Coming onstage Friday morning in front of a packed Atrium ballroom (M), Charlaine Harris, Jim Parrack, Joe Manganiello, and Kristin Bauer were greeted with deafening cheers and blinding flashbulbs. The True Blood actors and the author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels teased the audience with hints about what is coming in the last few episodes of season four as well as the kind of end Sookie might get in the 13th and final installment of the series.
Charlaine Harris felt that it was her personal time to bring Sookie’s story to “a happy end… or at least an end.” She feels that she has said what she wants to say with the series and plans to move on to something just as wonderful. Asked what the important message of the books was, Harris answered immediately with one word, “Tolerance.”
Joe Manganiello agreed, saying that ultimately, despite all the supernatural elements and creatures, the show is really about being human. He credited Jim Parrack and Deborah Ann Woll and their scenes together for really bringing that theme home. “I have to give Jim some props because I think his scenes and his various breakups with Jessica…this is every bad break up that I have ever had.”
Asked about some of their favorite moments from the current season, Parrack and Manganiello both answered that they were enjoying seeing another side of Eric Northman, played by Alexander Skarsgard. Kristin Bauer answered that she really enjoyed playing the scenes where her character, Pam, was rotting from the inside.
Throughout the entire hour-long panel, it was clear that the actors all had a lot of respect for Charlaine Harris and that the feeling was entirely mutual. Harris said she thinks True Blood creator Alan Ball has made some great decisions, taking her book four and making his own version of it, “which is what I’ve come to expect.”
Finally, the cast let the audience in on what they can expect for the end of season four: sex and death. It wouldn’t be True Blood without both.
