Author: Austin Siegemund-Broka

HBO/John P Johnson

Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer

True Blood fans aren’t the only ones wanting more of the recently departed series.

The HBO drama’s seven seasons concluded on Aug. 24 with a finale that disappointed some Truebies, but there are more stories the cast and showrunner Brian Buckner wish the show had explored, they tell The Hollywood Reporter.

Joe Manganiello says he understood that Alcide had to die. Sookie (Anna Paquin) was not going to end up with her werewolf love interest, but having her break up with him would make viewers dislike her. “You’ve got to kill him,” Manganiello tells THR. He says that when he got the news, he told Buckner, “I totally get it.”

With more screen time, he would’ve liked to develop Alcide’s relationship with Emma (Chloe Noelle). “She was orphaned because of Alcide. Alcide never wanted to have kids, so it would have been interesting to see him burning off the karma of putting her into a parentless atmosphere,” Manganiello tells THR. “It could’ve taught him that being a wolf wasn’t all that bad. It would have been an opportunity to see a warm, paternal side of him in the midst of dealing with monsters in the wolfpack.”

He says Alcide and his father Jackson (Robert Patrick) had an interesting storyline that was removed from season six. “When you’ve got three showrunners in as many episodes [Buckner replaced Mark Hudis not long after creator Alan Ball exited], something’s got to give. That something unfortunately was my storyline. There was a plan to — [Jackson] came back for a reason, it just never happened,” Manganiello says.

Bill Compton’s (Stephen Moyer) human life was shown in flashbacks throughout season seven, but Moyer wanted to see more of Bill’s vampire past — in particular, what caused the bad blood between him and Eric (Alexander Skarsgard). “I had always wanted for us to see a flashback to that, and so that Alex and I got a chance to do more flashbacks together,” Moyer tells THR. 

Deborah Ann Woll says she was surprised how Jessica’s storyline ended, but that it “forced” her to come to a new understanding of her character “which I think is really beautiful.”

She wants to know more about the world of True Blood. “You’ll see these scenes with people in broken-down trailers but with chains and chains of silver. Is that because the value’s gone down, are they stockpiling it? Could you go to a vampire to get glamoured to quit smoking? What about the family drama of a human aging and a vampire staying the same?” she says. “As the actor, I’m sitting there like, ‘hm.'”

There’s one character Buckner says he particularly missed in the season’s final episodes. “Would I rather we had a little more Lafayette [Nelsan Ellis] toward the end? Sure,” Buckner said in a conference call with reporters. “I think he’s brilliant. I think every time he opens his mouth, something extraordinary comes out, usually that we didn’t write.”

He and the show’s writers decided that Lafayette’s story ended when he found love with James (Nathan Parsons) “I learned this when I was writing on Friends — Ross [David Schwimmer] and Rachel [Jennifer Aniston] together wasn’t quite as much fun as Ross and Rachel sparring,” Buckner says. “I don’t know what the scenes would be if we just did scenes of [Lafayette and James] happy together. I’m thrilled we got Lafayette true love, but it sort of peaked in [episode] 6 or so. There was closure in that character.” 

Parsons wants to know more of his character’s background. “It would have been fun to go back to the ’70s a bit, to go back to the war going on and this hippie love child standing against it, the draft dodger, and how he paid for it,” he tells THR.

He wishes his character had more scenes with Jessica so that he could play opposite Woll — with whom he went to college. “My freshman year we did a play together, so I know Deb well. I would have loved a little more time to work with her. She’s a powerhouse,” Parsons says.

There’s more background to be explored in Violet (Karolina Wydra) too, Wydra tells THR. Jason’s (Ryan Kwanten) girlfriend-turned-would-be-torturer might have received backlash from fans because her motivations weren’t immediately clear. “We could have expanded who Violet is and where she’s coming from, to get a better idea of who she is. Imagine, she’s been around for 800 years. She’s seen a lot,” the actress says. 

But some of the cast are fully satisfied with their characters’ storylines. Carrie Preston tells THR that Arlene’s growth from fearing vampires to falling in love with one (Riley Smith‘s Keith) “was a great build. It builds up over the seasons, as opposed to breaking down or kind of fizzling out — it was the opposite. I feel like I had a great climb, and where it ended up was perfect.”

Email: Austin.Siegemund-Broka@THR.com
Twitter: @Asiegemundbroka 

HBO/John P Johnson

Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Sunday’s True Blood series finale, “Thank You.”]

True Blood showrunner Brian Buckner isn’t sorry for the series’ controversial finale, in which Sookie (Anna Paquin) ended up with neither Bill (Stephen Moyer) nor Eric (Alexander Skarskgard).

The HBO drama ended Sunday with Sookie pregnant and married to a husband whose face viewers never see (played by stuntman Tim Eulich, Buckner revealed). The vampires are out of the picture — Bill has been staked through the heart by Sookie at his request, while Eric is running a multimillion-dollar blood substitute company and Fangtasia with Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten). Wait, what?

Buckner defended the decision not to pair Sookie off with either vampire.  

“I don’t think there was a lot of talk about the end game other than people sitting around in a room going, ‘Bill or Eric? Bill or Eric?'” he said in a conference call with reporters. “That was the thing we were pretty leery of, because you immediately alienate everybody who likes the other guy. We choose to have it as Sookie marries every man.” (Read the conversation in full here.)

“I think I’ve actually honored all the writers who’ve been here in terms of ‘which man will Sookie choose,'” he added.

Introducing Sookie’s husband as a new character in the final minutes of the finale “wouldn’t have made a lot of sense,” he said, but “we felt like it was irrelevant honestly who Sookie wound up with. What we wanted to know was that she was happy and living the life that she wanted to lead.”

The finale’s title, “Thank You,” was meant for Paquin, who “took a lot of heat” for her performance but “was the center of the show again” this season. But it was also for the fans that stuck by the series, Buckner said. (In True Blood fashion, the title was shared with the ending credits song, a 1969 Led Zeppelin track.)

“I’m sure it could be told a different way, but we can’t break story from fear of how people are going to be disappointed, and the show had to end somehow. I’m sort of defiantly proud of what we did,” Buckner said of the episode.

Some fans were, in a word, disappointed:

But others reacted positively:

Courtesy of HBO

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from this week’s series finale of True Blood, “Thank You.”]

The biggest question remaining from True Blood‘s series finale on Sunday might be who Sookie (Anna Paquin) ended up with romantically: She is pregnant in the flash-forward epilogue, and while viewers see her husband, his face is never revealed.

It was a decision the show’s writers made, showrunner Brian Buckner says, to keep Sookie at True Blood‘s center.

“We felt like it was irrelevant, honestly, who Sookie wound up with,” he said in a conference call with reporters. “What we wanted to know was that she was happy and living the life that she wanted to lead. To introduce some other stranger in the last five minutes of the finale wouldn’t have made a lot of sense. We made a choice to say it’s every man.”

It wasn’t really “every man” — it was stuntman Tim Eulich, who was chosen for the part because he “had the best arms,” Buckner revealed. “He’s just an unassuming stunt guy where we said, ‘he’s got great arms and would look good frying a turkey.'”

Buckner explained Bill’s (Stephen Moyer) choice to die, not from Hep-V in the finale but by a staking from Sookie. Part of Bill’s decision was to give her a normal life by having her use her fairy light on him, Buckner said, but his other motivation was the point of Bill’s flashbacks throughout the season. “It was all meant to tell the story of the natural course of a human life, and I think what Bill came around to was similar to what Godric [Allan Hyde] came around to [in season 2], which is that a human life is extraordinary too.”

Buckner, who has written for every season of the HBO drama and served as showrunner for the latest two, wanted to bring the story back to Sookie and Bill because their relationship “launched” the series, he said. But “I think it’s obvious from these seven years that Sookie and Bill were not meant to be true love forever,” he said.

He pondered a finale — and even pitched it to HBO — in which Sookie gives up her powers, but it “felt really wrong,” he said. “The idea was that we wanted Bill to be correct when he said that Sookie could have a normal life, the twist of course being that Sookie choose to keep her power and specialness and persevere despite his belief that she couldn’t be ok without giving up her powers.”

And the rest of the characters? Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) and Sookie didn’t share as much screentime this season because of Skarsgard’s shooting schedule for Tarzan, Buckner said. He defends the decision not to renew their romance in the final season, however. “I was really impressed with the romantic undertones of [their] scene, but nothing was overt. We didn’t go back there because it would have been sloppier storytelling-wise.”

He said, though, that if there were to be a True Blood spinoff, it might center on a certain other blood substitute. “I believe that there is life in Eric and Pam [Kristin Bauer van Straten] running a multi-national corporation,” Buckner said.

The sex scene with Eric and Fangtasia’s loyal barmaid Ginger (Tara Buck) might have gone very differently — Buckner said the joke of the scene was originally to be that the Viking vampire was not tip-top in bed. But, he said, “we didn’t want to give Ginger the worst experience of her life.” The scene still turned out to be “the funniest thing I think we’ve ever done. I’m glad we went for the next thought there.”

The seventh season saw the deaths of Alcide (Joe Manganiello) and Tara (Rutina Wesley) — beloved characters, Buckner said, but ones who had completed their emotional journeys. The decision to kill Tara, he said, came out of the scene in the sixth season finale where Tara’s mother Lettie Mae (Adina Porter) is reconciled with her daughter. Buckner thought the scene resolved their storyline so well it couldn’t continue.

“I wanted to create the sense this season that anything could happen, and that’s what the Tara death did, and the Alcide death furthered it,” he added.

The finale he compares True Blood‘s to is that of Friday Night Lights, the football-centric (and decidedly non-supernatural) drama set in a small Texas town.

“I wanted to give [Sookie] and our fans a happy ending. I know that the show has made its living on sex and gore and violence but without story all that starts to take on the feeling of snuff film,” Buckner said. “The more surprising ending for this is this intimate, small, beautiful story of these people in a small town.”

“It’s not all that fun to explode vampires over and over again,” he said.

Email: Austin.Siegemund-Broka@THR.com
Twitter: @Asiegemundbroka