Nobody wears a Red Riding Hood costume like Jessica on True Blood, we’ve seen some steamy scenes with Deborah Ann Woll but none included full nudity.
Photo by Lacey Terrell
“I don’t do full nudity, but I do let [family] know if it’s going to be a sexually explicit scene, for particularly my boyfriend,” Woll tells nydailynews.com. “Most everyone else in my life, they just sort of roll their eyes, and go, ‘Okay, there she is doing it.’ “But it has deeper meaning for him, so I do prepare him for when those scenes are popping up.”
With freshly turned Steve Newlin and Tara, Jessica isn’t the youngest vampire on the show anymore.
“It’s fun playing a changed Jessica,” Woll says. “Now that she’s a little older and been through some stuff, you can find a little more nuance, rather than just petulant teenager. It’s fun not being the only baby vamp. Jessica gets to be more powerful than another vampire for once, which I think is going to be an interesting power struggle there. So she gets to be more confident and sow some wild oats.”
Jessica tries hard to have fun and now that she is a vampire she finally is one of the popular girls hosting a karaoke evening at the Compton Mansion.
“I ended up working very hard for that [scene] because you want it definitely to sound like a 17-year-old girl,” she says. “They don’t want it to sound too practiced or too rehearsed. You want it to sound like a couple of kids having a lot of fun. And sometimes that’s harder than it sounds. So I spent a lot of time listening to that song and really trying to just throw all caution to the wind and just go for it.”
Deborah knows what it feels like to not fit in.
“I was bullied a lot through middle school,” says Woll. “I probably annoyed other kids. I sang a lot in the halls and was very much an outspoken kid and I didn’t care about being cool, and I think that that really confused other kids. “So yeah, I had people leave me a lot of very mean notes in my locker, bad rumors got started, a lot of prank phone calls, people stole my stuff. And I end up shutting up in high school. I was much more quiet and shy and people left me alone more.”
As for the blood-soaked scenes, cast members make use of lots of different red substances to sub in for the fluid.
“There’s new blood, like mouth blood that has a minty-chocolaty taste to it,” Woll explains. “It’s very red and you drop a couple of those in your mouth, put your mouth on someone’s neck and let it ooze out as your feeding on them.” Makeup is used for “aged” blood, while stringy gelatin is used to rip up tendons with teeth. But the stickiest substitute is a syrup-based “blood.” I often find that if you’re covered in it, if you touch your arm and you don’t pick your hand up right away, it starts to stick,” Woll shares. “And we’re all getting wax jobs every time we’re doing this stuff, so we use a lot of K-Y Jelly actually to loosen up the sticky blood.”
