But I was obsessed with the show before I was on it, so I get it. I think it has to do with Alan’s writing. The storytelling and dialogue is really intelligent, and it draws you in, so you care so much about the characters.

MCKENNEY: Any interesting fan encounters recently?

MANGANIELLO: I’m currently in New York, and I was walking around Saks yesterday, and you know how you can kind of sense it when someone is staring at you? I got that feeling, and then looked up after ten minutes or so and all these ladies had come out from behind their counters and were sort of trailing behind me in a horde. I walked into another room and one lady screamed “WHERE’S THAT WEREWOLF AT?!” I waved at her and a bunch of ladies started hooting and hollering. It was great. It was fun.

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

Will you be listening?

~M.

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.

Mmmmhmmmm….

~M.

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.