The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com

Nelsan Ellis has been around a lot this weekend talking about True Blood’s Season finale,v“Season of the Witch”, and here’s another interview he gave to Access Hollywood about it. Despite the outrageous and drama-filled Bon Temps happenings of the last 11 episodes, the final script of 2011 shocked even the cast.

“I think we all read the finale and our jaws dropped,” Nelsan Ellis told Access Hollywood on Friday. “I was like, ‘What the hell?’(laughs). The audience is going to be so pissed off because they have to wait eight months before they see what happens next.”

Nelsan, who plays fan favorite, former V-dealer, Merlotte’s short order cook and new medium Lafayette Reynolds, said despite dozens of fantastical storylines throughout the show’s run, even he couldn’t quite believe how suspenseful Sunday’s episode ended up.

“As a person in the show, I literally went, ‘What’s gonna happen next?!’” he said. “Seriously, it’s the best finale so far.”

They’ve developed his [Lafayette] relationship with boyfriend Jesus (Kevin Alejandro) beyond the physical, gave Lafayette a power (he’s a medium), and a foe of sorts in the witch Marnie (Fiona Shaw), who when fans last saw her, slipped her spirit (Bill shot her in Episode 11) into Lafayette’s body.

“She’s gonna wreak havoc in that final episode,” Nelsan said of what’s coming up as his character struggles with the spirit of a vampire-hating witch, bent on revenge.

“I would say that the main [person] I’m gonna be knocking up against is Marnie, who possess me and I’m gonna be knocking up against Marnie because I’m trying to get out,” he added. “But, yeah, she’s gonna be at the center of all the drama.”

Marnie’s takeover is the third time Lafayette’s been possessed this season, his second by a female character.

So what did he think when he read about the latest twist?

“I was like, ‘Damn it! I’m gonna get possessed again.’ I don’t wanna act like no woman,” he laughed. “Let me get possessed by a dude.”

To read the rest of this interview where Nelsan talks about taking a master class with Fiona Shaw at Juilliard, go to: accesshollywood.com.

True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis had a role in the very popular and excellent movie, “The Help”. Nelsan tells New York Magazine who is going to get an Oscar for their performance and whether it will get a best picture nod. He also gives some hints about the True Blood season finale.  I’m scared now.

You would expect Nelsan Ellis to be fully onboard with The Help — he’s got a small role in it, after all — but when we caught up with Ellis yesterday at the John Varvatos/Fashion’s Night Out event and asked whether he thought the film would get a Best Picture nomination, he predicted big things. “It will, and it’ll probably win,” he said. “Viola Davis is probably going to win the Oscar for that. How often do you see a performance where the actor is that dynamic, even without speaking? Her and Emma Stone are my favorite parts in The Help.” Ellis had plenty of compliments to pay Bryce Dallas Howard and Octavia Spencer, too, but there’s another up-and-coming co-star he’s personally invested in. “Jessica Chastain! That girl is exciting. She’s marvelous. [After making The Help] I saw The Debt, and I was like, Jessica Chastain! She’s an excellent actress. I went to school with her, so I’m a little biased. She was a few years ahead of me at Julliard. She was amazing back then, too.”

As for his day job, Ellis claims that his current True Blood arc, where Lafayette finds himself possessed by the witch Marnie, wasn’t an easy thing to film. “Alan Ball told me I couldn’t try to talk like her, and I was like, ‘Really?’ So that was challenging. ‘Who do I act like?’ ‘Not her.’ I had to create something else … We’ll see what the fans say about it. The most exciting part of the episode isn’t me, though — it’s the cliffhangers.”

But True Blood always ends its seasons with big cliffhangers! “No,” said Ellis gravely. “This year, it’s on a different scale. When we all read the script, we were like, ‘What?!’ The cliffhangers take it to another level.” Are we getting something akin to the first season finale, where we thought that Lafayette had perished in the final minutes? “I can’t give it away, but something like that, except, I can’t say, but something really big on that level is going to happen.” He laughed. “You’ll see, and it’ll throw you for a loop, and then you all will have to wait for eight months!”

source: nymag.com

True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis, promises that the Season Finale will be one to remember — and not just in terms of momentous events for his character and his partner Jesus, played by Kevin Alejandro.

“The finale turns Bon Temps upside down,” the actor said, speaking recently by phone from New York, where he was shooting a feature film tentatively titled “Gods Behaving Badly.” “Lafayette and Jesus are directly in the middle of it, and it doesn’t end well. No finale in the history of ‘True Blood’ has been worse than this one in terms of the cliffhangers. People are going to be [upset] because they’re going to have to wait like seven months before they figure out what materializes after this finale.”

By the end of last week’s episode, “Soul of Fire,” Lafayette found himself possessed by the spirit of the recently dispatched witch Marnie (Fiona Shaw), who’s more than likely to use his body to her own evil ends as she seeks to eradicate vampires not just from Bon Temps but also from the world at large.

Lafayette’s newfound abilities to communicate with the dead — and occasionally host them in his body — has offered Ellis a number of exciting opportunities to play an even wider range of scenes than usual. But he said when he first learned about his new gift, he wasn’t initially that thrilled.

“Honestly, I was like, ‘Why can’t I get a cool gift?‘ ” he said. “When they told me I was a medium, I was like, OK, like Whoopi Goldberg in ‘Ghost’? That was my first impression. But for an actor it’s pretty good being a medium because you can portray other people. Alan Ball, he’s good at challenging his actors, I’ll say that.”

Ellis said he worked closely with actress Nondumiso Tembe, who played the wronged spirit of Mavis — the mother of the murdered child whom Lafayette and Jesus helped guide to a final peaceful rest — to determine specifically how she might inhabit Lafayette’s physical body and how Ellis could then show that on screen.

“I had to work with her to figure out what she was doing, and figure out how I was going to do what she was doing inside of me,” he said. “It was a long discussion, myself and Fiona, we sort of did the same thing, figuring out how that’s done. What we figured out is that there’s a third person that’s created. I didn’t have to mimic Nondumiso, Mavis, rather I had to find out how she was in my body because she’s coming into my mechanics, we had to figure out how that was.”

Apart from taking on new identities, working with Alejandro has been a particular highlight this season, Ellis said. “Last season, it was just us maneuvering around each other trying to make this relationship seem real to the rest of the world,” he said. “It wasn’t that much of a stretch. This season you see him doing things where I’m in the scene with him and I’m completely in awe and I’m in a master class of acting. He’s an inspiration to watch.”

Although the actors had immediate chemistry, Ellis said they took pains to build the rapport they now share, key to their making the relationship between their characters seem so authentic on screen.

Read the rest of this interview by going to: latimesblogs.latimes.com

True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis attends Time Warner’s “Beyond 9/11″ Photo Exhibit and Screening at Milk Studios on September 8, 2011 in New York City.

source: wireimage.com

American Cancer Society donors, volunteers as well as celebrity supporters True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis and  Nondumiso Tembe attended the first ever VIP Charity Dinner at Chef Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen!  

During dinner service HELL’S KITCHEN welcomes guests from the American Cancer Society and the American Humane Association in the first ever VIP Charity Dinner. Tune in to see which contestants wind up on the chopping block after an intense dinner sevice in the all-new “6 Chefs Compete” episode of HELL’S KITCHEN airing Monday, Aug. 29 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

source: makeitorbreakitsource.com

Nelsan Ellis as "Mavis"

Over at the Inside True Blood Blog, Nelsan Ellis shares what it’s like to play a character within a character, what’s up with Lafayette’s hair, and who he thinks Sookie should settle down with.

Possession is really the word of the season, and Lafayette gets a major dose of it in ‘Let’s Get Out of Here.’

How did you prepare to play the restless spirit of a murdered Creole woman?

Study the actress who’s playing the role. I was studying her dailies, and then she and I got together to work. I talked a lot to Fiona and tried to figure out what “possession” meant to me. I realized that I don’t become the person – the person becomes me. They get into a body where the mechanics are already there. Mavis has this funky little swish to her walk, but I was like, “No, my hips can’t move like that.” But I’d have something subtle that suggested that that was the direction that my hips wanted to go in. So, I tried to figure out what subtle nuances I could take from her that would remind the audience of who she was inside of me but also stay true to what Lafayette is, what his body does and the fact that he’s still in there.

He always seems to be at the mercy of this insane world around him – why is it that trouble always finds Lafayette?

Because he knows what to do with it … Lafayette is a survivor. Trouble comes, and then he surmounts it and moves on. I don’t know why he has all these problems. He got on this moving train that just won’t stop, and it just takes him deeper and deeper. I just hope he calms down next season.

source: inside-true-blood-blog.com

Below are scans of Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette, Anna Paquin as Sookie, Stephen Moyer as Bill and Alexander Skarsgård as Eric from the SFX 100 most iconic sci-fi characters issue.  Eric made #28, Bill made #66, Anna made #75 and Lafayette made #90 on their list.

Thanks to AphroditeMF for the scans

True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis is seen in the photos below on location for “Gods Behaving Badly” on August 9, 2011 in New York City. With Nelsan in the photos are Phylicia Rashad, Christopher Walken, Edie Falco, Nelsan Ellis, Gideon Glick , Alicia Silverstone and Sharon Stone.

source: wireimage.com

Today, True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis appeared on the day time show called, “The Talk“.  On the show, among other things, he discusses playing the gay Lafayette in as a straight man and how his mom influenced his flamboyant role.

source: cbs.com/daytime

True Blood’s Nelsan will be on the CBS daytime show “The Talk” tomorrow, Monday August 8. It airs at 2pm EST. Watch the video below to see the preview.

source: cbs.com