The Boston Herald interviewed Denis O’Hare, who plays the nefarious malefactor Russell Edgington in True Blood’s third (and possibly fifth?) season. He can now be seen in FX’s new scary-psych-drama American Horror Story. O’Hare said, “I love a good villain. There is nothing clear-cut and simple about a villain. Ever.” As a kid, the macabre enthusiast’s hero was Vincent Price in “those old Saturday afternoon horror films… they really stayed with me. I was a monster freak growing up.”
He describes his new show, American Horror Story, as a mix between The Shining, Twin Peaks and The Amityville Horror. “It’s not simply a horror show… It’s a lot more psychological, but the style is so odd and forward-thinking,” O’Hare remarks. He plays Larry, a former owner of an unholy, grim and possessed house into which Dylan McDermott’s character and family have recently moved. As a burn-disfigured and tortured man, O’Hare says Larry warns the new residents about the house’s malevolence “out of a strange compulsion to be set free. He’s looking for redemption — a way out.”
Despite Larry’s dark past (from which he covets redemption,) and three and a half hours in the makeup chair, O’Hare concedes that Russell Edgington is much scarier. He’s “a passionate character whose only motivation is to stay alive. He is so filled with forward motion and momentum about what he wants to do that he’s burning up with a desire to act. Of course, Russell is amoral in the great pagan sense — he doesn’t have the burden of our Judeo-Christian morals. He’s hard to parse because he’s playing by a different rule book.”
O’Hare, like the rest of the True Blood cast, is reticent to reveal any spoilers for the upcoming season. He says, “I have no idea what the writers will do. I have my ideas, but it might not be a straight linear line from the end of the last season.”
So until then Truebies, check him out on FX in American Horror Story, Wednesdays at 10pm.
Source: Boston Herald - O’Hare Splits Villainy in Two
Photo: HBO
