Love at first bite

BEING a vampire has never been so popular or sexy, but what if you happen to be married to someone who plays one on-screen and you also happen to have some pretty intense erotic scenes yourself in the same show?

How do you leave your work life outside the house and which shop-talk is allowed past the bedroom door?

Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin have been dealing with this scenario for the past four years since they met on the set of True Blood. Initially playing an on-screen couple, 175-year-old vampire Bill Compton and clairaudient waitress, Sookie Stackhouse, the two fell in love pretty rapidly in real life and were married within a year of meeting.

While the show stands out for its humour, its brashness, and for catering to the current cultural fascination with all things vampiric, True Blood also has a very devoted adult following for its sheer sexiness.

In one season, Bill and Sookie are no longer a couple and both of them are getting it on with lots of other people, Sookie with Eric in particular. When we sat down in LA last week, the question that kept begging to be asked was, which parts of work get brought home and what toll does all this on-screen sex with other characters take on them privately?

“We often shoot at different times of the day, or in Stephen’s case at night, so when one of us is going out the door, the other one is often like, ‘bye honey, have good sex today. Be sexy’,” says Paquin, 29, suffused with giggles. “It’s always vaguely weird getting it on with someone who isn’t your partner, but Alex Skarsgard (Eric) is a close friend of Steve and mine, so there’s really nothing that’s that weird — after you’ve all gotten naked on the cover of Rolling Stone and having people throw buckets of blood on top of you. We’ve broken the ice pretty well, so it’s going to take a lot for us to get ruffled!”

Anna Paquin is not your typical Hollywood actress. The Canadian-born Kiwi, who is bisexual, won an Oscar at the age of 11 for best supporting actress in The Piano and then announced she had no further interest in the profession. She studied psychology at Colombia University, but dropped out, lured back on to the big screen.

“I feel very fortunate that I was allowed to go through my childhood and adolescence before the paparazzi and all the attention there is today, where it’s become a sport. I lived in New Zealand until I was 16 and there wasn’t the kind of media feeding frenzy there is now,” she said.

Somewhat brittle and just a tad defensive in person, Paquin says meeting and marrying Moyer has made her more relaxed and easy-going and has broadened her singular focus in life, beyond work. She is the devoted step-mother to his two children, who now divide their time between being with their mother in London and the other half of their time with their Dad and Anna in Malibu.

So, what’s it like watching the sex scenes each does with other people in this season?

“I think it’s a credit to the show that when I’m watching it, I buy into the story and the characters,” says Paquin. “I ultimately want it to be really, really good and if Steve’s character is supposed to be off doing whatever with whomever, then I hope it’s really good and I hope he does it really well. I don’t want him to be half-assing it because he’s worried that the wife’s going to be upset at home. That would be incredibly unprofessional for one thing. We’re very much about the work, but it is a bit weird, though,” she concedes.

Stephen Moyer, 41, was a veteran of British TV for years on shows like Cold Feet, Life Support and NY-LON before getting cast as Bill Compton in True Blood. (His real name is Stephen Emory but he changed because an actor by the name of Stephen Emory registered with Equity just ahead of him on the same day.) He freely admits he had no idea of the extent to which getting cast in True Blood was going to utterly change his life.

“I don’t think anyone expected that Anna and I would get married. I’d never been married and had come from a (happily) broken home — that happened when I was about 18 and I couldn’t ever imagine myself getting married. But it got to the point with Anna where I knew I wanted to be with her forever and I couldn’t imagine calling my 50, 60, 70-year-old-partner my girlfriend and I felt she deserved a better name than that,” said Moyer.

The audiences for True Blood are in the tens of millions and growing, spanning a broad range of ages and all the major genders, and this broad appeal is something they’re proud of.

“Everyone is very interested in kinky vampire sex, it seems,” sighs Paquin. “It seems to be the guilty pleasure of a lot of different generations, judging by the range of people who come up to me,” concurs Moyer. Is there ever any concern or jealousy between them when the other is having a lot of on-screen sex?

“I’d love to be able to answer that and go ‘I don’t think about it’. But it’s not true,” says Moyer. “She has to watch me do it and there are days when you feel very confident in yourself and your relationship and you don’t even think about it. There are days when you’re tired and you haven’t seen each other and all the questions are in your mind like they would be for anybody. I’ll ask her ‘how was it sleeping with the big, rangy Swede?’ you know, ‘how were Alex’s pecs?’

“But the one advantage of both of us being in the business is that I know when I’m doing a love scene with somebody else that I’m not in love with them and that I’m doing my job. You have to ask each other questions and make sure the other one is alright, because sometimes there’s nothing odder for the person doing it to know that you’re going to watch it with your partner. I actually love watching the show with Anna,” says Moyer.

“It’s weird, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this job and marriage and Anna is that trust is 100% of it. It also helps that Alex is a very, very good friend of mine. Sometimes a couple of girls that I have stuff with this season were people who were new to the show and Anna had never met them before, so that can throw up an oddness,” he says.

Although True Blood is now entering its fifth season, all the cast and crew signed up for seven years at the outset, so the chances of a few more seasons of sexy vampire antics in Bon Temps are very high.