MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE Shape Shifting Sam Trammell Is Full of Surprises

The down-home, all-American guy that everyone thinks they’ve come to know has a complexity beneath the surface that few would expect. Sam Trammell and his alter-ego, “True Blood”’s Sam Merlotte, have a lot in common in this regard. Merlotte manages to keep a low profile as the owner of the neighborhood saloon in the fictional Louisiana town of Bon Temps, closely guarding his true nature as a shape-shifter, a creature capable of transforming into any animal he sees. Trammell is a talented, charismatic television actor on a hit show, who surfs and plays guitar — and is also a classical pianist who graduated from Brown University with a degree in semiotics and spent a year in Paris studying French philosophy. “Strictly speaking, it’s the study of signification,” he explains of semiotics during our meeting at a West Hollywood cafe. “The process of how things represent other things. Signs. If you do a really pure semiotical study, it’s very linguistic; it’s a lot about language but it’s also interdisciplinary.” He discusses how Freud, psychoanalysis, Marx and Engels, and feminist and film theories are all tied in with this field, and he touches on concepts of physics that leave us compelled to google and reexamine Einstein’s theory of relativity. Trammell is full of surprises.

An accomplished stage performer, his turn on Broadway in Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” earned him a Tony nomination in 1998. It was around the same time that Trammell leapt into a string of independent films, including The Hotel Manor Inn (1997), Childhood’s End (1997), Fear of Fiction (2000) with Melissa Leo, Autumn in New York (2000) with Richard Gere, and Undermind (2003) — all while performing in regional theater. Soon after, the Louisiana-born talent moved to Los Angeles and started his TV career in earnest. From 2004 to 2007, Trammell was seen on such shows as “House M.D.,” “Judging Amy,” “Bones,” “Numb3rs,” “Dexter,” and “Cold Case.” Then in September of 2008, Alan Ball and HBO premiered the “True Blood” juggernaut that launched Trammell and his fellow cast-mates into the stratosphere. Now in full swing, season three of the vampire-steeped drama — based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris — sees Merlotte, who was adopted as an infant, seek out his birth parents to gain a better understanding of who and what he is. Finding an alcoholic father, a desperately cloying mother, and a brother with a chip on his shoulder, he’s beginning to wish he hadn’t. Things aren’t likely to get any easier for the kind-hearted, pan-species restaurateur, as we’re pretty sure that, as always, he’ll find himself at the center of a much larger — and deadlier — predicament soon enough. And with HBO’s recent order of a fourth season, both Sams are assured of more wild and bloody adventures to come. Read on as the uncommon actor tells his tale.

Venice:

Of all the shows out there, what’s it like to be on one with so many possibilities?

Sam Trammell:

It’s so fun! I always say that it’s a genre show, but what we really are is a character drama in a fantastical world. So we have this really good character writing and character development from Alan Ball but we’re in this insane world where you get to do all this fun stuff — like turning into animals, and there’s lots of blood, and it’s a really fun show to do. We’re just so lucky because it never gets boring; it always gets more and more challenging.

Good fantasy is really about the characters.

Yes. That’s really where you have to go. I was talking to Alan Ball about it at the beginning of the season and he said, “In each season you have to go deeper into the characters.” And for sure, that’s what they’ve done this year. I think even more than last year, every character has a serious journey where everybody changes. We have 24 episodes under our belt now and we’re all just hitting our stride.

Did you know what the show was about when you first auditioned?

There was a script out there for Alan Ball’s new show for HBO. I knew I wanted to do it even before I read it because it was Alan Ball, and it also took place in Louisiana which is where I’m originally from. So I read it and I really loved it. When I met him for the audition I think he might have told me that Sam was a shape-shifter. I think that’s when I found out. I remember he had the first two episodes written and the third was half done, and he gave me those and I looked at them — and then I got the books. There was something about being a guy that works in a bar that I really wanted to do. I never worked in a bar! He owns a bar and lives in a trailer and he’s a little rough. It wasn’t my life growing up, but it’s very familiar to me because I grew up in some rural areas — West Virginia and Louisiana — so I felt a connection to this world. I also felt very connected to the fact that Sam is really secretive. It’s ironic because he owns Merlotte’s, which is the center of town. Everybody knows him but nobody knows him. Nobody knows at the beginning that he’s a shape-shifter. He has that superficial relationship, for lack of a better word, with everybody. He is pretty good at that but anything deeper he can’t do because he wants to keep it a secret. He’s ashamed of it.

When he reveals his nature to Sookie, that’s a big deal for him.

It’s huge and it’s unplanned. He has to say something. She knows. She saw him; she saw the dog.

When he wakes up naked in her bed, he doesn’t have much choice.

Yeah, exactly. Better to be a shape-shifter than a pervert. [laughs]

It’s all the way toward the end of the first season when the audience finds out about him. It’s a really effective switch because we’re being led to believe that he’s the killer.

They wanted to do that. Alan sort of wanted to have that red herring. And we had that scene where I put on the gloves to go into Dawn’s apartment and then I’m acting weird on her bed in episode four. We think that Sam had a relationship with Dawn [Lynn Collins] and that was a kind of final goodbye, and that was the dog side of him coming out when he’s smelling the sheets.

The arch villain, Maryann [Michelle Forbes], was focused completely on you last season and you ended up destroying her, but nobody knows about it. You’re the unsung hero.

That’s true. The only person that knows about it is Bill [Stephen Moyer]. That’s a bummer for Sam. I never really thought about that.

That happens to your character a lot, where he puts his all into something and it goes unappreciated. He puts all of his emotional effort first into Sookie [Anna Paquin], then into Tara [Rutina Wesley], and then into Daphne [Ashley Jones], and he’s brushed aside each time. And Daphne was the worst because she was planning to have him killed.

I know. Yeah, Daphne was a tough one because she was also a fellow shape-shifter and she was kind of wise. She was a sage person. Her motivation was to manipulate me, but what she had to say was actually pretty helpful to Sam — and certainly was part and parcel to what is driving him this season to go find his parents. [Daphne told him,] “It’s okay to be who you are. You’re not a bad person. Shape-shifters are not bad.” All of that is part of what drove him to see where he’s from.

He’s always been trying to find someone who can understand him and someone he can open up to, and that’s what he’s doing here, too.

Yes. I don’t think Sam’s intentions when he goes to meet the family are, “I want to start a relationship with them,” necessarily. And certainly not when he finds out who they are. It’s sort of like going to see yourself. You’re going to see who your biological parents are and find out more about who you are. And it’s also just curiosity. He’s sort of tamped it down his whole life, and it’s time. And now it’s this Pandora’s box that I open and I can’t put it back.

Was it funny to do that scene with Sam’s dad in his saggy underwear?

Oh, my Gosh! Cooper Huckabee is great! He’s the sweetest guy. He’s a real Southerner. He was in Urban Cowboy; he’s the real thing, man. Yeah, that wardrobe is pretty offensive. [laughs]

I like that however much Sam’s brother, Tommy [Marshall Allman], says he can’t stand his parents, there’s that scene where he’s watching TV with his dad and you can see there’s a real closeness between them.

I know. That is kind of nice, isn’t it? That’s the thing; families that still live together or all live in the same town sometimes complain a lot and get in fights more than families that are apart, but ultimately there’s a real closeness that they have that they may not appreciate, but is there. Sometimes, maybe, it’s taken for granted.

Do you watch the show when it airs?

I usually just watch it at home or I’ll TiVo it. Sometimes I’ll have people over; I did that last year a little bit. I had people over and had dinner and watched it — but I like to watch it alone first because then you know what to expect when other people see it. It’s like watching a private moment, really, and you want to see what you did in that private moment. It’s kind of weird. There are things that you’re embarrassed about sometimes.

Do you second-guess yourself when you watch your own work?

Oh God, yeah. It starts the second the scene is over. You’re walking to your car and you go, “Oh, there was that way I could have played it, too!” And you watch it and you go, “Oh, I should have done that, I should have done this.” Every once in a while you’re pleasantly surprised and something you thought was awful was actually not as bad as you thought it was going to be. [laughs] I’ve definitely had those moments. And then there are, of course, the other moments when you’re like, “I nailed that scene.” And then you watch it and you’re like, “Oh, no I did not.”

Do you have an example of something you didn’t think went well and then saw that it was really good?

You know what? They would be the tiniest moments that an average viewer would be like, “Why are you even thinking about that moment?” Like how I put some glasses down or something. The tiniest little details you can end up obsessing over or thinking about later on.

How old were you when you left Louisiana?

I was in fourth grade when I went to West Virginia. I was actually all over the place. I was in Texas for a year, in North Dakota for a couple years, and back to Louisiana, so I was moving around a little bit. My blood, my extended family, is all Louisiana but I would say that I grew up in West Virginia. I went to high school and junior high school there.

Did you do theater in school?

No. I was very into sports but I always figured that I’d be some kind of scientist.

What kind of science did you study?

For a while I thought I was going to be a physicist. I was very into big ideas, cosmology, and then big ideas about the very small, like particle physics. So I was thinking of theoretical physics, but then I realized that it’s literally all math. The ideas in “Scientific American” are great but the practice of it is just doing math. I was in advanced calculus and all that stuff but it got to a point where my brain couldn’t even wrap itself around it. You either enjoy it or you don’t, and it becomes more and more work, like anything does. Acting is a hell of a lot of work but I actually enjoy doing it and I enjoy the business of it, so I continue to do that. But physics? No. It didn’t work.

So the concepts were fascinating but what went into figuring them out was a different story?

Exactly. Reading about superstring theory and about all those attempts to unify the forces of nature — it’s good stuff. Time, too. It’s freaky! Science is like science fiction sometimes, like Einstein’s theory of relativity. People still  don’t get it. People still don’t really understand that time isn’t constant, because it sounds like fiction. It’s a freak show. [That said,] it was freshman year of college and we were doing abstract geometry, and I realized I was not going to be majoring in physics. [laughs] I remember the final. We had three hours to do it and there were three questions. It was like, “Find the center of gravity of an egg yolk on a turntable that’s at 68 degrees...” I was like, “I don’t care! Let somebody else do [those calculations], write a nice article about the ideas, and I’ll read it.”

When did you move into drama?

I did a play in my senior year. This [actor I knew] said, “You should audition for a play.” I had a lot of friends who were actors at school but it was sort of an intimidating little scene, and I would never have dared get into that. But it seemed pretty cool. It was like really taking “playing house” seriously [laughs] — which is basically what it is. And so I auditioned. [At Brown] they have this New Plays Festival. They had around nine new plays written by graduate students and they needed a bunch of actors. So I went and read for one and got cast in it. It was a success and I immediately fell in love with the whole process. I remember having my lines over Christmas break and just being so excited to learn them and think about how I would do it. So I did that one and I did one or two other plays, and I was like, “Now I’m not going to go to graduate school. I’m going to move to New York.”

What kind of graduate school were you considering?

I ended up being a semiotics major. What I did was a lot of contemporary French philosophy. There was this guy, Jacques Derrida, who was huge. He died recently, but he was very big in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I went to Paris in my senior year and I studied with him. I took a course with Julia Kristeva; I took a course with Luce Irigaray. She was one of [Jacques] Lacan’s students. Lacan was from the Freudian school. Everything I was studying in semiotics was happening in Paris; it was the hotbed. It was very exciting. It was kind of like taking an acting class with Al Pacino because I was taking classes with the people who were writing these books I was reading. So I went there and did that for a year and got totally burned out. And then this acting thing happened and it was very apparent to me that that’s what I wanted to do, which was nice. I was going to move to New York and pursue this.

Did you know anyone in New York?

There was a girl who I had been in Brown Summer Theater with and I knew that she was there, but I didn’t tell her I was coming. I wanted to arrive unannounced. I drove a friend’s car to Vermont and they bought me a bus ticket from Vermont to New York. So I showed up on a bus with a suitcase with nobody knowing I was there. For some reason that felt very romantic to me. I walked around the city with my bag for a while and then I was like, “I hope she’s there!” I called and she was, so I stayed at her place that night. I found a place within a couple days. A seedy little apartment in the East Village. Really seedy with a random roommate from [the classifieds in] “The Village Voice.” Then I just started hitting the pavement. I walked into a couple of casting places and [then to] an agency with a picture and resume and a couple of monologues memorized. So I went and read for them a couple times and they started freelancing me and that’s how it kind of started. I think the first part I got was a play in Winnipeg with Len Cariou. Len Cariou won a Tony Award for “Sweeney Todd.” He’s a big stage actor and he’s been in a ton of movies; he was on “Damages” this year. I ended up doing a lot of regional theater and that was the first one. It was called “Another Time.”

Did you find yourself getting bigger and bigger roles in larger venues?

In theater in New York you really have to pay your dues. You can do anything off-off- Broadway, but actually doing legitimate off-Broadway with an off-Broadway contract or legitimate Broadway, you have to pay your dues. I auditioned for so many plays and it took a while for the casting directors to get to know me, and finally I worked my way in. I did this Patrick Marber play called “Dealer’s Choice” and that was the first off-Broadway play I did. Then I did a Broadway play [Eugene O'Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!”] and got a Tony nomination. And at the same time I was doing some independent movies. They were low budget but they were leading roles, which was a good way to get experience.

The Tony nomination must have been exciting.

It was really awesome. It was at Lincoln Center and it was just an honor to work there. I had auditioned for them so many times and hadn’t gotten anything. It was really exciting — and scary as hell. I remember the first performance. It’s in a three-quarter at the Vivian Beaumont stage, filled with New Yorkers. Filled with savvy, savvy people.

Do you get stage fright?

I don’t think it’s any more than anyone else, but for sure. I hadn’t done a play in a long time and I did one a few years ago [“Rope,” 2005-2006], and I’d forgotten how scary it is the first time you go out in front of an audience. You’re like, “Do I really know all these lines?” [laughs]

You were the first one to discuss werewolves back in season one of “True Blood” and now, here they are. What’s the difference between a shape-shifter and a werewolf?

Oh, that’s easy. Werewolves are physiologically inferior to shape-shifters. That’s our point of view. Werewolves can just turn into wolves. That’s what they do and they don’t have a lot of control over it. Shape-shifters are much more advanced in the Darwinian universe. We can turn into anything and we kind of look down on them a bit. We see them as dirty, unsophisticated creatures — and we actually get all of that from Charlaine Harris and the books. That’s the deal!

I’ve heard that the scene where you’re running through the field was shot at a location that was very special to you.

It was on old, old family land and really close to where a lot of my relatives were buried, in a nowhere place in Louisiana.

When did you first find out you’d be shooting there?

I looked on the call sheet when I got to Shreveport and it said we’re going to Doyline. I was like, “What?” Because when I lived in Alexandria, Louisiana, we used to go there to see my dad’s aunt and uncle to have Sunday dinner there, or lunch — we call it “dinner” in the South. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “We’re shooting there?” And they said, “Yeah! The gas station is in Doyline,” which is where Jason — Ryan [Kwanten] — was shooting. “And then we’re going to shoot on Lake Bistineau, that’s just south.” I was like, “Oh, my God!” So I called my dad and told him and he couldn’t believe it. He said, “Lake Bistineau. My grandfather used to own Lake Bistineau.” It was around the turn of the century and he sold it to the state as a state park. But we literally drove through Doyline to get there. And there I was, right there. You could see the cemetery where my grandmother and everybody are buried as we drove through. So that was just a trip! A total trip. When we finished the episode I drove south and saw my family in Alexandria for a couple days, and when I went home I drove back through Doyline and I went to the cemetery and looked at all the graves — and said, “Please forgive me for running naked on our old land.” [laughs]

What a bizarre scenario.

It was very wild — because it’s family and it’s land, and family buried in land, and nudity. There were just a lot of carnal things going on.

With your roots in Louisiana, do you have any thoughts on the oil spill in the Gulf?

My cousin has a Ph.D. in forensic hydraulics and he’s wondering why they don’t just try to corral the oil. It’s leaking and they can’t stop it, so at least try to get it to where it’s just coming up in one spot so that they can then collect it. I have family down there and they all seem to think that the Obama administration is not listening to suggestions and I’m kind of wondering if it’s a liability issue, not wanting to do anything because if you do, then BP can say, “Hey, you took over this little bit, so now we’re not totally liable. Now you’re also liable.” Ultimately this is BP’s fault; it’s not the President’s fault, but I just know that everybody’s scared and they’ve got some pretty big problems. The other big issue is the wetlands. We’re losing a football field every 38 minutes and that’s because the Mississippi doesn’t flood like it used to. It used to flood and bring sediment to the wetlands, and because of all the levies that have been put up for settlement of towns in New Orleans, that doesn’t happen anymore. So we’re already losing the wetlands and we really need to start flooding the Atchafalaya River and the Mississippi River to get sediment in. The thing with the oil is that it’s going in and killing the grasses that hold the sediment together. There are so many issues down there and it’s really complex. If one good thing can come out of this oil spill, maybe it’s that a discussion will start about how we can get sediment to the wetlands again and replenish them, because we’re losing them. The wetlands are a breeding ground for all kinds of animals, and it’s an important place.

Are you still making music these days?

Yes, I’ve been playing a lot of guitar recently, a lot of slide guitar. A lot of old [Big] Jack Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt — very old fingerpicking blues stuff. That’s what I like to play. I never listened to that music growing up but for some reason when I pick up a guitar, I like the physicality of it and this kind of percussive element of guitars, so I like being able to touch it with my fingers.

And you play piano as well?

I do, yes. I was studying classical and practicing every day. I still play, but my music energy is now on the guitar.

Do you perform anywhere?

No, not anymore. The first band I was in was when I was like 13. A rock cover band. I was in bands all the way from 13 probably through college, and then once I started acting I wasn’t in bands anymore.

Sam Merlotte is a guy who keeps rising up and getting knocked down. What do you think motivates him to go back to work each day and serve everyone their beer and cheeseburgers?

I think Sam’s life in Bon Temps — as awful as it seems sometimes [laughs] — is a cakewalk compared to what he went through before he got there. A lot of that stuff is terrible, like his bad luck with women and with Maryann; it’s all tough. But I think relative to what he experienced growing up on the streets, it’s not so bad. I mean, it’s been a bad month and a half, you know? Seasons one, two, and three. [laughs] But other than that bad month and a half, I think he’s rebuilt his life in Bon Temps, and it’s a real oasis for him. It’s something he has to have. And I think he has to keep this place alive and keep it livable for himself. I think he would fight really hard for that town because this is a place where he can reinvent himself, which is what he’s trying to do there. So to answer your question, he’s been through worse, believe it or not. He has bigger fish to fry than being bummed out about Sookie not liking him, or Tara.

Or getting almost sacrificed by an evil maenad.

Yeah, getting sacrificed is a pretty big fish in that pan. [laughs] It’s hard to say, “Yeah, I got stabbed in the heart today. No big deal. I got bigger fish to fry.” That’s a pretty big one.

Do you find parallels in your own life in terms of getting knocked down and getting back up?

Oh, sure. Just the acting profession in general. It’s like you’re in trench warfare. I’ve been told “no” so many times. You have to be pretty resilient to do this.

What do you love about it?

I love the inconsistency of it. I mean, I love the consistency of being on a hit TV show — and I think all of us would do this show for as long as we can do it — but I like traveling. And what I really love about it is the fact that you’re always learning and you’re always trying to get better. I’m trying to get better in every single scene I do. You’re never there and I think that’s great. It’s really thrilling to do it. It’s fun playing pretend and being serious about it. I don’t know how else to say that, but it’s just fun doing it. And it’s scary. Like doing plays in front of a bunch of people, doing your first movie, or doing material you’re not comfortable with. There’s a part of overcoming fear that’s thrilling. ▼

“True Blood” airs on HBO. Catch up on previous episodes on HBO on Demand.