'True Blood's' Stephen Moyer on Bill, Eric's sexual tension

Stephen Moyer, who plays vampire Bill Compton on HBO’s “True Blood,” says he’ll occasionally bite his fans, but only when they ask him to.

“If the person looks clean and wholesome, I might oblige,” Moyer told The Advocate.

In the interview, which appears in the magazine’s August issue, the actor talks about “True Blood’s” dedicated LGBT fan base and the sexual tension between his character and Eric, played by Alexander Skarsgård.

When asked if Bill and Eric would ever be intimate, Moyer said, “Alex and I would absolutely embrace that. Last year, when Sookie had her fantasy about the two of them with her, we even suggested it.”

Of course, as we reported in 2010, Skarsgård declines to cover his goods with a modesty sock while filming the series, now in its fifth season. But Moyer, who opts to don the sock, says he doesn’t mind.

“We all know each other really well, and it’s not that I care about what the actors think, but I don’t think the crew necessarily needs to see my bits,” he said.

One costar Moyer knows extremely well is wife Anna Paquin, who plays Sookie on the vampire drama. The pair are currently expecting twins, according to US Weekly.

As to whether or not “True Blood’s” broad sexuality alienates some viewers, Moyer says, “We live in a very different world than we grew up in, so if people can’t embrace that aspect of our show, then that’s a shame.”

Image : CNN

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Rolling Stones celebrate 50 years of raucous rock'n'roll

At the beginning of 1962, Britain barely figured as an influence on the rest of the world of popular music. By the end of the year the fuse was lit for an unprecedented explosion of creativity that would turn the entire music business upside down. At this stage, "pop music" - especially "pop music" in the shape of rock'n'roll - was still regarded as a second-rate and largely disposable noise, even within the entertainment industry itself. That year, a bunch of spotty blues, and rhythm & blues fans from Liverpool and London would set in motion a process of change that transformed this perception dramatically and swiftly. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones would create a new, artistic language uniquely suited to reflect the concerns, hopes, and fears of their generation.

Rolling Stones gather to plot 50th anniversary bash

In October 1961, nineteen-year-old father of three, Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones (born 28 February 1942), and a fellow blues enthusiast, Dick Hattrell, attended a concert by Chris Barber's Jazz Band in their sleepy, conservative hometown, Cheltenham. During the interval, one of the members of Barber's band - the guitarist Alexis Korner - gave his own blues performance. Such was the purist attitude amongst the small community of blues cognoscenti in Britain, that Korner and his previous outfit had been sacked from their regular gig at the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club when they dared to introduce electric amplification. According to Barber, ever the supporter of fresh ideas (Bill Wyman calls him "virtually a founding father" of the British rock scene), Korner was the only British blues player who was amplifying his guitar at the time. Brian Jones was blown away by what he saw. Already known around town as a bit of a lad and a talented guitarist, he had no trouble being admitted backstage to speak to Korner and exchange telephone numbers. Two months later, Brian descended on the Korners in London, staying several days and spending most of his time perusing the older man's record collection. Discovering, amongst others, Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson, he purchased an electric guitar as soon as he was back in Cheltenham and began to practise with an obsession matched only by his pursuit of female companionship. Indeed, the influence he would later exert over the nascent Rolling Stones might not just have been in terms of music, but also in terms of attitude and lifestyle.

Brian Jones's father, Lewis, was an aeronautical engineer and his mother, Louisa, a piano teacher. He grew up in the quiet environment of a comfortably well-off family, whose attitudes had been shaped by memories of the War itself and the uncertainty of the post-War austerity years. He was clever, sporty and popular in school. Aged fifteen, he joined a skiffle band, playing washboard. He liked trad jazz -- aka Dixieland, the dominant style of dance music in Britain at the time -- until he discovered the saxophonist Charlie Parker. And then, Brian Jones went off the rails in spectacular fashion. Discipline became an anathema to him. Refusing to go to university, he was sacked from a long series of jobs, usually for helping himself to the contents of the till. Friends and acquaintances despaired of him, so wantonly did he abuse their generosity. He even featured in the national press as an example for the wayward and amoral ways of modern youth, when one of his underage lovers became pregnant. If Brian Jones cared, he certainly didn't show it, and he most definitely didn't change his ways. According to perspective he was a damned nuisance, a peril to society, or a charming, modern-day libertine.

Gallery: Stones in pictures

On the morning of 17 October 1961, eighteen-year-old Mick Jagger (born 26 July 1943) was waiting on the platform of Dartford railway station for the train to take him the 16 miles into central London, where he was a mediocre student at the highly respected London School of Economics. He was clutching a Chuck Berry album, Rockin' at the Hops, and The Best of Muddy Waters under his arm. Shortly afterwards, seventeen- year-old Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) arrived on the same platform on his way to Sidcup Art College. The two young men recognised each other from primary school. Studying the records on the train, Richards became even more envious of Jagger when he heard that he had actually seen Buddy Holly live in concert.

Time: Celebrating 50 years since they "start it up"

Two years earlier, Keith had received his first guitar as a gift from his mother. He was the only child of Bert, a factory worker, and Doris, whose mother had been the mayor of the Municipal Borough of Walthamstow (which is now part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest). Keith was a loner who was often bullied and the older he got, the more difficult he found it to accept the teachers' authoritarian rule. Music ran on his mother's side of the family; his grandfather had toured Britain with a big band, Gus Dupree and his Boys. Bert, on the other hand, was not keen on his son's growing interest in the guitar, especially after he was expelled from school for a variety of misdemeanors. As in school, two different worlds came up against each other in the family. "My parents were brought up in the Depression, when if you got something, you just kept it and you held it and that was it." Richards wrote in his autobiography. "Bert was the most unambitious man in the world. Meanwhile, I was a kid and I didn't even know what ambition meant. I just felt the constraints. The society and everything I was growing up in was just too small for me." By the time Richards arrived at art college -- it was the inspired idea of an art teacher to send him there -- he was deeply engrossed in music. Having started with Little Richard and Elvis, he had moved on via Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Marty Wilde and the like, to Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Lightnin' Hopkins. British art colleges, then as now, have always been a fertile breeding ground for musical ideas. It was the one side of his education Keith relished.

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Morgan Freeman: Obama, Mandela, Batman and me

If you enjoy hearing, as I do, a spirited denunciation of stubborn Republican resistance to Barack Obama over the past three years, then you could do a whole lot worse than have it declaimed to you by Morgan Freeman in his warm and ever authoritative baritone.

"At the outset of Obama's administration, the political right [meaning Senator Mitch McConnell] literally said, out loud: 'The No1 project of this party is to make sure that this guy – this guy – only serves one term.' How do you make sure of that? You don't allow him to do anything good or worthwhile. Every chance you get, block him, and that's what they've done. Which now allows them to say: 'He's failed, he can't get anything done.' If he loses, it simply proves what you always feared, that democracy can be bought, and that the country is owned by the rich. And if everything gets bought, how do we ever get the country back?"

For all the subdued anger in his voice, Freeman is, as expected, a cool and emollient presence as around him the press junket for The Dark Knight Rises noisily unfolds. The last time we met, he stood up and I got a sore neck waiting for him to reach his full height. Now, quite still, with long slender arms on the chair arms, back straight and knees bent, he creates an impression of serpentine undulation, like a slinky-toy spooling itself down steps.

So, the election of an African-American president has not cast us into a sunlit utopian "post-racial" society? "No, not at all, instead the whole thing uncovered" he pauses in sorrow or anger, "plenty of maggots still squirming around there under the stone."

We're here to talk about the concluding panel of Christopher Nolan's Batman triptych, which he resisted directing for a while, having failed to answer for himself the pertinent and sobering question: how many movie trilogies have a triumphant part three? Once all doubts had been cast off and filming began, though, Nolan threw himself into the project, a calm head at the centre of the whirlwind, like Napoleon leading his grande armée film crew across the globe. Not that he's Napoleonic, says Freeman.

"If you walked on the set and I said go talk to the director, you'd have a hard time picking him out. And even then, you might look straight past him. He's quiet, but it's a quiet authority, and he enjoys doing it."

It was always going to be a problem topping Heath Ledger's vivid and unsettling performance as the Joker in the second film. Here, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne, reclusive, inactive for eight years, weakened and chastened, comes out of his obscurity to tackle Bane (Tom Hardy), a giant who wears an immovable mask that pumps perpetual doses of anaesthetic into his bulked-up body. Where Ledger was chaos embodied, Bane is unstoppable brute strength. As Freeman has it: "Bane is to Gotham what bats were to Batman, a fear the city has to overcome."

What impact did the death of Ledger after The Dark Knight have? "Well, it's a downer when anything happens to an actor in mid-production. In fact, he didn't die during production, his part was wrapped up, but the movie itself wasn't out yet. People connected the character to his death because the character was so ... evil – people imagine that the role leaks into the man or something. And I don't think that was the case at all."

Like its two predecessors, The Dark Knight Rises contains political echoes of the zeitgeist. The League of Shadows had an al-Qaida-ish lust to destroy what they saw as an incorrigibly corrupt Gotham, while The Dark Knight's Joker embodied chaos, which Freeman calls "a quality I associate with the right". For the villain in The Dark Knight Rises to share a name, during this election, with Mitt Romney's increasingly infamous investment group – Bain Capital – seems almost too good to be true, especially since Bane also makes ever more demagogic appeals to a Gotham populace polarised along Tea Party/Occupy-movement lines, even as he is readying the immolation of their city.

I couldn't quite make the timeline work on this, though: surely shooting had wrapped before Occupy took off? Freeman clarifies: "Someone asked Christopher that question yesterday, and he said he didn't intentionally think of anything political in the development of the story. So I think the politics here, if there are any, is like art or beauty, it's largely in the eye of the beholder."

In the midst of all this stand Bruce Wayne's father-surrogates, Michael Caine's avuncular Alfred and Freeman's Lucius Fox, CEO of Wayne Enterprises and personal armourer to the Batman, ever eager to show off his new toys, which this time include "the Bat", a tooled-up helipod that, yes, comes in black. When I remind Freeman that Nolan has expressed interest in doing a Bond movie, he chuckles long and hard, imagining what franchise-invigorating mayhem the director might wreak on Bond. "Funny thing is, with Lucius Fox, Chris is already halfway there – after all, Lucius is Batman's 'Q'."

Father-surrogate to Batman or not, Freeman's career, at the age of 75, is inevitably taking on certain crepuscular, autumnal hues. Recently he featured in the Geritol Generation dream-cast of oldsters in RED ("Retired"), and The Bucket List, his "dream-come-true to work with Jack" [Nicholson], a comedy about facing impending death with dignity, a large scotch and a parachute. His next movie, Last Vegas, features Freeman and fellow pensioners Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Michael Douglas on an old farts' bachelor weekend in Sin City. "Guess which one's the Lothario skirt-chaser?" he asks, and we enjoy a dirty laugh at Douglas's expense.

Many of his co-stars of the same age are walking off into the sunset, including Gene Hackman, Freeman's tormentor from Unforgiven. "Gene and I share the same agent, and he is fully retired. He's like, nah, I wanna stay home and write my novels and paint." And although Unforgiven director Clint Eastwood has also largely retired from acting, Freeman says: "He will keep directing literally until he drops dead. Working for him was three of my happiest times in the movies. He's the same way John Huston was: 'The art of directing lies mainly in casting; once you cast somebody, get out of the way.' I love that. And Huston kept directing right till the last moment, too."

So what keeps Freeman going, now that he's worth an estimated $70m (£45m) and should by rights be sailing his 40ft ketch in the Caribbean, instead of slogging it out with the media?

"What keeps anyone going? I have work. I have things to do. I prefer working to idleness. And I like my job. I'm lucky, I'm not working because I have to; I'm working because I love to."

He especially loved playing Nelson Mandela in Eastwood's Invictus. He has known Mandela for years. "It's funny how we met – he kind of summoned me. When he published Long Walk to Freedom, he was asked: who would you want to play you in the movie? And he said: 'Morgan Freeman.' Which was pretty nice of him, I thought. So I met him at his house in Jo'burg. I said: 'If we do this, I'm going to need to have access to you, to be close enough to hold your hand.' So every time we were in any kind of proximity or I had a shot at being around him for a while, we sat down together." What's he like? "From a distance, he has an aura, that legendary quality. Up close, the reassuring thing is, he's just a guy."

And South Africa? "First time I was terrified, in 1992, I think. Mandela was out of jail, but he wasn't president yet. The Zulus and the Nationals were combining because they knew that the ANC had the numbers behind them. So riots were sprouting up all over the place. We were there to make a movie called Bopha [Freeman's directorial debut, starring Danny Glover, 1992]. It was about a black policeman, a guy his own community basically ostracises as an agent of apartheid, when he's really just trying to keep chaos at bay. We asked permission to film in Soweto, we had two riots to shoot, and we just figured, well, we'll just start a riot today," and he bursts out laughing at the suicidal idiocy of the idea. "We did it elsewhere in the end."

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Whitney Houston Drowned After Cocaine Use

Whitney Houston's death was caused by accidental drowning, but drug abuse and heart disease were also factors, a coroner has ruled.

Coroner's spokesman Craig Harvey said drug tests indicated the 48-year-old US singer was a chronic cocaine user.

The announcement ends weeks of speculation over the cause of Houston's death.

She was found submerged in the bath of her Los Angeles hotel room on the eve of the Grammy Awards on 11 February.

In a statement, the LA County Coroner's office described Houston's manner of death as an "accident", adding that "no trauma or foul play is suspected".

The cause was cited as drowning and "effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use".

Other drugs found in her blood included marijuana, as well as an anti-anxiety drug, a muscle relaxant and an allergy medication.

But these were not factors in her death, the coroner's statement said.

Patricia Houston, the singer's sister-in-law and manager, told the Associated Press news agency: "We are saddened to learn of the toxicology results, although we are glad to now have closure."

The pop star was laid to rest at a cemetery in her home state of New Jersey after a funeral that was attended by celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Mary J Blige.

The singer, who was one of the world's best selling artists from the mid-1980s to late 1990s, had a long battle with drug addiction.

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