'True Blood' Season Four: More Sex and Gore
HBO vampire drama returns Sunday with Sookie, Bill, Eric love triangle.
June 24, 2011— -- Sookie, Bill and Eric are back for season four of "True Blood."
Only this season, Eric and Sookie's relationship gets hotter after she and Bill call it quits, although offscreen, actors Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin, who play Bill and Sookie, are happily married.
Confused yet?
If the love triangle in HBO's sexy southern vampire drama isn't enough to keep your head spinning, then the werewolves, fairies, witches and -- oh, yeah -- humans in this fictional Louisiana town should.
Creator Alan Ball, the genius behind "Six Feet Under," was reluctant to reveal too much about Sunday's season opener during the Hollywood premiere earlier this week. "Let's just say somebody's life is turned completely upside down and somebody else's is very, very different," he told E!
XfinityTV.com's West Coast editor Craig Tomashoff, who has seen the premiere, promises fans they won't be disappointed. "It will definitely be the thing people are talking about," Tomashoff told ABCNews.com. "It will be the buzzed-about show of the summer."
To build the buzz for season four, HBO put the first eight minutes of the first episode on its website.
"It's breathtaking," Tomashoff said. "You're expecting twilight sumer romance and instead you get summer blockbuster. If ever there was an opening to a season that grabs an audience, this is the one."
Without giving too much away, Tomashoff said, "There's a big twist in the storyline that literally changes every story."
"There's a new tone to it," star Stephen Moyer told E! "Some things have changed. You find that out very quickly at the beginning of the series."
As for his character, Moyer said, "Bill is trying to clear up the mess that Russell Edgington made in season three," referring to the Mississippi vampire king who put humans on edge when he slaughtered a newscaster on live television -- definitely one of the most surprising scenes on screen last year.
"He's trying to put the vampires back in front of the humans and convince them that the vampires aren't going to eat them," Moyer said.
Then, of course, there's the matter of Bill and Sookie, who split at the end of last season. "He has to kind of eat that and be prepared to sit back and let her do whatever it is she needs to do," Moyer said.
And what that is turns out to be a lot of sex with Bill's rival, Swedish vampire Eric Northman, played by heartthrob Alexander Skarsgard.
Most newly married men -- Moyer and Paquin were hitched last August -- might have difficulty with their wife hooking up with another man, but not Moyer.
"When it gets really dull, you get a third person in like Alex, and it just sort of spices it up a bit," Moyer told E!
"Obviously, we tried that stuff at home just to work out how it was going to be on set," he said.
Moyer may be joking, but Paquin was open last year about her sexuality, revealing she was bisexual. In a PSA featuring stars speaking out about equality, she said, "I'm Anna Paquin. I'm bisexual, and I give a damn."
Paquin fell in love with her co-star on the set of "True Blood," and Ball recently described his initial reaction.
"I had heard through the grapevine that they had gotten closer on a location shoot in Shreveport," he said, "and I have to be honest, my first reaction was, 'Oh no.' But it has never been an issue. The only thing it has brought to the show is a real romantic chemistry, and that's been great for the show."
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