The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com

The staff of the Brentwood Theatre has sent out a press release to inform us that the backstage facilities are about to be completed, with the builders moving back on site on 23 February, and this final phase of the fit out is due for completion at the end of May.

This means that the fundraiser for the Brentwood Theatre “Reaching Out, Building on” has come to an end.

Mark Reed, the administrator of the theatre, tells us that they will carry on fundraising as the theatre needs a few thousand pounds a year to keep going, and he has plans to extend the front of house/bar area.
A date for the bricks has not been set yet, but Mark assures me that he will let everyone know as soon as it happens.

Jean Armitage, Volunteer Fundraising Coordinator, adds: “Bricks have been ordered, but being held until April or May, since there is no place to store them safely.  For anyone who ordered a brick late in December or during the extended period of January, Steve will be signing the next batch of certificates in April or May as well…”.

Brentwood theatre with the added on dressing rooms at the back

From the press release and related email

We delighted to announce that ALL of our backstage facilities are about to be completed, with the builders moving back on site on 23 February, and this final phase of the fit out is due for completion at the end of May.

We cannot believe that this project is coming to an end. The fundraising was only launched in September 2005, and less than four years later, we have raised around £400,000 which will have been efficiently spent providing outstanding facilities for the local community.

We reopened on 1 November, as planned, to a complete sell-out with the kids from BOSSY performing FAME, which was supported by the Theatre’s Patron, Stephen Moyer, currently in America from where he sent this message :-

‘I am currently in LA filming the second series of TRUE BLOOD for HBO. True Blood was nominated for two Golden Globes, one for best dramatic TV series and one for best Actress, which Anna Paquin won for her role as Sookie Stackhouse. And, the American Cinema Editors (ACE) just presented TRUE BLOOD’S Michael Ruscio and Andy Keir with the 2009 Eddie Award for ‘Best Edited One-Hour Series For Non-Com Television.’ We cannot wait until the show launches in April in the UK when I hope to dash back to see how this final phase is progressing.’

We are honored beyond words that fans of TRUE BLOOD from America and all over the world – including author CHARLAINE HARRIS — have contributed nearly FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS in the past three months, which has also ensured that we had enough money to go ahead with this final phase!!

Productions will continue without interruption during the final fitting out, with the builders working around rehearsals and performances to bring into use a new theatre office, washroom facilities, a galley kitchen, and a multi-use space which will be able to be used as a dance studio (with full mirrors), rehearsal area, overflow dressing room, or even a forty-seat studio theatre.

Read more about the Brentwood Theatre

No True Blood without vampires and no vampires without fangs. But what makes the True Blood fangs so special? In what way are they different from other fangs? All about the FANGS!

All the dental work on our favorite vamps is done by Dan Repert and his team at MasterFX.
MasterFX is an award winning prosthetics, animatronics and character effects company responsible for some of the most impressive, scary and gruesome scenes ever seen in modern movie.

Dan Repert recalls: “Way back before we even did the pilot, Alan Ball called a meeting with Todd Masters (MasterFX founder) and myself to come in and talk about vampire teeth. They wanted something new; they wanted something no one’s seen before, and they still want it to be sexy and cool.
And the first thing I thought of, and the design that Alan really liked, is modeling the teeth more mechanically off of the way snakes teeth work, the way they unfold from the back of the palate of the mouth as opposed to disappear from, like, a stiletto-type action from the gums. And Alan really liked that idea, and, again, it was based on basically the way the anatomy of a snake’s inner mouth works.
Obviously we didn’t make it needle-thin like a snake’s would be, but we basically mixed what was already there on a snake with what’s already there on a human, and even down to the detail of the fang – which I doubt we’ll ever see in the show – but there is little holes where they would suck the blood up, up through the fang.

We started out with doing some Photoshops, and that was the one Alan liked the best. But then it also came down to this is in terms of – what we thought out on this – we were talking to the visual effects, who were actually doing the fang emergence from the palate.
That was always decided: that was going to be a visual effect. But everyone had a different idea about how that would look. So what we did to make it so everyone was on the same page – all the animators, all our guys making the actual prosthetic fangs – is we made a mechanical mock-up that actually shows this.
It was the upper and lower palate and the tongue and the teeth of one of the actual performers. It had a little mechanism on the top that you pulled the levers. And the really cool thing about these teeth – which isn’t really like a snake – but the eye teeth that you see in front are actually false little fronts, and they fold back into the gums as the vampire/snake teeth come out.”

Alan Ball explains: “In keeping with our idea about the supernatural being a deeper more profound manifestation of nature we really thought a lot about the physiology of the fangs. And we created fangs that actually lie flat along the roof of the mouth and than click into place when a vampire is in danger or aroused or ready to feed. Much like a rattlesnake’s fangs click into place.
We actually created a model of teeth with showing how the fangs click in and click out. And we put the fangs not with the forefront teeth between them but with only two because it worked better for the physiology. I like that because it looks different and it’s not like the classic thing and there is a sound that it makes when they click, like a weapon being loaded. It really works well for the show.

All the actors, even when we cast guest vampires for only one episode, they have to go to the dentist and make impressions of their teeth when they make fangs. It’s hilarious to watch the dailies because the actors will make a face and then we’ll stop and everybody will go and get their little plastic cup with their fangs and put their fangs in and then the scene keeps going.
The extending and the retracting of the fangs is done with a visual effect, we have to place little dots on the actors face as tracking marks. So if you every watch an unfinished cut of our show there is some unintentional humor in those moments.”

Stephen Moyer had some difficulties at first trying to speak with his fangs in: “As a kid, I had to wear a retainer to push my teeth straight, and it’s kind of like having a retainer. You have to learn to talk with them in. There was this hilarious thing, in episode three or four, where there are four vampires, all sitting around, chatting, and then we all have to have our teeth in, so everybody reaches down and sticks their teeth in and they start talking funny, and it really wasn’t very cool at all. It’s quite difficult, but we’ve all gotten much, much better at talking with them in. And, we’ve reduced the back plate on the teeth a little bit, so people have gotten better at talking with them in.”
He adds that kissing with fangs is really hard. “You can’t do a proper open-mouth washing-machine-type thing. They are sharp!”

And portraying his love-interest Anna Paquin knows all about that. “You do get fangs caught in places,” Paquin says, remembering her first lip lock with Bill’s lethal teeth, which pop down when he’s lost in bloodlust. “Perhaps it’s like people with braces trying to make it work. Puncture wounds aside, one gets used to it,” she teases.

Kristin Bauer, who portrays vampire Pam, remembers her first time with fangs very well.
“The first time I had to say a line with those teeth in, I had never worn them. It was the scene with Jason Stackhouse when he comes to Fangtasia  and they said “you’re going to say your lines, we’re going to keep the camera rolling, put in your teeth and say the line again.” And I said: “Can I rehearse that?” And they we’re like: “ROLLING”. They handed me my teeth, I put them in and what came out of my mouth… one tooth got caught inside my lip, one got caught outside my lip and I sounded like an evil Bugs Bunny character. And the entire set, which I could not see because we were shooting at night and there was a bright light on me, all I heard was that I brought the house down, they were laughing so hard.
I went to Stephen (Moyer) and I asked him how the hell do you speak with these things in? And he told me exactly what to do. He said that you can’t try have the teeth avoid your bottom lip, you just have to take the pain.”

sources: npr.org, i09.com, mediablvd.com, People Magazine, true-blood.net

Review of True Blood on the Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald

Ryan Kwanten - Photo: Domino Postiglione

An Aussie actor gets his big break in the vampire drama True Blood, writes Gabriel Wilder.

Vampires may not like the sun but they certainly have no aversion to the limelight. The cultural phenomenon that stretches back to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, has resurfaced in umpteen guises since. Lately, teens who like their vamps glitter-skinned and their heroines breathless have turned to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels and film. Those looking for something meatier, however, can sink their teeth into Alan Ball’s new series True Blood.

Yes, it has a vampire romance but this is no Mills & Boon with fangs: the violence is brutal, the sex sweaty, the dialogue salty and the humour dry. As with Twilight, it has its origins in a series of novels. Ball (Six Feet Under) stumbled across one of Charlaine Harris‘s novels and became hooked on the sultry, supernatural world set in the Louisiana bayous.

The first book focuses on telepath Sookie Stackhouse (played by Anna Paquin, who won a Golden Globe for her performance), her romance with a vampire, Bill Compton, and a serial-killer mystery. But after the first two episodes, Ball began developing new storylines for other members of the ensemble.

“I think Alan’s very clever like that,” says Stephen Moyer, who plays Bill. “He knows that it can’t just be [a romance]. I think that it ultimately is a love story [but] it doesn’t mean it can’t be 20 other things as well. When I read the script, I couldn’t believe how much he’d packed into it.”

One beneficiary of Ball’s approach is Australian actor Ryan Kwanten, who plays Sookie’s brother, Jason. Once a Home And Away regular, Kwanten now lives in LA and was sought out by Ball.

“He’d seen a film of mine and saw characteristics of Jason Stackhouse in the character that I was playing,” Kwanten says. “Next thing you know, I was hired.”

Ball expanded the character of Jason, giving him his own storyline and one hilarious episode involving a severe case of priapism. Kwanten, 32, has the task of making the self-centred, womanising Jason not seem like a lost cause.

“I threw away the textbook on everything I thought I knew about acting and just flew by the seat of my pants because that’s exactly how this guy operates,” he says. “It’s really liberating to play a character like that because a lot of characters tend to be very brooding.”

The brooding territory in True Blood is pretty much covered by Civil War vampire Bill, whom Moyer describes as “completely angst-ridden … your classic tortured hero”. Unlike Kwanten, who was one of the first to be cast, Moyer was one of the last. Ball searched for months for the right “Bill” before Moyer, who had just finished shooting The Starter Wife with Debra Messing in Queensland, emailed an audition. “Alan saw it in the afternoon and I flew [to LA] that night,” he says.

True Blood poses particular challenges for its cast. As well as having to guzzle copious amounts of fake blood (apparently some kind of glucose concoction), both Kwanten and Moyer have frequent nude scenes. The first time we meet Kwanten’s character, he is butt-naked and engaged in a sex act. In fact, clothes seem to be something of an afterthought for Jason.

“This is by far the most full-on sex and nudity I’ve ever done,” says Kwanten, who has been acting since he was 16. “I was warned but one can never quite be prepared. You sort of sign your life away and go, ‘Oh, nudity’, then you walk into your trailer and you see a modesty patch and that’s what you’re wearing for the day.”

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen any of Ball’s previous work that there is a subtext beneath the sex and humour. In True Blood the vamps have come “out of the coffin” and are campaigning for equal rights. Ball is an openly gay man but has stated the vampires can stand for a number of things.

“It can be any group that has been persecuted or felt like an outcast in society,” Kwanten explains.

This ambiguity bothers many of the people posting comments on web forums about the show, people who would rather see their entertainment delivered in a tidier package – ethical dilemmas sorted, no shades of grey. “I think they’re the people that need to see it more than anyone,” Kwanten says. “But we’ll get those people one person at a time.”

True Blood begins on Showcase on Tuesday at 8.30pm.

Stephen Moyer – 3 stage vampire sunlight exposure makeup created by MastersFX

Photo credit MastersFX

click photo to enlarge

And this is what it looks like on screen.

Fancast.com published their top 5 of the Sexiest Men On TV.

A king, a vampire, a high school football star, a wealthy teenage lothario, and a Viper-pilot-turned-space-lawyer walk into a bar. The bartender says…well, actually, it would be difficult to hear him talking above the din of women shrieking in ecstasy, swooning and stampeding toward the new arrivals, so never mind the punchline.

Not surprisingly, our “Sexiest Men” list slightly favors bad boys over good guys, but after all, these are the sexiest men on television…not the ones you’d necessarily bring home to meet Mom. (Not unless you want her beheaded or drained of blood.) Also, interestingly enough, there’s barely a Yank in sight: we have one Irishman, a Canadian, two Brits, and one British American (Jamie Bamber does possess American citizenship as well, but hadn’t actually lived here until recently), and these gents been more than a little busy storming our shores in a highly photogenic siege this past year. We surrender! Gladly.

Without further ado, behold five reasons why television sets were ablaze in 2008:

1. Jonathan Rhys Meyers
2. Stephen Moyer
3. Taylor Kitsch
4. Ed Westwick
5. Jamie Bamber

2. Stephen Moyer, True Blood

Recently, True Blood’s headlining heartthrob declared in an interview, “I’ve always rather liked doing sex scenes. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.”

Apparently this fellow hasn’t looked in the mirror recently. Then again, vampires have traditionally had issues with reflective surfaces…

Stephen Moyer has long been a fixture on the British miniseries scene: Castles; The Grand; Midsomer Murders…the list goes on, but given that it went on in the U.K., most of Moyer’s early projects aren’t familiar to American audiences. And no, this isn’t Moyer’s first time sporting fangs…he also did the undead thing in the U.K. series Ultraviolet, though interestingly enough, that series never actually employed the “V” word – choosing instead to brand their nightwalkers as, “Code 5”s, or “leeches,” instead. (So, does that technically make this Moyer’s first time playing a “vampire,” after all? Not to split hairs or anything…)

His recent appearances on American television – first as Sam in The Starter Wife and, more visibly, currently starring in True Blood – have finally thrust Sookie’s breathtaking and blood-sipping beau into a particularly luminous stream of Hollywood limelight. In Alan Ball’s hit series, Moyer plays Bill Compton, an atypically moral immortal who pines for a local waitress and is perpetually striving to curb his more animal instincts. It’s that romantic and gentlemanly veneer that has female fans entertaining all sorts of uncivilized fantasies.

And who can blame them?

Who said anything about SEX?

It seems that everybody has it’s own poll these days. TVGuide is doing a “sexiest” poll and Stephen Moyer is nominated for the honorouble title of Sexiest Badass.

The result will be publish in the TV Guide of March 30.

Cast you vote

Article on CourierMail

THERE’S one major drawback to being a vampire in Los Angeles.

“I wasn’t allowed to go into the sun because my character’s white,” laments British actor Stephen Moyer, who plays a 173-year-old blood sucker in raunchy US drama True Blood.

“After a while I was like, ‘Come on, guys. I’m in LA! I live by the beach. Let me play’.

“Then of course I started getting the LA permatan and got in big trouble.”

Moyer, a father of two, will have to get used to spending time in dark places.

True Blood, based on the novels by Charlaine Harris and reimagined for the small screen by Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, has grabbed TV audiences by the jugular.

With its graphic mix of sex, gore and black humour, it’s not for the feint-hearted, but received critical kudos at last month’s Golden Globes, with star Anna Paquin collecting the award for best actress and the series nominated for best drama.

“You can’t say it too many times that Alan is a clever man,” Moyer says of the Oscar-winning writer and director.

“You’ve got this classic love story, which he gives a modern twist to . . . you’ve got the funny, you’ve got the sexy, you’ve got the downright dirty, but you’ve also got the drama of it.”

In True Blood, vampires have come out of the coffin, so to speak. They live alongside humans thanks to the invention of synthetic blood called “True Blood”, which can be bought like a six-pack of beer and supposedly quenches the vamps’ thirst for mortals.

But their integration into society is fraught with prejudice and violence.

Telepathic Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Paquin) is one of the few willing to give the undead a chance, particularly when the brooding Bill Compton (Moyer) arrives.

“Alan creates this outsider who comes into the town and is immediately looked at with suspicion,” Moyer says of his character.

“So he’s kind of a metaphor for any minority group you can think of, whether it be the idea of blacks in the South or homosexuality or any outsider group, really.

“That’s the sort of deeper level that I find very interesting. I couldn’t believe it when I read it. I was just blown away by the idea of him.”

Like New Zealand’s Paquin and Australia’s Ryan Kwanten, who plays Sookie’s sex-mad brother Jason, Moyer had to disguise his native accent with some convincing Southern dialects. He says the fact half the lead cast have foreign passports is a coincidence.

“I truly don’t believe that actors in America don’t exist to have been able to play these parts,” he says. “Alan just sees things in people and he’ll wait until he finds what he wants.

“Anna, obviously, we all know, is a pale brunette and she’s playing this tanned blonde girl, but she had to go through the whole audition process. It wasn’t offered to her. She ended up reading with five blonde actresses, with her still dark and pale, and Alan just believed that she could do it.”

While he is begrudgingly avoiding UV rays ahead of filming True Blood’s second series, Moyer says it’s nice to have finally found a place in the sun career-wise. “A couple of other offers have come in that I haven’t taken because my kids live in England and I didn’t want to leave them unless it was something fantastic,” he says.

“I’ve been in a very nice position for the first time in my life to say,’You know what? I don’t need to do that at the moment’.”

A couple of weeks ago Stephen was spotted walking his dog in Beverly Hills, some more photo’s have surfaced showing how he gives his pooch a refreshing drink.

The Vault does not watermark the photo’s posted on this website.
The Vault does not damage the photo’s by slapping the website name all over them.
The Vault is happy to share all the photo’s with all the Stephen Moyer and True Blood fans.

Since we know Stephen has worn Crocs at least once in his life…. you don’t believe me? We have the photo’s to prove it!
And he loves his dog Splash….. and would want him to be comfortable….

Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer

Here is a wonderful gift idea for Splash’s next birthday……

Sasquatch Dog Bed

p.s. they also come in black.

Sasquatch Pet Beds