Saturday, July 11, 2009

True Blood's Michelle Forbes Ponders "The Riddle of Maryann"

from SeattlePI and TV Guide

Michelle Forbes likes that her True Blood character, Maryann Forrester, is such an enigma. It reminds her of how she got the acting gig. "I was told a lot, yet very little, and that is the riddle of Maryann," she says, quixotically. "I was so lost initially." Join the club. You may have heard that Maryann is a maenad, and that's technically accurate — but it's certainly not the whole story. Forbes was gracious enough to help us understand Maryann's maybe-not-so-evil-after-all ways in this two-part interview. (After you watch Sunday's episode, come back Monday morning for the juicy bits of Part 2.)

TVGuide.com: When I heard Alan Ball was going to be doing a vampire show, I thought: Oh, no! I'm not generally a fan of goth or genre-type stuff.
Michelle Forbes: That's what's so fascinating about [True Blood]. For someone who seems to be known for her sci-fi career, I had not thought of vampires for more than five minutes in my entire life. But this show is not about vampires. It's looking at all these different beings — a telepathic waitress, a shape-shifter bar owner, or, you know, Stephen Root's lonely accountant vampire — and it gives such a real face to this world of the supernatural that I always found rather goofy.

TVGuide.com: And the end result is both fun and sophisticated.
Forbes: You have this landscape for social commentary, for questioning injustice, compassion and our pack-mentality thinking allegorically.

TVGuide.com: Were you a fan of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels?
Forbes: I'd never even heard of them. I bought them, read the first one and then put them down because we are telling our own story. For the "book-ies" out there, everyone has to remember that it's an adaptation, not a translation.

TVGuide.com: There is a character who's similar to Maryann in the books though, isn't there?
Forbes: Yes, Callisto — she shows up in the second book. I was like, why didn't we use that name? It's so much prettier than Maryann.

TVGuide.com: What did they tell you in advance about Maryann?
Forbes: There were discussions about Greek mythology, and yet you open a script and you're dancing to the B-52's. It was a little hard trying to understand how the two mesh together, but with these writers and [series creator Alan Ball], the trust factor is massive. Everything became evident the more I sat still.

TVGuide.com: What exactly did you talk about?
Forbes: We talked about Bacchus and Dionysus; what a maenad is, how they're led by appetite, how they thrive off other peoples' appetites, chaos and destruction. But, you know, that was the diving board, but it wasn't the pool.

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