Undead & Prime Time

Denis O’Hare is a king. Well, at least on the new season of True Blood he is.  When the show returns on June 13,  he’ll be playing the pivotal new role of Russell Edgington, the almost 3,000-year-old Vampire King of Mississippi. But O’Hare is also a king of his craft, an openly gay Tony Award-winning star of stage and an ever-present character actor of the big and small screen, who has appeared in some of the biggest TV shows and films of the past decade—opposite stars like Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn. And while you might not recognize his name at first, you most certainly won’t forget his face. “People think they know me; they don’t assume I am an actor; they think they just met me, that we have worked together,” explains the energetic 48-year-old. “A lot of people say to me, ‘Are you my doctor?’ and I am like, ‘No. I am not your doctor.’ They don’t know where they know me from and I kind of like that.”  

His journey to True Blood began this past winter, when he received a call on the set of his new movie with Channing Tatum, The Eagle of the Ninth. “I was literally walking by a cathedral and I got a phone call; it was my agent,” explains O’Hare in the expansive Fort Greene loft he shares with his partner. “He asked me, ‘How would you like to be a vampire on HBO’s smash hit show, True Blood?’” Creator Alan Ball had seen him in his Tony-winning role in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out back in 2003. “You never know what people are going to remember you from and I think it had just stuck in his mind and seven years later he was like, ‘Sure, hire him.’”

However, the role was a bit unique for O’Hare, best known for playing straight (and often pig-headed, angry and even homophobic characters), as King Russell is actually gay. “I have played mostly straight characters my entire career and, Newsweek not withstanding, gay men are just as easy to play as straight men,” he admits. O’Hare’s résumé is the perfect rebuttal to Ramin Setoodeh’s article in Newsweek that claims gay men aren’t believable when they play straight. “Not everyone that meets with me assumes that I am gay,” the actorexplains, saying he is upfront about his sexual orientation.  “[When people ask me] ‘Do you have a family?’ that is an opportunity to lie.” He says that for some it’s easier to leave out the gay part but that “I take the initial stand and then it’s easy afterwards.”

Which is possibly why O’Hare was so excited to change it up and play Russell. “I think gay men are better at playing gay men because we don’t try to be gay. I know that a gay person is not defined by characteristics. The King of Mississippi is the King of Mississippi; he just happens to—I was going to say something else—suck…blood,” he jokes, as he slips in and out of the charcter’s bourgeois Mississippi drawl. “My character is all about battles, wars and macho shit. I don’t do anything in the show that is even remotely stereotypically gay, and as a gay actor, I don’t worry about it. If I were a straight actor I would be looking for an angle, like how do I show the character as gay, but as gay men we know that we don’t have to show the character is gay.” But just because his character is a 2,800-year-old vampire doesn’t mean he and his boyfriend, Talbot (played by actor Theo Alexander), can’t also be role models, especially in light of the marriage-equality debate. “As Alan Ball joked, this is the most stable relationship in all of True Blood. These guys have been together for 700 years!”

Showing characters fighting prevailing stereotypes of gay men in traditional media is a crucial step to changing mass perception of homosexuality, O’Hare believes. “Think about 24. [It] had the first black president, Dennis Haybert, and psychologically seeing Dennis [Haybert] for two years in a row, you just wonder what kind of impact that had for Barack Obama,” he ponders. “Did it help people because they already imagined it, they had already lived with it? It seems more plausible in a strange way. It’s the same thing when gay people are in every movie and are casual. Russell and Talbot are just one example of a marriage that’s great.”

O’Hare relishes his new character equally as a fan and as an actor. “I was already a fan of the show and the idea of being on it had never occurred to me.” But he ran with the opportunity. “The character was a work in progress. [Alan Ball and I] evolved it together. We figured out [Russell] is actually 2,800 years old, one of the original Druids probably in the Carpathian Mountains—modern-day Romania—and somewhere along the way, 1300 AD, he met up with his lover Theo and he made him a vampire. They’ve been together 700 years at the opening of the show when we meet [Russell] as a very wealthy “art collector,” really the King of Mississippi, and he has larger ambitions,” O’Hare excitedly shares about the season. “I think the show is finally getting back to its roots. We’re fleshing out how the vampires function. What are their laws, where do they come from, how are they organized? I feel like this season is solidifying where the vampires came from. Then there’s the whole interaction with werewolves…”

Werewolf interaction! Gay vampire sex! Antiques! With the second-season finale garnering 5.1 million viewers—making it the most-watched HBO series since The Sopranos—True Blood Season 3 is sure to be water-cooler talk this summer, and put the happily unrecognized O’Hare in a whole new, brighter light. But is he ready for it? “I look at people’s careers [that] I love, like Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and I feel like they are in the same realm I am in,” he reveals. “Those are character actors that became leading actors and I would love to do that. I would love the opportunity to show what I can do in a bigger part, the opportunity to carry a movie.” That is, so long as too much fame doesn’t come with it, he says. “I love my level of anonymity. I’m not looking for any special treatment; I like it just the way it is,” he assures us. “As far as bigger parts, I just want to keep working. Every actor I know just wants to work; we want to work in a satisfying way and [we] want to enjoy it. So far I am having a blast.”    N

Denis O’Hare stars in the third season of True Blood, premiering June 13 on HBO. Visit HBO.com/TrueBlood for more info.