Going into this new season, Season Four, it seems like you’re taking it back to the more Bon Temps-based nature of Season Two, with a new character coming into the town and raising all kinds of hell.
Well, it is like that, in that there is some person shaking things up at home, and all of Season Four takes place in Bon Temps or Shreveport; nobody goes anywhere. In Season Two, the vampires did go to Dallas, and there was all of the stuff with the Fellowship of the Sun, but everybody ended up in Bon Temps; this year, everybody pretty much stays at home.
There are less new characters then there were last season probably. And there’s something kind of fun about taking some of your characters, sticking them in a plane, and flying them off somewhere new, where they’re sort of fish out of water. But I basically just go wherever the story takes us. I work with five other writers, and we try to figure out interesting stories that will challenge all of our regular characters in new and interesting ways, and force them to change and grow, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. We always want to keep the show fresh and not make it seem like we’re just treading water.
Denis O’Hare made Russell such a huge presence on the show last season, giving it a villain that actually topped the second season’s antagonist, Maryann. Did you put extra focus on making this season’s primary villain, the witch Marnie, even more impactful?
She has very big shoes to fill, yeah. We were very fortunate that we got the great Irish actress Fiona Shaw, who is one of the premier Shakespearean actresses of hers and any other generation. We needed somebody of that depth, because her character starts off very mousy and unassuming but all kinds of stuff happens to her, and we needed somebody who could go to these epic places, and she totally does that.
Through her character, True Blood will explore the world of witches this season, coming off last season’s werewolf angle and the previous one’s maenad. You mentioned earlier that you’re becoming well-versed in genre terms and monsters. Looking ahead, are there any creatures or supernatural villains that you’d particularly like to introduce, even if they’re not featured in the books?
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve done a lot of the familiar ones, but one of the things I loved about the second book was the idea of the maenad, and what that was. You don’t really hear much about maenads and what they are, so I’m hoping in seasons hence that we’ll find some more lesser-known supernatural creatures, to figure out what’s going on with them.
But this year, actually, we have a whole bunch of them; we have witches, an interesting twist on shape-shifting that gets played out over the course of the season. There are disembodied spirits; I hesitate to call them “ghosts,” so I call them “spirits without hosts.” The magic demon that overtook Jesus (Kevin Alejandro) last season and scared the hell out of Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) comes back a bit more. So there’s all kinds of fun stuff this year, in addition to werewolves and vampires.
One of this season’s new characters that plays into the shape-shifter plotline is played by Janina Gavankar, who we recently shot in a rather sexy graveyard set-up. What struck you about her?
She’s great. We were casting a love interest for Sam (Sam Trammell), and so we were definitely looking for attractive women. We wanted a woman who’d have some Hispanic/Native American characteristics, and, even though I believe Janina is more Indian, she had the right physical characteristics. She’s really good—she has a really nice mix of total backbone and vulnerability. She fit right into the show from day one, and she’s also beautiful.
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