ENTER THE HERO I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I didn't always want to act. I thought I was going to wind up playing college basketball and go into the FBI. But, after a series of sports injuries, I didn't end up pursuing athletics. It left me just enough time to get back in touch with my artistic side, which I'd had to put aside for about a decade. When I was a kid. I was really artistic. I used to draw, create characters and write stories. My mother would take me to art classes and children's theatre. I loved movies, books and comics. But this sensitive side had to be put away because when you're my size [1.96 metres tall] and you grow up in Pittsburgh, where football is king, that's what you do. In high school, I started making home movies with my friends, which were heavily influenced by Hong Kong movies. I had a friend who grew up in Vietnam, who was a black belt in several martial arts. He got me into Enter the Dragon, Drunken Master and Police Story, the old Jackie Chan films. He later introduced me to Jet Li and his film Hero. I would sit up at night with a pad and pen and write these mafia, martial-arts action movies. We found out how to make home-made squibs [small explosives] and gunshot effects, so we'd have these John Woo-style showdowns where everybody got shot and blood spattered everywhere. That's how I caught the bug. My friends said I should take an acting class and the teacher urged me to audition for the high-school musical. I wound up getting a scholarship in classical theatre at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which exceeded all of my expectations.
THE MONSTER INSIDE In True Blood season four, my character [werewolf Alcide Herveaux] develops a lot - at times, towards the end of the season, I felt like I was playing a different character in a different show. [His love interest] Sookie [Stackhouse] activates the hero in Alcide. She drags him out of the house and puts him in these dangerous situations, so he has to reach inside and pull that hero out. But the hero is handcuffed to the monster in him, so there's a fear of letting that thing out. I don't have to train for the role but I choose to, because growing up I idolised actors who [were willing to] change themselves physically, like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear or Edward Norton in American History X. The better physical condition I'm in, the better I can find the complexity in the character. [Herveaux's] sensitivity is juxtaposed to how imposing he is physically.
KILLING IT I got the part because there were fans of the books [by Charlaine Harris; on which True Blood is based] and they were blogging about who should play which character. Some of the fans were posting pictures of me saying I should play this werewolf. So they called me in and I had the best audition of my life. Sometimes the light just comes on and you're inspired. I think there was a scene when I came out of a wolf transformation and started snarling into the casting director's face. I remember sitting in the waiting room listening to the other actors who went in before me and none of them was really going there - at least not to the extent that I'd prepared to. When the audition was over, there was silence and a delay, and then everyone burst out laughing. That's exactly the reaction you want to get.
GOING COMMANDO The atmosphere on set is pretty intense. Everybody in the cast is really down to earth and polite, but once they turn those cameras on they're just crazy. Super crazy. There's a lot of crying [in the show], a lot of murder and sex - there's all this stuff going on and it takes a certain amount of concentration. Having said that, we have a lot of fun with it and we're all really obsessed with the show. We behave like fans, we're like, 'What do you know? What's going on with your character? Do you know what's happening this season?' Compared to Twilight, it's adult. We get naked. We have sex. I think the show's been so successful because the emotion in it is true. The brilliant part about it - and I think this is the curveball - is that it's about being human. It's not about being a vampire or a werewolf or a fairy. It deconstructs monsters and myths. Ibsen and Chekhov wrote about what was going on in the kitchen and that was revolutionary, because at the time theatre was so high-concept. With True Blood, they're talking about vampires going to the grocery store. As a [monster] what do you do with your day? How do you live your life? There are long conversations on set about details. Like, do werewolves wear underwear? Well, no. Why would you?
BEAUTY OF THE BEAST The beautiful thing about the show is it's about these people with really serious handicaps struggling to be human. That's what attracted me to monster movies as a kid - The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, it's the same thing. My dad used to get mad at me for rooting for Godzilla, but there was something in me that felt for the monsters and identified with them. So now my job is really easy. We're talking about the animal nature of men. I really think werewolves are a metaphor for that struggle in men, who are descended from hundreds of thousands of years of hunters and who now have to go to the grocery store. Where does that energy go? Vampires [enjoy these pop-culture moments] in times of recession. When things are tough, people turn to fantasy. More than that, I think vampires represent the 'haves' - money and power. They're sexy. Werewolves and zombies are popular because they represent this fear of the pack mentality, of the 'have nots' who could rise up and tear down the walls.
True Blood season four is screening on HBO, on Thursdays at 10pm.