True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll is featured in NYLON and we have photos from the shoot and also an interview with and about her and why the series hits “close to home.” As most True Blood fans know, Deborah Ann’s boyfriend, EJ Scott is also going blind, just like the series namesake, so we can certainly understand why she chose this series.
Oh, and be sure to check out Deb’s new series, “Daredevil” on Netflix which launches a whole season of episodes this Friday, April 10.
See more below:
So focused is actress Deborah Ann Woll on honing her craft that she’s been known to let all of her emotions sit very close to the surface.
“Most people, when they feel a laugh or a sob in their throat, might choke it down because it’s inappropriate,” she explains over a bowl of tomato basil soup in the booth of a Beverly Hills steak house. “You don’t want people to see you cry over something as silly as a commercial. But I don’t want to hold back, because that trains me to hold back. So, when people watch me, they’re seeing someone who is actually feeling something, not someone who is squeezing and trying to push out a tear.”
For this reason Woll, a graduate of USC’s prestigious School of Theatre, is drawn to intense projects—by nature, her work is genuine and anguished. After a seven-year run as the scene-stealing vampire Jessica Hamby on HBO’s recently concluded True Blood, she now takes on the role of Karen Page in Marvel’s Daredevil, a new series out this April on Netflix that’s adapted from he original comic. “It’s definitely darker than the others,” she says, noting that the show is the first in a slate of five live-action adventure series (also including Marvel’s A.K.A. Jessica Jones, Marvel’s Iron Fist, and Marvel’s Luke Cage, all leading up to the characters teaming up in Marvel’s The Defenders) to premiere only on Netflix.
The origin story of Daredevil goes like this: A young Matt Murdock pushes a man out of the way of a truck carrying toxic waste, which spills on Murdock, blinding him, but heightening his other senses drastically—just before his father is murdered by gangsters. Murdock becomes Daredevil (played in the Netflix series by Charlie Cox), a superhero intent on avenging his dad’s death by fighting corruption in New York.
As for Page, she goes all the way back to the first issue of the comic in 1964 as Murdock’s secretary and love interest. The character did, however, get a revamp from writer Frank Miller in the ’80s. “She went through all kinds of mutations,” says Woll, taking a spoonful of soup and letting it drip back into the bowl. “She starts out [in the ’60s] very Leave It to Beaver—a little stereotypically feminine—then [later], she becomes a heroin addict and does some pornography and sells out Daredevil to the bad guy for some drugs, gets clean, and gets back together with him, and then she dies.”
Woll is highly charismatic as Page—her interpretation of the character falls somewhere between the angelic early version and the out-of-control iteration.
“There’s this old idea that women in men’s stories are either Madonnas or whores, and she is both, but at different times,” says Woll. “What I ended up doing, and what Marvel was trying to do, was to merge those two. She doesn’t have to be a Madonna or a whore—she can be good and bad all at once, which is more modern.”
To read the rest of this interview about Deborah, go to: nylon.com
