The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com

I’m still up in the clouds and can’t stop thinking about what happened while I was on my vacation. Billshuman and I were in Los Angeles this past week and never expected to have such a wonderful and memorable meeting as we were lucky enough to encounter while there. We were already having a wonderful time seeing all the sites, taking in Hollywood Boulevard that included the Oscar festivities and even saw some stars, but all of that was paled by the historic meeting we had that was truly the highlight of the trip.

On Tuesday, in Hollywood, while walking on Highland Avenue towards our hotel, Billshuman and I saw and spent time with the man, the myth, the legend, Stephen Moyer.

He was having lunch at Ammo Restaurant on Highland Avenue, which happens to be near our hotel. He looked wonderful dressed casually in jeans, black shirt and grey cardigan. Although he was in the middle of an interview and very pressed for time, he was happy to take a moment out to speak with us.

We asked him if he remembered us from last year’s PaleyFest event and he said yes, of course he remembered us and he also mentioned that he knew of Billshuman from her question at Paley and that I was a co-admin on the Vault and AllStephenMoyer.com. We asked if it would be possible to get a picture and/or video with him and he immediately got up from his lunch and came outside the restaurant for the quick hello.

Stephen and Lynnpd

I still can’t get over how incredibly natural and funny he is. As we began chatting, he immediately noticed Billshuman’s teeth and asked if she had fangs in. She said no these are her real teeth and he said I have some, too and showed us his.

He mentioned that he was a bit jet lagged, as he had just returned from London to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar party and was still getting up at 4am because he was on London time. He did look a bit tired, but he still looked unbelievably perfect to me!

We asked him how the filming of Season 3 was going and if we could depend on him to, “kick some ass” this year. He said, of course, and although he couldn’t elaborate too much, he did say, “You won’t fucking believe what they are doing to my character this season”. We asked if we might get to see a femoral artery bite also and he said, “you just might”. We’re hoping!

I then inquired if True Blood would be at Comic con this year and he said, “Yes”.  He then went on to talk about how he remembers all the Eric fans from Comic con last year and that there will probably be even more fans for him this year because of Eric’s increased profile on the show, so he needs all the Bill fans he can get to attend. We assured him that we were true to Bill only and would help to rally all the Bill fans for him.

Billshuman and Stephen

He was very affectionate, friendly, charismatic and extremely personable. Along with the photos and the video, we each got two big hugs and a kiss. He is everything I thought he was and more. Extremely gracious in every way and as handsome as I thought he would be and not only that but, he gave a big shout out to the Vault and AllStephenMoyer.com in the video. What more could you want?

For me, this was the highlight of my vacation and probably for the entire year or even longer! What a treat!  Thanks Steve!

Stephen and Lynnpd

A few notes about the video written by Shadaliza:

Even though Stephen was in the middle of lunch he graciously agreed to record a quick video message and do a shout out to The Vault and AllStephenMoyer.com. So you’ll all understand what Stephen is talking about in the video, he refers to a problem I am dealing with for which I was hospitalized just a few weeks ago.

Despite what you may have heard about Lynnpd and Billshuman’s investigative activities, no restraining order for stalking has been filed (yet).

Tip for watching the video. Loading time of the video depends on your connection and the amount of viewers. To watch the video without interruptions click “play” and click “pause”, watch the blue bar and let the video load completely before hitting “play” again.

More photos in the Photo Gallery.

Photography by: Billshuman
Video and story by: Lynnpd

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In October of last year Stephen Moyer spent many many hours in the Channel 4 building talking to various reporters of the British press. One of them was Keith Emmerson of Hecklerspray. On Twitter, Keith tweeted about his upcoming interview with Stephen and several of the Billsbabes contacted him there about this and sent him some of their burning questions for the Bill in Billsbabes.

Keith also discovered the Billsbabes forum on Yuku and applied for membership, we do have strict rules on our messageboard to protect the privacy of our members, including Keith’s, and only the 2 admins of the board (one of them being yours truly) have access to our members email addresses. I heard Keith was asking for questions and I contacted him by email, which seemed a much better way than by Twitter. The only answer I received was that he wanted to be removed from the board… sure no problem, I even apologized.

When the video of Keith’s interview with Stephen was released, one of the first reactions I read was: “Has this guy been drinking?” In the following article, written by Keith about this memorable interview, we learn that he indeed had been nipping from the bottle on his way in.

And Bill Pullman? Lovely man, but he really has to find his own fanclub.

Thank you Keith for shedding some light on the events of that day and be prepared for the settled dust to swirl up again…

Keith’s article:

“Finally someone people will have heard of” was how my editor described the opportunity to interview True Blood’s Stephen Moyer in his email. I’d never heard of him. I only knew of True Blood from tube station posters advertising the fact it was showing on the FX channel on satellite.
Time to do some research.

Having no knowledge of this man actually made the preparation and question conjuring process easier. Not only was I thinking of off topic and irreverent/irrelevant areas because I didn’t know what was on topic, but I also felt empowered by the fact that he was a nobody (to me at least). Inevitably, the more I learnt about him the more difficult this became, especially after I watched the first episode. For one thing it made my “What is True Blood?” trick question not a trick question. It removed the comedy angle, but I felt it served as a good introduction for normal terrestrial TV viewers, and was a decent segue into the rest of the interview.

Soon after tweeting a request for questions to this seemingly unknown, I received a number of emails from his very observant fan club, as well as a number of new True Blood affiliated followers. I visited the fansite one of the emails referred to, it was a closed community so I requested membership. In doing so I had to reveal who I was, and agree not to exploit the members. This didn’t fail to amuse me considering how fervently and ferociously I’ve seen die hard fans defend their beloved idols.

As we have discovered with Robert Pattinson, a sure-fire way to ensure traffic to your website is to aggravate ardent and loyal fans. The Stephen Moyer fan club named ‘Billsbabes’ after his character in True Blood, dropped the opportunity into my lap. Too many people seemed to be getting hold of my email address via that fansite so I asked them to remove me from the membership list. This was met with some concern, but I wanted to avoid a deluge of mail from upset crazy people.

My ‘master’ plan was to convince Stephen that Billsbabes was originally a Bill Pullman fan club, and the members had merely switched allegiance. In the cold light of day this doesn’t seem very funny, you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that it is, ok?
While my memory of the day is a little hazy, I seem to recall wanting to extend my habit of having a drink to calm my nerves beforehand. This resulted in drinking scotch from a hip flask on the train to London, which, at the time, felt like a shameful act.

It was my first time at the Channel 4 building and I must admit that the occasion wasn’t lost on me. I arrived 5-10 minutes early and was passed from publicist to publicist around 4 times like stoners sharing a joint. I was eventually told that I had to wait while Stephen got through some telephone interviews. This seemed to go on forever, possibly because I had to wait with one of these publicists while the Moyer finished up. Conversation turned into an awkward silence very quickly.

When one perceives themselves to be in the business of subverting interviewees as I did, or do, publicists and PR agents become a professional enemy. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be a level of hostility between the press and press officers anyway, but I’ll address that in a future post. In the defence of the guy I was left waiting with, he is one of the more human-esque publicists I’ve met, and he cooed over Stephen the least.

My number was called so I went in to set up my camera etc. Stephen came back into the room moments later and spoke with quite a thick Essex accent I thought, it dissipated incredibly quickly however, especially once the interview began.

After he answered my opener by explaining what True Blood was, he asked me if I’d seen the show. While I had seen the first episode, fawning over a celebrity who is basically just promoting a product is highly undesirable as far as I’m concerned. I decided it would be funnier to answer negatively. After watching the video of the brief exchange and resulting expression on his face, I’m glad I did.

He took my semi-mocking questions in a much better spirit than I had probably intended when writing them. When penning my question about researching the role I wanted to press the similarity between vampires and prostitutes in a much more malevolent manner than I managed to summon in practice. This was partially because he seemed quite amused by my mention of a brothel and wanted to make a joke along those lines himself, thus interrupting my comparison, and also because by this stage I’d come to think he was a decent individual.

Then came the ruse, it took some persistent insistence but he appeared to believe me, even stating his surprise when the interview had concluded, “I didn’t know about the Bill Pullman thing.” A slightly more sceptical publicist from Channel 4 asked for more details, but at this stage I just repeated what I’d said earlier as I was distracted by packing my equipment away, and a swooning woman from Heat magazine was already in the room.

There’s always a small team of people who hover just out of sight in order to listen in to these interviews. They never really acknowledge this fact, but it’s pretty clear from their frosty behaviour towards you afterwards that it occurs.

In the lift down to reception I sent a text to my editor telling him that I felt immense guilt for being a bit of a bastard towards Stephen in the interview. That feeling continued for some time afterwards; I even stopped to give a confused looking tourist some directions to allay my conscience.

To this day I’m not really sure if I feel proud of my behaviour towards this unusually grounded and decent celebrity, or still ashamed and guilty. I’m told that my questions are now something of a legend in the office of the PR agency that arranged the interview, that’s something I suppose.

This all happened at the beginning of October last year, I’ve waited this long to write about it through a mixture of procrastination and a desire to let the dust settle on all those fan comments. The YouTube comments in particular managed to coerce me into breaking my rule of refraining from replying. I met them with a mixture of heavy sarcasm, light sarcasm, mocking, and honesty. The majority of the comments on fansites revolved around something I was reluctant to reveal the answer to at the time, and that was whether it was intended as a joke or not. Well yes, basically, it was.

Go watch the product of all this ridiculousness here.

Source

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This post has been updated with a reaction of Stephen Moyer to this article.
Read at the bottom.

The interview “Five questions for Stephen Moyer” is part of a bigger article. The writer posted the quotes that didn’t make it on her blog.

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 Paquin 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, so here’s some of the stuff that didn’t make it in.

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 Charlaine 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 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.

Note from Shadaliza:

I would like to set a few things straight. The writer of this article could have contacted me to know more about the Billsbabes, but instead she guessed and she guessed wrong.

Most of us hadn’t read the Charlaine Harris books before True Blood and many of us still haven’t read them. Our demographic includes many different ages, countries, cultures, body types and colors. Stating that we are a bunch of middle-aged women seems very short-sighted to me. It makes it sound like we are dull and colorless.

Stephen is right that we are totally insane and we have become best friends, we chat, twitter, Facebook and Skype and organize meetings in various parts of the US. But our roots are not on the True Blood Wiki, we started out on the HBO message boards, but that was a long time ago, we now have our own virtual community.

I sent Stephen Moyer a link to this post on The Vault and this is part of what he responded to me:

“Oh God..
I am so sorry this has been edited this way.

Whenever I talk about your web site and your group I have always made a concerted effort to represent you in the best of all possible ways.
At the beginning I say something like ‘what I really love about it is that all these girls and ladies have never known each other before,’ and truly I mean that..
The interviewer then asked me something about aspirations..if I remember rightly.. something like “did you see yourself followed by middle aged ladies…?” and I took the sentence and made it what it became because, in that moment, I probably thought the sentence would sound funny.. (something that is increasingly getting me into trouble!)

So – apologies indeed”

Thank you Steve. Knowing you, we knew you didn’t mean it the way it sounded. You’re the best!

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Five question for Stephen Moyer.

Click image to enlarge

As co-founder of the Billsbabes I would like to add that the ‘profit’ of the fan merchandise we sell in the Billsbabe’s Shoppe is donated 100% to the Brentwood Theatre of which Stephen Moyer is patron. And yes… we ship internationally.

Enter the Billsbabe’s Shoppe

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