True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll talks about fangs, blood, flying rigs, her favorite scenes and baby vamp Jessica’s changing attitude in the interview below with iF Magazine.
You won’t find the character of Jessica Hamby in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire books, but ever since Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) was forced by vampire law to make the erstwhile fundamentalist Christian teenager into a bloodsucker (to replace a fellow vamp that he’d killed), the red-haired “baby vamp” has been all over TRUE BLOOD, alternating between brattiness, bewilderment and moments of startling compassion and sweetness. Deborah Ann Woll, the actress who has brought Jessica to such memorable unlife, is at the West Hollywood studio where much of TRUE BLOOD films for a table read of an upcoming episode. Before heading out, she takes time to talk to IF about where Jessica has been and where she may be going.
iF MAGAZINE: As an actress, are you playing Jessica a little more mature this year – is she growing up fast due to these extraordinary circumstances or is she still pretty much a seventeen-year-old?
DEBORAH ANN WOLL: Definitely growing up fast. I have a sense that Jessica will be older or more mature by the end of the season, but we probably won’t see it. So much is happening and there’s so much to deal with that you probably won’t realize how much she’s grown until the end of the season.
iF: When you were brought onto TRUE BLOOD midway into Season One, did you know that you’d be carrying into Season Three?
WOLL: Not at all. It was just supposed to be a two- or three-episode arc, so this is a pleasant surprise. It was a total surprise to me when they invited me back. When we had done the two episodes, they could have sent me away and never brought me back after that, created some plot device – “Jessica hitched a ride with a trucker and never returned.” But I guess they enjoyed the character and they were willing to bring me back and it’s just been a whirlwind. I never could have dreamed of a better situation for myself.
iF: Were you surprised by the plot development in Season Two where Jessica goes to see her family and the whole set of cascading revelations about her past that followed?
WOLL: I think it was so important to do that moment. I think you meet Jessica and you think that she’s annoying, innocent, irritating, all of these opinions immediately come to mind and you don’t like her very much, but the minute that you find out that there’s a reason for all of that. If you had been told every day of your life that you weren’t good enough, that you were ugly, that you weren’t worth anyone’s time, then the minute that you got any kind of freedom, wouldn’t anybody take a mile? And I think that was the moment, at least for me and I think for the character, that we were able to go in another direction. Because we had said this is why she is the way she is. And that’s the beauty of television, I think, is that it really forces you to stick with someone and learn more about them. You can’t have a first opinion and then brush someone aside. You have to learn more and go, “This is someone really worth spending some time getting to know.”
iF: When Jessica slams her father up against the wall, did you have to practice for that? How was that accomplished?
WOLL: I’m a pretty tall girl, so I can match most TV boys, TV men. They actually had us on a moving platform, and somebody else pushed this platform. They only really did one or two takes of it, because they would do one take, rebuild [the wall] overnight and do a second take, so what you saw was the first and only take we did. They liked it enough – we did it slow-motion a couple of times to see how it would work and whatever body movement we needed to look like I was walking and then some grip just grabbed the back of that platform and then rammed him into the wall. The first time we did it, the wall didn’t break. Poor guy just got slammed into a wall, and they had to go back in and rescore it until it actually went through.
iF: There’s a hilarious online HBO promo bit where Jessica is checking out how she looks with and without fangs. How do you feel about having the fangs?
WOLL: It’s great. In some of the intimidating scenes, often being intimidating can be a little scary, a little hard for an actor. You always wonder if you’re going to be any good at it, especially for someone like myself – I don’t think I’ve ever intimidated someone in my life [laughs]. But it’s nice – [the fangs] do a lot of the work for you. You just have to show those pointy little dangerous knives in your mouth, and people listen.
To read the rest of this interveiw, go to ifmagazine.com
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