True Blood star says HBO show’s cast were ‘really, really overqualified’

Joe Manganiello has said that the cast of HBO’s acclaimed supernatural vampire series True Blood were “really, really overqualified”.

Speaking in the latest episode of the Penn Badgley ’s podcast, Podcrushed , Manganiello, who scored a breakout role in the series as werewolf Alcide Herveaux in the series, said the show’s cast arrived on the series with an outstanding amount of thespian experience between them.

"What’s funny about True Blood was, you know, we were all really, really overqualified," he said, pointing towards the prestigious training schools the actors had come from.

“It’s all theatre kids,” he said. “It’s like people with Tonys and Oscars and, you know, Mike McMillan and I were the Carnegie Mellon kids, then there was Rutina [Wesley] and Nelsan [Ellis] were the Juilliard kids, then Chris Bauer was the Yalie, then you get West End of London, then you get this international cast.

“You got [Alexander] Skarsgård from Sweden. You had [Stephen] Moyer from England. And Anna [Paquin] , obviously, from New Zealand by way of Canada. It was really, really intelligent, trained actors.”

Manganiello said the material was “deceptively tricky because it was kind of written in like Tennessee Williams. It was very operatic at times”.

The show, which debuted on HBO in 2008 and ran for seven seasons, is based on author Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels.

Created by Six Feet Under showrunner Alan Ball, True Blood is set in a world where vampires can live among humans thanks to the invention of a synthetic blood substitute. It followed telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse (played by Paquin) and her adventures with vampires Bill Compton (Moyer) and Eric Northman (Skarsgård).

Paquin won Best Supporting Actress Oscar, aged 11 for her acting debut in Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano , and went on to win a Golden Globe for True Blood ‘s first season.

Manganiello praised the show for being a “wild, crazy and intelligent project that pushed the culture forward”.

“Marriage equality was not on the table [for HBO] prior to True Blood ’s conversation about it, so they used vampires as this kind of trojan horse into this conversation about equality and racism in the south,” he said.

“It was a really important show. And we were all treated like rock stars because of the nature of the show – people were watching us doing insane things to each other.”

Earlier this year, Manganiello said he wasn’t happy with the way the show concluded in 2014, and said there was “a lot left unexplored”.

“I thought there was so much left on the table for me,” he said on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM show in March. “The thing about it was they never planned for me to be on the show past one season. I was signed up as a guest star [for] my first season, and when my character really broke and people really loved the character, they were kind of unprepared for that to happen.”

“I wound up on the show for five years in total, but my character had to get out of the way so that Sookie could wind up settling the A and B plots with Bill and Eric,” Manganiello continued. “The only way to get me out of the way was – spoiler alert – you know, to shoot me in the face. I really felt like there was a lot that was left unexplored.”