“True Blood” creator Alan Ball has said he’d like to bring Russell Edgington back to Bon Temps in Season 5, but Denis O’Hare expects a different sort of former Mississippi vampire king when his ancient character returns.
“The trick is — and these guys are better at it than I am — but the trick is to reinvent [Russell], because he can’t come back and be the same guy,” Denis told Access Hollywood on Saturday. “He’s gotta come back transformed in some way and in a surprising way and I look forward to whatever they’re choosing to do with him.”
Denis, who stars in Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s “American Horror Story” on FX, which premieres on Oct. 5, said it’s all in the “True Blood” writers’ hands regarding his return to the HBO show. But, when asked if he, personally, expects Russell to come back from his cased-in-concrete Season 3 ending, bent on avenging the staking death of his longtime love Talbot, Denis said he thinks his character would return with a much more surprising set of motives.
“The thing I love about him is his dreams aren’t petty. He’s never motivated by anything petty, so I can’t imagine if he came back he’d be motivated by simple revenge,” Denis said. “I think he’s always out for something bigger. “
While Talbot’s true death occurred after he was staked by Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard), Denis said Russell’s experience across the centuries is likely to make his return more complex.
“There are dreams that are bigger than that, there are ambitions bigger than that. And he’s been alive 2,800 years, he was with Talbot for 700 years. Not to say that it was only a short period of time, but he’ll do his grieving and he’ll move on,” Denis noted.
So perhaps a turn in politics then?
“Politics sounds great,” he smiled.
Although he’s had roles across film and television, playing Russell — and in particular the scene where the then-king took over a national news broadcast and gave a speech that upset vampire-human politics — has fans begging the actor to repeat his lines in public.
“I get people who want me to say the last line, ‘Now time for the weather. Tiffany?’ I get a lot of that,” he smiled. “But it was a brilliant monologue that [‘True Blood’ writer] Alexander Woo created and I was so happy to be able to do it. It was the kind of meat that as an actor you dream of getting. And I was so lucky to be able to get that.”
Beyond the rumored “True Blood” return, Denis is hoping to come back to CBS drama, “The Good Wife,” where he plays the thorn-in-Alicia-Florrick’s-side-judge, Charles Abernathy.
“I hope so. I live in New York and whenever I’m there and they call me up I’ve been able to come and do one. And I’m hoping that they’ll call me back because I love that,” he said. “I love that show and I like Alicia fine, as long as she’s on point, legally. What I love about that character is that he is honest and he has integrity and he rules against his own instincts when the law tells him he has to. I think that’s amazing. I love that.”
Working on “The Good Wife” also keeps Denis closer to his family – his new husband Hugo Redwood – and the foster child the couple has taken in.
“We want to adopt and we wanted to adopt for quite a while and we decided we wanted to do it locally and we wanted to do it with a child who is already in the area who needed a home,” Denis told Access. “And our boy was actually born in Queens. He’s not ours yet, he’s a foster child but we’re hoping — we’re on a track to adopt him.”
Getting into the thick of it with diapers galore, Denis said fatherhood has been a wonderful.
“It’s great, he’s a beautiful kid and we love him,” he added.
Copyright © 2024 by NBC Universal, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be republished, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.