Nelsan Ellis talks about 'True Blood's' finale and what's next for Lafayette

from Chicago Tribune

As the wild and largely enjoyable second season of HBO's "True Blood" came to a close on Sunday, most of the residents of Bon Temps, La., wanted to put the insanity that had gripped the town behind them.

No one was more interested in sweeping things under the rug than Lafayette Reynolds, the cook at Merlotte's, Bon Temps' favorite watering hole.

Like most of the people in Bon Temps, Lafayette had fallen under the sway of the charismatic Maryann (Michelle Forbes), who was actually a creature known as a maenad.

Over a period of weeks, Maryann had turned more and more townsfolk into her unhinged acolytes, and though Lafayette had held out longer than most, he eventually succumbed.

[Events from "True Blood's" Season 2 finale will be discussed below. If you haven't seen the episode, be forewarned.]

Once the town's maenad encounter was over -- and it took a clever scheme from a vampire and a shapeshifter to engineer Maryann's demise -- most of the Bon Temps residents could not recall what insane or criminal things they'd done under her influence. And according to Nelsan Ellis, the Chicago native who plays Lafayette, that was just fine with the tart-tongued Merlotte's cook.

"He tells [waitress] Sookie [Stackhouse], 'I know you know what happened. Take it to your grave,'" said Ellis.

The actor, who was born in Harvey, spent much of his youth in Alabama, and returned to the Chicago area at age 14 to attend Dolton's Thornridge High School. He later studied at Columbia College Chicago, at Illinois State University and at New York's prestigious Juilliard School.

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