Saturday, July 31, 2010

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE Shape Shifting Sam Trammell Is Full of Surprises

The down-home, all-American guy that everyone thinks they’ve come to know has a complexity beneath the surface that few would expect. Sam Trammell and his alter-ego, “True Blood”’s Sam Merlotte, have a lot in common in this regard. Merlotte manages to keep a low profile as the owner of the neighborhood saloon in the fictional Louisiana town of Bon Temps, closely guarding his true nature as a shape-shifter, a creature capable of transforming into any animal he sees. Trammell is a talented, charismatic television actor on a hit show, who surfs and plays guitar — and is also a classical pianist who graduated from Brown University with a degree in semiotics and spent a year in Paris studying French philosophy. “Strictly speaking, it’s the study of signification,” he explains of semiotics during our meeting at a West Hollywood cafe. “The process of how things represent other things. Signs. If you do a really pure semiotical study, it’s very linguistic; it’s a lot about language but it’s also interdisciplinary.” He discusses how Freud, psychoanalysis, Marx and Engels, and feminist and film theories are all tied in with this field, and he touches on concepts of physics that leave us compelled to google and reexamine Einstein’s theory of relativity. Trammell is full of surprises.

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1 comments:

Rita said...

You know Sam has done a lot of different
things in life and smart to.I guess he was in shock when finding out where he
would be doing that nude running part
and it had been some family land at some
time in the past neat.