I found out yesterday that people.com picked up my interview with Stephen Moyer for DirecTV's Access magazine, which I write for all the time and nobody's ever heard of, in which he talks about how hardcore his girlfriend Anna Pacquin is about boxing. Hence, the failure for people.com to give me a name check. But whatever, I'm not exactly up there with Maureen Orth or, gee, you know, Meghan McCain. Still, it's a bit exciting to have an outtake from a piece you wrote aggregated all over town.
Moyer was a fantastic interview. He was super-chatty and informal and off-the-cuff and funny—he joked around and laughed a lot. I had to narrow the piece down to 700 words so a ton of quotes got left behind. Here are some of them.
Moyer's a patron at the Brentwood Theatre in Brentwood, in England's Essex County, where he grew up. His mother is the chairman, and it's where he got his first acting gig. "I was about 10 in a show called The Gypsy Baron. And I can’t remember very much about it apart from a song that went [lapsing into an impressive tenor] Up in the morning with the lark… And I also had to run onstage and say, 'Queen Sheepra is coming!'"
When he hit big as Bill Compton in True Blood, a lot of fans of the show started contributing to the theatre's renovation—including the BillsBabes, a group of middle-aged women who were rabid fans of the character in the Charlane Harris books and now are just crazy about Moyer. I asked him what he thought about the BillsBabes.
"They’re wonderful, and they’re totally insane. We were at the Paley festival this week, it was honoring True Blood, and these ladies had flown in from all over America to come to see us live. And there was a load of BillsBabes in the second row with their BillsBabes T-shirts on. But I've gotta say, what I really love about it is that all these girls and ladies have never known each other before, and they started... twittering, if you will, in the True Blood wiki website, and now they’ve all become friends, and they’ve started this amazing community of people. It’s quite unbelievable really."
I asked him if he ever dreamed anything like this would happen to him back when he was touring with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
"That I would be followed by some middle-aged women across America?"
Ooo-er, cheeky! (He's joking, ladies.)
He talks about the sexual potency of Twilight vs True Blood:
"Twilight is about a chaste love affair. And in many respects, it’s the same with True Blood, up to a point. And then when the sex happens, it fucking happens, and it’s real and it’s almost breathtaking. You know, you’ve been waiting for it and it’s: Will they? Won’t they? Yes they fucking will. And it’s gonna be dark sexy sex. And you’re gonna see it. And of course you don’t see that in Twilight. And you don’t get to see it on terrestrial television. Luckily on HBO you do get to see that, and I think the viewer does want to see that."
Which gets him going about the hypocrisies in American culture. "I think we live in a puritanical society where we should be able to say to our children, 'No you can’t watch something after 9 o'clock,' and we should be able to watch it on television without having to pay for it. We’re grown ups. I don’t understand that you’re allowed to shoot 200 people in the first 30 seconds of 24 but you’re not allowed to show a nipple? And how are we gonna bring up our kids with that kind of right-wing puritanical…. Oh it drives me fuckin’ nuts."
I asked him if he thinks Robert Pattinson has stolen his thunder. And he gets totally earnest.
"No! I truly don’t. I was in England, I didn’t even know about Twilight. I was in England living my happy little life and being with my kids and walking the dog. So as much as I think people want me to say I am affected by it, I'm not. I wish him all the best. He’s a cracking lookin’ dude and good luck to ’im. There’s room for all of us, there really is."
Moyer has described himself as a bit of a lad, a geezer. He translates, for those who think geezer means old man:
"A geezer is somebody who is confident, who's a little bit cheeky and cocky and maybe a little bit too cocky for his own good. A bit of a lad means a bit naughty, maybe you do things that you shouldn’t do."
I'd read that Moyer had become a vegetarian because Anna was a vegetarian. I asked him if this was true. He's genuinely taken aback.
"Noooo! Anna’s not a vegetarian. She was at one point." He pauses. "But, she likes her meat and two veg, know what I mean?"
Ooe-er! Nudge nudge, wink wink.
