Denis O’Hare May Play a Vampire on "True Blood," but His Life Sure Doesn’t Suck

Denis O’Hare is a bit worried these days. It’s not his role HBO’s True Blood as Russell Edgington, the Vampire King of Mississippi, that has him troubled. Nor is it the fact True Blood is notorious for getting its actors both covered in blood and/or naked.

No, what has O'Hare worried is that thanks to Alan Ball’s hugely popular vampire drama, O’Hare’s life might be about to change drastically. While O’Hare has been acting for more than thirty years both on Broadway as well as on television and film, he’s managed to stay mostly anonymous by taking the sort of character parts that have made him recognizable to the public in a mostly vague “Say, don’t I know you?” sort of way.

But those days might be over for O’Hare as he’s now on a show squarely at the center of the pop culture zeitgeist. Its third season having just debuted, True Blood recently landed on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, the show’s first episode garnered near record highs, and the denizens of Bon Temps are poised to be the number one topic around watercoolers everywhere this summer.

And O’Hare, or more precisely Russell Edgington, will surely be at the center of many of those conversations given his designs on vampire society. For O’Hare, that means his days of anonymously riding the subway might be over, a luxury the forty-eight-year old actor is reluctant to give up.

AfterElton.com recently caught up with O’Hare to discuss how he came to be on True Blood, how he explained to Theo Alexander, who plays Russell’s lover Talbot, what gay men like, what it was like for O’Hare to have been out in high school thirty years ago and much more.

AE: So I hear there is this vampire entertainment reporter at Newsweek who has suggested that since you're actually human, you can't convincingly play a vampire. Do you care to comment on that?
DO: (laughs) Give me his name and address and I will take care of that.

AE: Said the Vampire King of Mississippi. So how did you come to be on True Blood?
DO: Funnily enough, I was doing a movie in Budapest, a film called The Eagle of the Ninth with Channing Tatum and Donald Sutherland, and I was actually just walking around one evening there and I got a call from my agent in New York saying "How would you like to play the vampire king on HBO's hit show True Blood?" I was completely bowled over and completely surprised. I said "Uh, yeah!" and that was kinda it.

O'Hare as Russell Edington

AE: So you didn't audition for the part?
DO: I didn't. You know what's funny about that ... I wish I could say I'm at the point in my life when I never audition, but that's not true. I do a lot of auditioning. But I have great agents, and one of my agents out here in L.A. had gotten the breakdown and just said "Well, Denis should do this part." And he called up the folks at True Blood and said "Have you thought about someone like Denis O'Hare?"

They said "Oh, that's a good idea" and then he said "Well, how 'bout it?" So … he pitched them the idea of me, which was pretty fantastic. Alan Ball, years ago, had seen Take Me Out in 2003 on Broadway, and I guess I stuck in his memory from that. That's when I kind of got in his radar. So you never know what's going to lead to another job.