Rutina Wesley (Tara Thornton) wasn’t kidding when she said all hell would break loose when True Blood returned for its sixth season on Sunday. The heart pounding season opener not only left us worried about (and slightly afraid of) Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) but pretty much everyone else as well. Rutina recently talked with Zap2it about season 6, being a vampire, and long night shoots:
“Oh, yeah, all hell is breaking loose when we come back.We all meet up and just get the hell out of Dodge, because ‘Billith’ is no joke this season. Seriously. We don’t know what to do, because before we can figure out what the next step is, we have to really understand what Bill is — in fact, whether Bill Compton still is even in this thing anymore. You’ll find that out eventually, whether Bill is just completely lost inside.”
Speaking of being lost, Rutina admits that she felt slightly unsure of her fate upon being told that her character would be turned while in production for season 4. It did mean that Tara would have to die in order to be turned and what if the writers changed their mind over hiatus? Would that mean Rutina would be out of a job?:
“When Alan [Ball, the series creator] first told me, I just freaked out. While we were setting up to do another take, he just pulled me into a corner and said, ‘Hey, we’re really excited about something, and I hope you will be, too. Tara’s going to be turned.’ And I was like, ‘What? That doesn’t mean that I’m dying, does it?’ Because normally when a character gets turned, they’ve got one more death and then that’s it; they’re gone. So Tara was critically injured in the Season 4 finale, and all during the hiatus I kept worrying that they would decide not to bring me back, because people sometimes change their minds over the break. I trusted Alan and I had faith in the writers, but privately, I was so afraid that I wasn’t going to be working the next season.”
But those doubts quick dissipated when Rutina found out her maker would Kristin Bauer van Straten (Pamela Sywnford de Beaufort) who gets some of the best lines and wardrobe on the show. Not to mention, it gave Wesley the chance to change some of Tara’s physical tendencies:
“I asked, ‘Ooh, do I get to dress like her? Do I get to be sexy?’ Kristin is just awesome, and as long as I got to dress like Pam, I was OK with it. As an actor, something like this is the meat, the thing that keeps you inspired and challenged to do something new. I decided that, as a vampire, Tara would walk in a slightly different way, kind of like a panther, and her voice was going to be lower. There was a whole physical transformation that I tried to work in, but it’s still Tara.”
It isn’t all fun though. The transformation from human to vampire also meant Rutina would be shooting a lot of nights….very long nights. While she wouldn’t trade her job for anything, shooting that beach scene in the season premiere was definitely a challenge:
“Oh, my God, so many long night shoots!” the actress gasps, then laughs. “Sometimes I kind of miss being human. In some of the early episodes this season, we were shooting on a beach near the ocean, and we shot, like, all night, and it was very cold, and it sucked. But don’t get me wrong; I love my job. And there is an advantage, really, because when you’re playing a human character, you can be doing a scene at any time of the day or night, but when you’re a vampire, when the sun comes up, you have to stop shooting!”
Source: Zap2it.com- “‘True Blood’s’ Rutina Wesley: In Season 6, ‘all hell is breaking loose’”
Image Credits: Frazer Harrison, Getty Images and HBO, Inc.
