True Blood actor Alexander Skarsgard graces the cover of the latest issue of Interview magazine, where he discusses the show and his fans.
When asked if he was burned out by playing vampire Eric Northman, or if he still loves it, he said, “No, I still love it. I think the writing on the show is so good that it keeps me interested. I was nervous when I first started True Blood because if you do a play or a movie, you know the complete arc of the character. You can see the end.”
He went on to say, “But with a show like True Blood, you don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re shooting season four, and I don’t even know how it’s going to end because they write it as we’re shooting it. So I was nervous. I didn’t know how it would be to live with a character for years, because I’ve never experienced that before. What happens if you wake up after two years, and you’re like, ‘Oh, God. I’m over this guy’? But the writing is so good, and they keep surprising me. Plus, we only shoot for six or seven months out of the year, so there is time to try other things as well. That gives me a chance to not only go home and see my family, but also work on movies or do a play where I can dive into a different world and then come back to True Blood kind of rejuvenated.”
The interviewer then said, “There’s always a thing with actors where people think they know you because they’ve seen you play a character for so long. It’s different from what happens with musicians. I know that when I was a teenager and I was in New York, you’d recognize someone from a film and be like, I think I know this person because you know their face. How do you deal with that? The small amount of it that I’ve had to deal with drives me crazy.”
Alexander responded, “Well, I think that meeting fans who feel like they know you and they know everything about you is actually very flattering. It means a lot to know that what you’re doing actually means something to someone. But the thing that I feel to be a problem potentially is that you become that character, that in the industry, people associate it too closely with who you are and what you can do. I do get a lot of scripts sent to me where they basically want me to play Eric from True Blood, but just a different name in a different movie. That’s not interesting to me. I don’t want to play a character that I’ve played for four years on a television show, change the name, and make him a zombie instead of a vampire.”
