Ambiguous Fluidity

And so, yet another episode last night. Through Scratches, True Blood began to really warm up to me. Except, there wasn't enough of Maryann. This time around, I began loving it since Maryann went off into the darkness. It took me a second viewing because a spoiler proclaimed : " You will no longer be in doubt as to who the horned creature is". And then I saw it...them...claws.It was a very subtle reveal, one which I wasn't expecting from the series. I had been watching the attack scene on Sookie many times and I was almost sure who the outline belonged to, but not the movement. And could television be capable of making a 'bull-man' and a woman the same person?

Below is Part 2 of the in-depth interview by TVGuide:

Sunday's revealing episode of True Blood confirmed for us that the bull-headed monster who is stalking Bon Temps' ladies and Maryann are one and the same! How does the very pleasant Michelle Forbes reconcile her sunny portrayal of Maryann, "that Ibiza party girl," with the clawed she-beast who ripped out Miss Jeannette's heart? "Maryann lives in a different moral construct than the rest of us," she says, emphasizing that Maryann doesn't think of herself as a villain. Earlier, Forbes hinted that True Blood might look like Animal Farm by the season's end. Here, she talks about becoming the monster, why Maryann does what she does and, gulp, bestiality?

TVGuide.com: All right, level with us: What is Maryann really?
Forbes: I am maenad. [Wikipedia has a quick primer on what a maenad is.]

TVGuide.com: Is that really you under all those prosthetics?
Forbes: It is!

TVGuide.com: What kind of process did you have to go through to get into all that?
Forbes: Maryann, and what she turns into, was really created as we went along. They knew about the prosthetics for the claws, but it became something more as we went along. Some of the sounds the creature made were developed in post-production. But the claws just made everything come together, without a doubt.

TVGuide.com: How long did it take to get into all that?
Forbes: It really only takes an hour and a half, but it's very uncomfortable for the rest of the evening. You can't text; you can't make phone calls. People have to feed you sandwiches.

TVGuide.com: And there's a big headpiece. Is that removable?
Forbes: Yes, that's removable, but the claws aren't. You're buttoned into those.

TVGuide.com: Did you have any inspiration for the gait or how the creature moves?
Forbes: Maryann's movements are really important. I wanted there to be a hint of... not masculinity, but I wanted it to be ambiguous and asexual because Maryann is so sexual and so feminine. I wanted it to be totally different than the very fluid way in which Maryann moves, with her long hair and long dresses.

TVGuide.com: So if her goal is pleasure or ecstasy, why is she also violent?
Forbes: Maryann lives in a different moral construct than the rest of us. Tenderness, violence — they're the same to her. The more that somebody is feeling alive and in their adrenaline and feeding that appetite for what we're not supposed to do, the more that they're in what she considers purity. That is her life blood; that is her excitement.

All those things that people hold themselves back from — food, sex, booze, drugs — she wants to push people into their vices, their purity, their ecstasy. That's what she considers happiness. It's not a nefarious or villainous thing in her mind. She wants everyone to feel the same glory and joy that she feels. She wants everyone to join the party.

TVGuide.com: In one scene, we see that Maryann can vibrate and will Sam to shape-shift. So why, in the flashback scene, does she vibrate when they're having sex? Was she trying to have sex with a dog?
Forbes: That is a season-revealer, so I can't say anything. That's a really important scene; people will be going back to that scene when they see the entire season.

As far as Wikipedia goes, you better ignore it if you haven't done so already. The name Maenad demands a new definition, if it even must be defined. And the way Michelle says - I am Maenad - not 'a' follower of someone. She is her own leader...She is a God/dess.

Polaris TCON Pictures

TCONteewts: Polaris has arranged for 2 incredible 8x10 head shots of Michelle Forbes for Sunday at her table! They are FANTASTIC

Here they are:





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Polaris on Twitter

Just a quick Saturday update.

This weekend Michelle is in Toronto at the TCON Polaris convention. You can follow the events in real time on Twitter, here are some queries you may want to use:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=michelle+forbes
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=tcon
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=polaris
http://twitter.com/TCONTweets

We also have a Twitter feed on the blog sidebar.



TCONTweets: * Let everyone know Michelle WILL have photos at her table for Sunday!
* Polaris has arranged for 2 incredible 8x10 head shots of Michelle Forbes for Sunday at her table! They are FANTASTIC
* Michelle Forbes photos almost gone. If you have your own item (Cards, Magazine, DVD) bring it to have it signed!

* Michelle Forbes is super-gorgeous in person. YOWZA!
* thetelevixen: Michelle Forbes press conference was FANTASTIC! Such an awesome woman. Photos and video to come n the next few days!
* thetelevixen: Michelle Forbes on what's to come in this season: "It becomes so insane and outrageous this year it will blow your mind!" #trueblood


Update Sunday morning (Toronto time, it's afternoon in Amsterdam)

Deb let us know that she did NOT steal the Michelle poster:



* The con has been very fun. And geeky wonderful. Michael Hogan and Michelle Forbes are wonderful speakers, their Q&A sessions rocked. And when I get back from camping, I need to watch Durham County so Michelle Forbes won't think I'm a bad Canadian. :p
Source: livejournal






Update

Here's an interview with 'a bunch of Canadian reporters' published on BlogTV

Criminal amount of fun, favourite Canadian films, Swimming with Sharks, the cut-throat world.


Greek Mythology, the statue, Battlestar Galactica, the glee & terror of True Blood, fun v. torture, sea of naked people, and turning European.


Durham County & Goodbye


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Transcript of a (small) part of the interview:

The TV Addict: Earlier in your career, it was widely reported that you turned down a series regular role on STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE because you didn’t wish to commit to a series regular role on television at that point in your career. Why the change of heart with TRUE BLOOD?
Michelle Forbes: Alan Ball [TRUE BLOOD's creator]. He’s such a wonderful man to work for and I don’t think I’ve ever run into anyone who is not a fan of his. And, after DURHAM COUNTY and IN TREATMENT, I really wanted to do something light and fun. And while TRUE BLOOD is a very technically difficult show and there is a lot of depth to it, it’s illegal how much fun we’re having on the show. Which for me, was really important, to go and do something that was fun for a bloody change as supposed to being tortured all the time. Even though I was tortured on the show by having to face a few fears.

Would one of those fears have been TRUE BLOOD’s penchant for onscreen nudity?
Not really. I actually think we [as a culture] need to stop being so prudish about nudity and start being more european because it’s just nudity. For me what’s so great about being part of the TRUE BLOOD company, and I mean the entire company, the writers, the production team and definitely the actors is that it is the most fearless group of people that you will ever work with. Everybody’s just game for anything, everyone’s looking for that next challenge and when you’re surrounded by such courage, boldness and fearlessness, if you don’t join in, well… you just look like a stick in the mud. And I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I say there are quite a few orgies on the show, and once you’re in the middle of the woods with a sea of naked people, it really becomes… just drinking coffee and chatting with the actors. Really no big deal.

Although we’re slowly learning what exactly Maryann is, we’re still waiting to find out what brings her to Bon Temps? Care to elaborate?
Is that not good television? When we don’t know quite yet! It’s really revealed over the season, as is so much about the show. If last year we were introduced to this very interesting and fascinating little town in Louisiana, this second year, the story blows open and sort of spins off into these little hurricane stories where Bill and Sookie go off to Dallas, you’ve got the Fellowship of the Sun story-line and then we have what’s still happening in Bon Temps with Maryanne and the crowd at Merlotte’s. It gets very insane this year [laughs].

There has been a lot of speculation online with regards to your character’s statue, can you elaborate as to its meaning?
The statue actually has enormous meaning as the season goes on. There has been a lot of interest about that statue and the Brooklyn Museum (which is where they [the creative team] found that statue and replicated it) have been inundated with people wanting to know about the statue, the history of it. So it’s really wonderful in a show that seems to be about vampires and what have you has now garnered this conversation about Greek mythology, ancient art and thoughts of injustice. That statue has a lot of meaning as we head like a train on fire throughout the rest of the season.

Do you have a theory as to why TRUE BLOOD seems to have made its way into the cultural zeitgeist?
My theory is that we’ve (America) been through eight years of nonsense and hell with the Bush administration — when our economy is just in utter chaos, people are out of work, and we’re stuck still in the middle of an endless war — there is something refreshing about being able to watch something that is fun and escapist. Plus, because it’s Allan Ball and our wonderful writers, the show still serves as a beautiful place for social commentary looking at injustice and compassion. Like BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, it’s never preachy about it, the show doesn’t tell you how to feel — rather it raises the questions and it does so in a small sleepy Louisiana town that is very diverse.

Source: thetvaddict.com


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...then I looked at my watch and realised it was uncomfortably close to the time when Michelle Forbes's Q&A would begin; I really wanted to see her.

[...] So then we watched the Michelle Forbes Q&A, and wouldn't you know, within the first five minutes, some stereotype of basement-dwelling fanboy-hood asked the question about whether Forbes, as Ro, had been groomed on TNG to play the Bajoran on DS9. I cringed; Forbes was Very Sarcastic Indeed, although she did answer the question for--as she pointed out--roughly the billionth time. And it was at that moment I decided I wanted her to be asked something she didn't hear every time she faced a roomful of genre fans, so with a little prodding from C, I went up to the mic and asked her to tell us about her experience on In Treatment.

She mentioned the density of the material, the stage-play format, the way she and the other one-day-a-week actors had it easy compared to Gabriel Byrne (when she left the production after finishing a chunk of her work to go off and do BSG, Byrne was sitting in the chair, nodding his head; when she came back a few months later, Byrne was still sitting in the chair, nodding his head). The thing she liked most about it, she said, was the "intimacy" of the material.

All in all, she spoke for about five mintues on the subject, so I like to think she appreciated the question.

There were some questions about True Blood, some more Trek stuff, and a question about something she'd said at a previous Q&A about the nature of celebrity in this day and age. Somewhere along the way, she mentioned that, in the course of her twenty-year career, only about fourteen hours of finished product have been genre; she said she'd do a show in Albania about baseball if the material was good. (I learned she's in s2 of Durham County, which made me flail rather a lot.)

Source: Serrico Livejournal

"Sunday morning (first thing again) I had a photo session with Michelle Forbes and some of my friends. I love her work and it was the only time I saw her on the weekend. She seems a lovely person. The group ahead of me in line gave her an honourary Canadian citizenship. :) I did hear that during her Q&As she was hyping Durham County, and quite right, too."

Maryann' s Creativity of Destruction and Mutual Energy

The first part of the highly anticipated TVGuide interview with Michelle Forbes is finally here.

Michelle Forbes likes that her True Blood character, Maryann Forrester, is such an enigma. It reminds her of how she got the acting gig. "I was told a lot, yet very little, and that is the riddle of Maryann," she says, quixotically. "I was so lost initially." Join the club. You may have heard that Maryann is a maenad, and that's technically accurate — but it's certainly not the whole story. Forbes was gracious enough to help us understand Maryann's maybe-not-so-evil-after-all ways in this two-part interview. (After you watch Sunday's episode, come back Monday morning for the juicy bits of Part 2.)

TVGuide.com: When I heard Alan Ball was going to be doing a vampire show, I thought: Oh, no! I'm not generally a fan of goth or genre-type stuff.
Michelle Forbes: That's what's so fascinating about [True Blood]. For someone who seems to be known for her sci-fi career, I had not thought of vampires for more than five minutes in my entire life. But this show is not about vampires. It's looking at all these different beings — a telepathic waitress, a shape-shifter bar owner, or, you know, Stephen Root's lonely accountant vampire — and it gives such a real face to this world of the supernatural that I always found rather goofy.

TVGuide.com: And the end result is both fun and sophisticated.
Forbes: You have this landscape for social commentary, for questioning injustice, compassion and our pack-mentality thinking allegorically.

TVGuide.com: What did they tell you in advance about Maryann?
Forbes: There were discussions about Greek mythology, and yet you open a script and you're dancing to the B-52's. It was a little hard trying to understand how the two mesh together, but with these writers and [series creator Alan Ball], the trust factor is massive. Everything became evident the more I sat still.

TVGuide.com: What exactly did you talk about?
Forbes: We talked about Bacchus and Dionysus; what a maenad is, how they're led by appetite, how they thrive off other peoples' appetites, chaos and destruction. But, you know, that was the diving board, but it wasn't the pool.

TVGuide.com: So then how did you make Maryann contemporary?
Forbes: I watched a lot of Ken Russell films. I thought a lot about New York in the '80s, [avant-garde punk singer] Lydia Lunch, when there was just freedom and excess and people were just knocking down walls, and there was chaos and destruction. On the Lower East Side, there were rats running through the street and people loved it! Stepping over bodies to walk home! The burning trash cans. There was just this creativity.

TVGuide.com: What do you like about playing her?
Forbes: I tend to play a lot of tortured people, so it has been liberating playing Maryann. There is a sense of contentment that was, to be honest, initially horrifying and frightening to me. She's not afraid of anything, and not in that clichéd way, she's truly just OK. She's not afraid. She can eat what she likes, she can have sex with whom she likes, she can play with whom she likes. She can dress in beautiful clothes. She has everything at her fingertips. There's nothing she doesn't need.

TVGuide.com: Speaking of the clothes, did the wardrobe help you find her?
Forbes: Yes. She is that Ibiza party girl. She's the girl who never left the party, but it hasn't hurt her. Those people are usually quite tragic, but she's not. She doesn't give one blink as to what people think of her. She's free of all those constraints.

TVGuide.com: What exactly is happening when Maryann vibrates?
Forbes: The vibrations are very integral to who she is. She thrives off the energy of the people around her. When they are in a place of ecstasy, that feeds her. Her appetite is fed off the appetite of others.

TVGuide.com: But isn't she also creating their behavior?
Forbes: It's a mutual energy flow, if you will. She sets it in motion and then she receives the energy from it.

TVGuide.com: Are those vibration scenes really weird to film?
Forbes: You do feel a little nutty. There's some green screen; it depends because it happens in different ways at different times. It's a bit technical at times and you have to brace yourself for the fact that you're standing there shaking in front of the crew.

Full Interview

The Girl With Flowers in Her Hair

Things have been rather quiet aroundTrue Blood, and we were deprived of seeing Michelle Forbes steal our hearts all over again as Maryann. However, some interesting tidbits have just come in.

Below is a sneak peek of this Sunday's episode: Shake and Fingerpop:

Now, if only someone would copy and paste her into every single scene of the episode...

*

The San Diego International Comic-Con will host a True Blood panel on Saturday, July 25th in Ballroom 20. (5:15-6:15). It will be attended by the regular cast of this season: Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, Rutina Wesley, Michelle Forbes, Alexander Skarsgard, Nelsan Ellis, Sam Trammell,Deborah Ann Woll. The show;s creator/producer Alan Ball and the author of the Sookie novels Charlaine Harris will also be present.

If you just happen to be going, before the panel, there is also set to be an autograph session "at the Warner Bros. booth on the convention floor". The time is tba.

*

HBO TB Merch can finally offer some Maryann items to wear:




Finally, there will be aplenty of TB episodes every Sunday in August. Spoilery synopses can be found here.

As for me, I couldn't care less about spoilers. I will only be paying notice to the girl with flowers in her hair.
-------------

'Comes your girl, Randy. Copy&Paste ;-)
--chris


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