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'True Blood's' Lindsay Pulsipher: Ryan Kwanten 'is an extremely spontaneous actor'
Thus far, we've seen small peeks of Lindsay Pulsipher this season on "True Blood," but in many ways they were a good indication of the mystery that will surround her character, Crystal Norris.Crystal has led a sheltered life as part of a cult, but they're not growing their own food or preparing themselves for Armageddon (or at least we don't know if they are, yet), they're cooking meth.
"That's pretty much all she has ever known," Pulsipher tells Zap2it. "She was home-schooled and she has never really left the compound. I was actually misquoted as saying it was a Christian compound, which it is not. It's not a religious kind of thing. It just some red necks who live out in the woods cooking meth."
Raised in Salt Lake City, Pulsipher's mother, a theater actress, encouraged her to follow her love of acting. After moving to Los Angeles, she landed several guest roles on television before landing A&E's "The Beast" with the late, great Patrick Swayze. That role gave her the first glimpse of the fandom she'll experience as part of "True Blood's" cast.
"I have to say that that was really eye-opening for me," she says. "When we had to go out for cast dinners or a party or when you are out shooting, there was so much attention around [Swayze]. People were so enamored. How can you not? He was such a lovable person and he had a huge fan base. So, I definitely witnessed that firsthand being around him and seeing the love and dedication that his fans have. I had never really seen anything like that before."
On "True Blood," we expect her to find some of the same fanaticism, especially since she'll be involved in a turbulent romance with one of its most popular cast members, Ryan Kwanten, who plays Jason Stackhouse.
"She brings some complications for Jason's character for sure," Pulsipher explains. "I feel like for the first time maybe he sees something in Crystal that he hasn't had in the other girls that he has been with. He's kind of swept off his feet a little bit and he might think. 'Oh, She could possibly be the one.'"
But, while Pulsipher's character is inevitably going to shake things up for Jason, the man behind the part didn't make it easy for her either.
"[Ryan is] an extremely giving actor and even in the audition he was right there and very available and present," she says. "Since I have worked with him on the show, I have realized that he is an extremely spontaneous actor and he'll throw in a little ad-lib. That totally works for the scene and he was doing that in the audition, you know, he was kind of ad-libbing and improving a little bit, keeping me on my toes. And it works, because I think that I was able to play off that. And it worked because I got the part."
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I hate what Alan Ball has done to "True Blood", a series of novels about a working class southern girl with a solid ethical scale struggling to stay afloat in a seething stew of increasingly weird supernatural moralities.
Now Sookie barely matters; the show is a constant parade of leeringly male vampires making leeringly menacing eyes at each other, and Sookie is just a sideshow of fixated female hysteria, when she even shows up. This *isn't* Anne Rice's hothouse metaphor for gayness; it's a whole different matter, and I wish Sookie hadn't been sidelined for a lot of heaving pectorals and lowering looks from the boy-vampires who now hog all the screen time.
Where is Sookie's witch-guardian angel? Where are her friends, her social life, her concerns about what's going on around her (not just boring old Bill)?
As a fan of the book-series, I have become deeply disappointed by this series.
Hey, ELW! Everybody has their own opinions but so the heck what? The show is awesome and it's keeping me from being impatient about when the new fall line-up will start. If you're SOOO disappointed in the show, why are you talking about it?
This is a problem for a lot of book fans. The show is NOT Harris' book series, it's called TrueBlood, not the Sookie Stackhouse series. The show is BASED on the series of books, and AB has said repeatedly that he would not follow plot lines or character development in all cases, that he would follow the themes of the books (eg. vampires and other supernaturals colliding with humans,the problems and challenges that entails.)
ELW, you make an excellent point. Being a fan of heaving pectorals, I've been enjoying the show, but you're right - by stripping Sookie of her depth, her quirks, her treks to WalMart and her friendships, the show wastes the chance it had to explore a great character. Have you notice how rarely she's actually waitressed on the show? They still play up that identity, which she wears proudly, yet they don't let her live it. The books had their flaws, but I enjoyed them, and until I read your comment I didn't realize why: the part I liked best was watching Sookie retain her sense of self in a very weird world.
Keith, I'm glad you're enjoying the show. ELW is pointing out something that happens a lot on TV, which can make it hard for a lot of women to get the enjoyment you're experiencing. The treatment of women as nonpeople without inner lives beyond their men is unfortunately systematic at the best of times (google "Bechdel Test"), but especially when that happens to a previously-complex character.
Now back to your regularly scheduled heaving pectorals and sultry gazes. *Ahem.*