Ryan Kwanten - True Blood - interview

First published on 10 Sep 2009. Updated on 18 Aug 2010.

Day One of Season One of True Blood and Ryan Kwanten looked up from between the thighs of a quivering co-star and felt his marrow run cold.

A loud call of "Cut!" had come from Alan Ball, Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty and Six Feet Under and, as of 2007, the creator of True Blood, the sensational TV adaptation of the blood-curdling, sex-drenched Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris, about a near-future where vampires are out of the coffin and deviously assimilating themselves into American mainstream society.

To play Jason Stackhouse, a pea-brained sex-maniac whose natural habitat is administering unholy congress betwixt the knees of the belles of Bon Temps, Ball had cast ex-Hey Dad and Home & Away actor Ryan Kwanten. Now, filming his very first scene, the Sydney boy feared it was he who was going down.

"I was mortified," Kwanten chuckles to Time Out. "I thought I'd be fired on the spot and that there'd been a horrible mistake casting me. Instead Alan yells out: 'Make-up! The area around Ryan's mouth just doesn't look right - he doesn't look like he's doing the business down there.' So the next thing I know there's ‘love juice' being applied to my lips and chin..."

Ryan Kwanten has been on everyone's lips ever since. True Blood wasn't into its third episode before HBO commissioned the second season Australians will see when it debuts on Showcase on 15 September.

In the US, True Blood has gone gangbusters, eclipsing Entourage to be HBO's highest-rating show of 2009. "The scope has tripled, new characters have developed, there's multiple storylines and there's more bull-at-a-gate chaos, more blood and more risk," says Kwanten. "Season Two isn't just re-opening the door to True Blood, it's like seeing it ripped clean off its hinges!"

The ratings would tend to agree. True Blood's Season 2 premiere alone garnered 3.7 million viewers, the network's highest-rating show since The Sopranos finale two years ago. The show has since settled in at an amazing 3.9 million watchers every week. No wonder Aussie True Blood fans are excited.

Today, the 33-year-old Kwanten is talking to Time Out from his home in Los Angeles where he's prepping for Season 3 and another exhaustive but exhilarating six month shoot in LA, the bayous of Louisiana and the eerie open spaces of Baton Rouge in Texas that form True Blood 3's spooky backdrops.

But before then, the tousle-haired, outrageously ripped 33 year old is coming home to Sydney to shoot Griff the Invisible, a film he says is about "an ordinary guy in a nine-to-five job who thinks he's saving the world by night but isn't." Kwanten plays the title character and starts shooting in Surry Hills later in September.

It's his second big film role after Red Hill, the modern revenge western he shot in Omeo, Victoria last year. There, he played a young police officer struggling to survive his first day's duty in a small country town. "It's an old-school western - brutal, full of beautiful panoramas. High Plains Drifter meets The Proposition."

Both films are due in 2010. Until then, Kwanten is larger-than-life lothario Jason Stackhouse, and finding himself accosted in public by American vamps of all shapes, sizes, ages and tastes. "These are the ins and outs of Jason Stackhouse," he laughs. "I don't think these girls come up and expect me to rip off their clothes and throw them down on the bed... but they are, er, fascinated by Jason."

Before you ask, Jason's redneck riffs and Mississippi leg-hound habits aren't at all shared by his maker. "Unlike me, Jason has no willpower. In Season One, his addiction to the Tru Blood serum - which I've always figured is a mix of valium, V8, viagra and Vicodin multiplied by 1,000 - puts him in a tailspin and sends him into some deep, dark places that are pretty hard to crawl out of."

Including between the thighs of his co-stars? "Maybe that's where my athletics and acting fuel each other," he grins. Alas, Kwanten's qualification for the World Biathalon Championships in Pyeongchang, South Korea in June was kyboshed by shooting commitments for True Blood. He's quietly shattered by this - after all, he won the LA Biathalon two years straight in 2006-07. "But whether it's a ten-hour triathalon or a two-scene day where I have to cry, I need to get a sweat up during the day or I'm a pretty crappy person to be around."

Thankfully, Kwanten says that episode nine of TB2 contains his version of an acting triathalon. "It's probably my favourite scene that I've shot for True Blood. I mean, I cried my arse off on the first take but the director said ‘Go deeper!' Scene two: More sobbing. ‘Deeper still!' he's yelling. By take five or six I'm exhausted and elated. I've taken myself into the darkest, most unpleasant place imaginable but I've delivered a scene that is essentially the sum total of what Jason Stackhouse has become and hopefully shown that, under all the bravado and testosterone, is a sweet boy with big issues."

One could describe Kwanten the same way, particularly when Time Out mentions his days as a teen actor on A Country Practice, GP, Echo Point and Water Rats and his Logie nomination for Home and Away. Those days were all about 'Superman acting'," he says. "There was no substance to the characters I played, no subtext. It was just a paycheque. But Home and Away was a turning point because my character was an extrovert and I'm not, so I was forced to come out of my shell and create a character."

Even before he found stardom on True Blood, Kwanten had commitment down pat. The former junior boxing champ and St Pauls schoolboy earned a business degree at Sydney University and qualified as a yoga instructor before playing slumdog in Hollywood. "I got to auditions on a bike with my clothes in a backpack and lived in apartments I couldn't afford, skipping before the first month's rent was due," he recalls. "I loved the desperation - hitting the wall then breaking through. I thrived on getting down and dirty."

That's what made Kwanten was the first actor Ball cast for True Blood. "Alan told me before Season One: ‘Always remember it's good to be Jason Stackhouse.' It meant throw away the textbook and fly by the seat of your pants - literally. It's a very fun, liberating way to work and it's what makes Alan a genius - he creates these amazing characters yet is then happy to hand them over to his actors."

It's made Kwanten the in-demand actor he is today. "There are a thousand monkeys out there who'll do what they're told. But directors like Alan Ball do their work in casting, which means I'm hired for what I can bring to the character and what I have to offer beyond the script. And these days, Jason Stackhouse is embedded in me - I'm always wide-eyed with astonishment at where the True Blood writers take him next."