The Advocate said the show broke the net- Ryan Kwanten and Alexander Skarsgard, who portray True Blood characters Jason Stackhouse and Eric Northman,nearly broke the Internet on Sunday's episode of the HBO drama. Just as the clothes were coming off in their steamy scene, Kwanten jerked awake in a church pew, cutting short one of the show's most salacious same-sex, human-vampire trysts yet.
This isn't the first time that True Blood, which has portrayed a groundbreaking number of same-sex characters through its seven-season run, has delved into dream sequences in order to showcase even straight characters like Jason Stackhouse in the arms of another man.
Another article talks to Kristin- Looking back on these parallels between the real and fictional world of the show, Kristin Bauer van Straten, who has portrayed the lesbian vampire Pam De Beaufort since season 1, reflects on how groundbreaking True Blood truly was in its portrayal of characters and stories that staked at the heart of what it means to be a minority in America.
“I always wonder how many people just enjoy the show and how many people see the depth that Alan Ball began,” Bauer van Straten says, referring to the show’s gay creator. “And for me, that’s what gives HBO and the character of Pam in this show a lasting presence.”
“Crazy stuff happens in Bon Temps,” she adds. “But really, it’s nothing crazier than what we deal with in life on earth.”
OK I perved out along with the internetzzz, Dream Rendezvous without tongue.
That's our Jason and his O face.
Behind, ahem, the scenes with Ryan Kwanten, TVLine-
TVLINE Were you told about this scene ahead of time, or did you just see it on the page?
There was word on the street that a scene was coming, and to be honest, Alex and I had been — not necessarily begging to work together — but we’d been pondering the thought, “What if we were ever put in a scene where it was just the two of us? What would happen?” And this is what our illustrious writers came up with.
TVLINE | This being the final season, it kind of felt like a gift to longtime fans.
[Laughs] I wouldn’t call that a gift, but hey, you can interpret it any way you want, man.
TVLINE | How long did it take you to film?
Eh, a couple hours.
TVLINE | And what was the vibe during the shoot?
I always have a lot of fun, and I think that’s the important thing to remember. We’re just there to have fun and to stay true to the characters. Thinking back to this particular scene, I just remember Alex and I laughing a lot.
TVLINE | Have you gotten a chance to watch it yet? It turned out, I’d say, pretty elegant.
Not yet, and I certainly wouldn’t have thought it would turn out elegant, but I’m happy about that. I don’t think too many of Jason’s scenes can be called elegant. I’ll take it.
TVLINE | Can you clarify why this dream happened now?
[Laughs] Well, obviously, Jason has had these dreams before, with other vampires whose blood he’s had. I mean, Eric’s gotten himself into some trouble, and I think Jason sensed that
TVLINE | He’s a good guy, that Jason.
Jason, to me, has always been the kind of character you can never have a bad day with. He’s always upbeat and rambunctious, even under life-threatening conditions.
TVLINE | Is that a quality you’ve inherited from him?
Not yet, but I’m trying. I want to be more like Jason.
My Campblood friend-o Buzz has his recap up early this week, yeah!
Sookie the Danger Whore (Anna Paquin) listens as Sam (Sam Trammell) and Andy (Chris Bauer) argue about the search for the missing Bon Tempsians. Sookie mentions the dead chick she stumbled over in the woods, and they agree that they should trace her origins. The Reverend Daniels (Gregg Daniel) asks Sam to inspire the flock, and Sam tells them to clean up the mess at Bellefleur’s. Once a bar manager, always a bar manager! Still, his message is “Be of service.”
Lettie (Adina Porter) wants to “check on Lafayette”. I think there’s something going on with this chick…
Andy tells Adilyn (Bailey Noble) not to let Jessica in, and she’s all, “Hahaha me whaaaaaaat? Of course not! Teehee!”
Lala (Nelsan Ellis) – wrapped in a crocheted afghan, AS YOU DO – greets Lettie Mae, who wastes no time asking him to summon Tara for her using his powers of witch realness. He shuts her crazy ass down.
Addy tries to convince Kenya (Tanya Wright) that the mob is coming for the guns, and eventually she believes her – but it’s too late, because the mob is there. The vigilante lady convinces Kenya that Jason Stackhouse is “The Man” (Dream Eric would agree!) and gets her to turn on Adilyn, but she just microwave-fingers Kenya across the room and gets the hell outta dodge. Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) awakens when she feels Addy in peril. Oh – and Maxine calls Adilyn out on being a newborn, which is kind of hilarious. Jess tries calling Sookie but of course Sookie is an idiot and threw her phone away.Read it all here. GIFS by IHFS
Meredith has her pros and cons up-
Pro: OMG it's Eric. IT'S ERIC!!!!!!
Pro: Jason and Eric get the whole '90s sexy body camera pan treatment. There's lots of gasping and moaning, and I know this is all adult stuff and I should be an adult about it, but I can't help but feel like this is actually a parody the Top Gun sex scene—like a parody of the sex scene parody in Hot Shots.
Pro: Wait, wait, wait, Eric makes the drink for Jason? Look, I know these two are five shakes of a lamb's tail away from creating the two-backed beast, but this was surprising—and thoughtful. Eric even remembered the twist!
Pro: Jason's go-to seduction move is to shove Eric. Aaaaaand it works!
Con: And now we pick up right after the church meeting. Let's hope this episode makes more sense than the last one... oh wait, no... Sookie just now decides to tell the entire police force of Bon Temps that she saw a dead body yesterday and was like, "Hey, a dead body. You know what movie I haven't seen in a long time? Stand By Me."
There was word on the street that a scene was coming, and to be honest, Alex and I had been — not necessarily begging to work together — but we’d been pondering the thought, “What if we were ever put in a scene where it was just the two of us? What would happen?” And this is what our illustrious writers came up with.
TVLINE | This being the final season, it kind of felt like a gift to longtime fans.
[Laughs] I wouldn’t call that a gift, but hey, you can interpret it any way you want, man.
TVLINE | How long did it take you to film?
Eh, a couple hours.
TVLINE | And what was the vibe during the shoot?
I always have a lot of fun, and I think that’s the important thing to remember. We’re just there to have fun and to stay true to the characters. Thinking back to this particular scene, I just remember Alex and I laughing a lot.
TVLINE | Have you gotten a chance to watch it yet? It turned out, I’d say, pretty elegant.
Not yet, and I certainly wouldn’t have thought it would turn out elegant, but I’m happy about that. I don’t think too many of Jason’s scenes can be called elegant. I’ll take it.
TVLINE | Can you clarify why this dream happened now?
[Laughs] Well, obviously, Jason has had these dreams before, with other vampires whose blood he’s had. I mean, Eric’s gotten himself into some trouble, and I think Jason sensed that
TVLINE | He’s a good guy, that Jason.
Jason, to me, has always been the kind of character you can never have a bad day with. He’s always upbeat and rambunctious, even under life-threatening conditions.
TVLINE | Is that a quality you’ve inherited from him?
Not yet, but I’m trying. I want to be more like Jason.
Sookie the Danger Whore (Anna Paquin) listens as Sam (Sam Trammell) and Andy (Chris Bauer) argue about the search for the missing Bon Tempsians. Sookie mentions the dead chick she stumbled over in the woods, and they agree that they should trace her origins. The Reverend Daniels (Gregg Daniel) asks Sam to inspire the flock, and Sam tells them to clean up the mess at Bellefleur’s. Once a bar manager, always a bar manager! Still, his message is “Be of service.”
Lettie (Adina Porter) wants to “check on Lafayette”. I think there’s something going on with this chick…
Andy tells Adilyn (Bailey Noble) not to let Jessica in, and she’s all, “Hahaha me whaaaaaaat? Of course not! Teehee!”
Lala (Nelsan Ellis) – wrapped in a crocheted afghan, AS YOU DO – greets Lettie Mae, who wastes no time asking him to summon Tara for her using his powers of witch realness. He shuts her crazy ass down.
Meredith has her pros and cons up-
Pro: OMG it's Eric. IT'S ERIC!!!!!!
Pro: Jason and Eric get the whole '90s sexy body camera pan treatment. There's lots of gasping and moaning, and I know this is all adult stuff and I should be an adult about it, but I can't help but feel like this is actually a parody the Top Gun sex scene—like a parody of the sex scene parody in Hot Shots.
Pro: Wait, wait, wait, Eric makes the drink for Jason? Look, I know these two are five shakes of a lamb's tail away from creating the two-backed beast, but this was surprising—and thoughtful. Eric even remembered the twist!
Pro: Jason's go-to seduction move is to shove Eric. Aaaaaand it works!
Con: And now we pick up right after the church meeting. Let's hope this episode makes more sense than the last one... oh wait, no... Sookie just now decides to tell the entire police force of Bon Temps that she saw a dead body yesterday and was like, "Hey, a dead body. You know what movie I haven't seen in a long time? Stand By Me."
Con: Sookie takes the law enforcement back to the body she found in the woods and quotes something she read off a tombstone (believe it) about the brutal indifference of life. Hey Sooks, where was your compassion for this poor soul when you stumbled over her cold, dead body the previous night and decided, "No, no, first I need some Jack Daniels and some sex, and then I'll report to the authorities about the poor dead girl in my backyard. I'm sure the coyotes won't eat her face off too much for an open casket funeral." Please, someone, please call her out on this bullshit.
Howard Deutch: Bucky [showrunner Brian Buckner] and Kate asked me for my input, and I felt like the more ownership of the scene I gave Alex and Jason, the more they’d be able to channel it. So it wouldn’t be me being a puppeteer or them just acting, they could be it. This is Jason’s dream, so Alex kept saying, “Well, you tell me what to do, Ryan. It’s your dream.” And Ryan would go, “Well, I don’t know. What do you want to do?” It started like that until Alex said, “Well, you know, I could f–k him or I could kill him. I’m not sure.” And out of that came the notion that there’s violence in the eroticism. There’s a sense of, What is gonna happen here? It’s not just romantic. It’s dangerous as well.
Deutch: Ryan came up with that. Ryan was like, “I need to tackle him. That’s gonna turn Jason on.” I was like, “Got it, okay.”
Deutch: Did she tell you this story? I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I don’t care. All the girls have major understandable crushes on Alex. We were doing the scene, and at a certain point, Kate came up to Alex to tell him about a line change, and as she was telling him, he started to play the part with her, and he looked in her eyes and connected with her, and she started to swoon. I had to catch her. It was hilarious. I’m not making it up. It’s true. MORE!
Whew!!!
Vince, Bon Temps own Putin. More pics here at Skarsgardfans.
AVClub, they hating this season- I Found You” puts in the work to make these roving packs of sick vampires seem like a threat. The show wants Sookie and company rolling up on a completely abandoned town to seem eerie and full of doom. It even occasionally succeeds, like with the mass grave right off main street. But as quickly as the dread builds up, it fizzles out when the whole endeavor turns into yet another way for Sookie to feel bad about herself. It’s not enough that, seven seasons later, Sookie’s story hasn’t evolved at all. It’s that the show still feels it must underline this story and then put an exclamation point on it by having her find a diary of a woman going through a very similar situation.True Blood, I guarantee that we get it. We didn’t need the Diary of a Vampire Loving Anne Frank read out loud to us to spell it out. What’s crazy is that everyone is trying their hardest to find Holly, Arlene, and Nicole, but no one has the bright idea to check out the damn vampire bar. So instead of the humans being smart enough to figure out what’s happening, storm in on all the vampires during the day while they are sleeping, and save their friends, the show writes entire, mostly-pointless scenes for these Hep V-infected captors, even though it’s obvious they are all going to be dead soon. The only saving grace is Arlene realizing she knows one of her kidnappers and using that connection to attempt to get them released, which turns into one of the more reliably entertaining bits of the episode. Carrie Preston is consistently better than the material True Blood gives her, and she does hilarious work with a better-than-usual setup here, using all of her innate humor and manic likability to make this staid hostage situation story a lot of fun. When it ends with her captor dissolving into goo while feeding on her femoral artery, well, that’s what True Blood is supposed to be. It’s good to see they still remember it.
If people just stay in their houses at night, don’t invite vampires inside, and the authorities root out vampire nests during the day, won’t they be able to get this threat in control rather quickly? How many infected vampires are really out there? How the heck were they able to wipe out a whole town, unless that whole town was full of morons?
IGN mentions the obvious blunders about St Alice- I get that these are supposed to be dirt nothin' towns, but it being 2011 (the show's timeline is a few years behind) doesn't mean that they'd be without means to contact - or drive to -someone who could help out. I mean, even Sam and Sookie figured out that they could get out of town during the day time. And Alcide even went so far as to mention that he and Sookie could, theoretically, just keep driving. And leave Bon Temps behind. The vamps didn''t come in and cut the power. They didn't slash everyone's tires. They didn't trap people inside a force field. True Blood's playing off certain zombie apocalypse tropes, but the world's not falling apart. The infrastructure's still intact. The vamps can only attack at night and they can only come in when invited. You'd think people - those who chose not to clear out once the sun came up - could figure out how to protect themselves.
And the infected vampires themselves turned out to be a lot less intimidating than I originally assumed. They're not rabid or insane from their degenerative disease. They're just regular vamps (meaning they come in all shapes and sizes) who are constantly hungry. They bicker. They have names like Ronnie. They're not the horror squad everyone thinks they are. And so there's a big tonal dichotomy between the vamps we meet and the mass grave we see in Saint Alice.
who the saddest widdle vamp girl? Willa, for sure.
EW went inside the dream, (don't we all want to go there?) Jason you are the tops!
Ryan Kwanten: Alex and I would really only see each other in table reads once every two weeks at best [over the years], and we always would end up talking at the end of a table read about how we never work together. [Laughs] I guess finally the writers wanted to put us together, and this was the end result.Howard Deutch: Bucky [showrunner Brian Buckner] and Kate asked me for my input, and I felt like the more ownership of the scene I gave Alex and Jason, the more they’d be able to channel it. So it wouldn’t be me being a puppeteer or them just acting, they could be it. This is Jason’s dream, so Alex kept saying, “Well, you tell me what to do, Ryan. It’s your dream.” And Ryan would go, “Well, I don’t know. What do you want to do?” It started like that until Alex said, “Well, you know, I could f–k him or I could kill him. I’m not sure.” And out of that came the notion that there’s violence in the eroticism. There’s a sense of, What is gonna happen here? It’s not just romantic. It’s dangerous as well.
Deutch: Did she tell you this story? I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I don’t care. All the girls have major understandable crushes on Alex. We were doing the scene, and at a certain point, Kate came up to Alex to tell him about a line change, and as she was telling him, he started to play the part with her, and he looked in her eyes and connected with her, and she started to swoon. I had to catch her. It was hilarious. I’m not making it up. It’s true. MORE!
AVClub, they hating this season- I Found You” puts in the work to make these roving packs of sick vampires seem like a threat. The show wants Sookie and company rolling up on a completely abandoned town to seem eerie and full of doom. It even occasionally succeeds, like with the mass grave right off main street. But as quickly as the dread builds up, it fizzles out when the whole endeavor turns into yet another way for Sookie to feel bad about herself. It’s not enough that, seven seasons later, Sookie’s story hasn’t evolved at all. It’s that the show still feels it must underline this story and then put an exclamation point on it by having her find a diary of a woman going through a very similar situation.True Blood, I guarantee that we get it. We didn’t need the Diary of a Vampire Loving Anne Frank read out loud to us to spell it out. What’s crazy is that everyone is trying their hardest to find Holly, Arlene, and Nicole, but no one has the bright idea to check out the damn vampire bar. So instead of the humans being smart enough to figure out what’s happening, storm in on all the vampires during the day while they are sleeping, and save their friends, the show writes entire, mostly-pointless scenes for these Hep V-infected captors, even though it’s obvious they are all going to be dead soon. The only saving grace is Arlene realizing she knows one of her kidnappers and using that connection to attempt to get them released, which turns into one of the more reliably entertaining bits of the episode. Carrie Preston is consistently better than the material True Blood gives her, and she does hilarious work with a better-than-usual setup here, using all of her innate humor and manic likability to make this staid hostage situation story a lot of fun. When it ends with her captor dissolving into goo while feeding on her femoral artery, well, that’s what True Blood is supposed to be. It’s good to see they still remember it.
If people just stay in their houses at night, don’t invite vampires inside, and the authorities root out vampire nests during the day, won’t they be able to get this threat in control rather quickly? How many infected vampires are really out there? How the heck were they able to wipe out a whole town, unless that whole town was full of morons?
