It is quite interesting how different Kristin Bauer van Straten is from her alter ego, Pam on True Blood. Pam is the resident bitch on wheels and a 100-year-old vampire. Pam may be many things—bloodthirsty, ruthless, and sartorially blessed, among them—but a crier is not the first thing that comes to mind.
Yet, Kristin has admitted that she’s prone to tearing up.
“I’m warning you: I get weepy a lot,” said Bauer van Straten, sipping a green-tea soy latte at Priscilla’s, a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley’s Toluca Lake. “You’ll get used to it.”
Bauer van Straten’s character Pam, the protégé of Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård), became a fan-favorite on True Blood after deftly stealing nearly every scene she’s in, assisted ably by Pam’s penchant for bon mots and torture, and her ability to reinvent her killer wardrobe every episode. One week, she’s in a pink Chanel suit; the next, she’s a leather-clad dominatrix. There’s an unpredictable and, according to Bauer van Straten, a “completely unapologetic” nature to this beautiful and brutal vampire, one that led creator Alan Ball to make Bauer van Straten a series regular in the third season.
She is amazing,” said Ball of Bauer van Straten. “Pam is one of everybody’s favorite characters to write… She’ll say whatever she thinks and say it in a way that is really hilarious. And then Kristin will take that line and deliver it in a way that is only hers.”
Now in its fourth season, True Blood has pushed Bauer van Straten even further into the spotlight, granting Pam her very own storyline, one in which she’s the victim of a spell by possessed witch Marnie (Fiona Shaw) and her immortal body begins to decay. For Pam, whose priorities are Eric and her appearance (sometimes in reverse order), having her skin peel off in ribbons of goo is a massive blow.
“Last year, we found out that Pam has a sensitive side, that she has this Achilles heel, which is Eric,” said Bauer van Straten, almost unrecognizable as Pam without a stitch of makeup and her hair in loose waves. “I thought she would be really vulnerable, that she would just crumble, but she doesn’t… There’s going to be payback.”
On Sunday’s episode, Pam—dressed in black lace with a heavy veil covering her ruined face (“Even when her face is putrefying, she comes up with an outfit for putrefying,” said Bauer van Straten)—betrayed Eric to Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), inadvertently revealing that Eric’s memory had been erased and that he’s hiding out under the watchful eye of Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin). Oops.
“That was a hard moment for me,” said Bauer van Straten, “because we’ve seen her willing to die for him. I tried to play it that she probably hasn’t slept and is so stressed that she literally makes a mistake and is crushed by it. It’s a true mistake.”
Read the rest of this interview with Kristin by going to: thedailybeast.com
