By Shaun Daily and Kenn Gold

Chris Bauer plays Detective Andy Bellefleur on HBO’s hit vampire series, True Blood.  Bauer played his role well in first season as the antagonist to Jason Stackhouse (Ryan Kwanten), and received an appropriate of hate mail from Ryan’s fans.  In season two, his role has expanded considerably as Andy is undergoing a bout with drinking, and is getting more involved with the strange goings on surrounding Maryann (Michelle Forbes).

Bauer is a veteran character actor with notable roles in The Wire, The Lost Room, Thrid Watch, Tilt, Smith and other shows.  He also has had numerous guest appearances on TV shows such as Lost on Mars, Fringe, Numb3rs, New Amsterdam, The Black Donnellys and many others.

Bauer recently came on to TV Talk to discuss his role on True Blood, and the amazing levels of success that the show is reaching as it’s viewership continues to grow.

Shaun> Hi Chris, how are you?

Chris> I’m great, how are you doing? 

Shaun>  I’m great.  You’re on with me, and Kenn Gold, the editor of MediaBlvd Magazine. We were just talking about some of our favorite shows that you’ve been on.  I love you, you’re terrific.  I’m glad you’re on True Blood, and I hope they don’t kill you off. 

Chris> Oh my God.  You know, when I got that job, I met the writer of the books.  My first question to her was, “Am I dead?”  I’ve been killed in a lot of shows. 

Shaun> Yes, you have.  The Wire comes to mind.

Chris> Oh, I know.  The Wire, to me, epitomizes the whole thing.  I’m not sure that character would have resonated as much as it does if I had lived.  I kind of had to die for that thing to have any power.

Shaun> I guess The Wire did pretty well with the viewers, but not to the extent of True Blood.  Were you surprised when this show took off like a rocket?  It’s been building every week, and last week was the most watched episode ever of the show.  It’s amazing.

Chris> It is amazing.  It’s incredibly refreshing, because that is where you want it to go.  But God knows, I’ve done a lot of shows that I thought were going to be it.  Smith was a classic example.  That thing was supposed to a big deal, but they shut it down after three.  But True Blood is exploding exactly the way we hoped it would.

Shaun> You do a fantastic job as Andy.  I like it when Sookie reads your mind.  But I wonder though, did you get any hate mail the first season when you were going after Jason Stackhouse?  I imagine the girls and his fans were probably on you to stop picking on him.

Chris> Literally.  They were convinced that Andy was the meanest guy ever, and it hurt my feelings, because they were right in a way.  But I never see a character that way.  In the second season, the writers gave me a lot more to do.  The things that Andy ends up involved in are the kind of things where you learn a lot more about him.  He is not so one dimensional.  I’m really grateful for that.  But last year I was pretty much a hard noised dude who was obsessed for revenge on this guy who weighed half my body weight, and had twice my hair.

Shaun> But you both had the same six pack, right?

Chris> Somewhere in there.  Somewhere in there, there is one.  But it was fun.  One of the fun things about True Blood is how they’ve got this sort of cliff-hanger dynamic from episode to episode.  You are never really sure what is going to happen.  They keep us pretty tight lipped, but I think I can say, eventually I get to experience a different sort of relationship with the Jason Stackhouse character.  It’s really fun.

Shaun> Of course last week we say you dancing with Maryanne, and that whole thing at her house with the pig.  How did they explain that to you?  The pig is in a nice dog house, and you turn around and the pig is going to be gone.  Did that scene make sense to you when you were shooting it?

Chris> Well, there are a couple of things they have in their favor.  Number one, they tend to write really deliberately, really explicitly.  So if you trust them, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by not asking to many questions.  The other thing is that for me personally, the way I like to work is to encounter a scene on its own, without any real need for context and just see what happens.  What happens if I walk up to a dog house and there is a pig in there and I say, “Hi,” to it.?  I turn around and it’s gone.  I think that scene is a simple scene, but it can be played with a lot more flavor if you don’t have an agenda with it.  How cool is it to turn the page and say, “Now I’ve got a scene with a pig!”

Shaun> A couple of people in the chatroom are saying they loved you dancing with Maryanne, and are asking if that is to warm you up for Dancing With The Stars?

Chris> Can you imagine?  I would not hold back.  I would not hold back!

Shaun> It would be great promotion for the show if you went on that!

Chris> I gave up any shame and vanity a long, long time ago.  So bring it on, as far as I’m concerned.

Kenn> The book series currently has nine books, and it seems like they are doing a season per book so far.  With its popularity, I don’t think it’s going to end any time soon.  Are you prepared to be playing this character for a decade?

Chris> Absolutely not, for two reasons.  One, that would just be too good.  And that would be too fun.  If I’ve learned anything over this kind of journeyman character’s career, it’s that the real joy and the real fun is being present for what you are doing right then and there.  Try not to look too far down the road, because it’s pretty easy to be disappointed; especially when you are working on material that you adore.  On the other hand, that would be a dream.  I love this character.  For whatever reason this guy fits me like a glove.  It’s never going to be the Andy Bellefleur show, but what they do let me do continues to grow and gets a little more complicated and a little more human.  Frankly, I don’t know how much of my work you guys have seen, but it’s been a really long time since anyone has let me be funny on TV.

Kenn> Yeah, we were talking about that before you came in; just the sheer number of things that we’ve featured heavily on this show that you’ve been on.

Shaun> You were great on the Lost Room.  We really had hoped that Sci Fi would turn that into a series.  Of course, Third Watch was great.  Tilt was even good, and they cancelled that too.

Chris> I know, that’s what I’m saying! I would love to do this as long as the books are out there.  I can tell you, Alan Ball is having a great time.  I just finished early this morning for the season, and we were going about two weeks of working all night trying to get stuff done.  I’m telling you, the attitude on that set is so mellow, and so fun and real.  It’s a bunch of professional people who go to work, prepared to work, and who appreciate that they get to do some crazy stuff.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a set like that.

Shaun> The first season was all about the vampires, but it seems like this season has taken a little bit of a different direction, but is still about them with Eric and Sookie.  The thing with Maryanne is that we don’t know what she is, and Sam turns into a dog.  Hopefully they don’t have plans to turn you into any kind of animal do they?

Chris> That would be redundant I think.  I think that I’ve already been turned into something, we just don’t know what it is.  Basically, Michelle Forbe’s character, Maryanne is just such a trip.  I think as you are starting to sense, a few episodes in, all she has to do is be around a group of people and that whole environment changes.  That continues to kind of create more and more consequences for the town.  The great thing is that I got my cop’s hunch that there is something not right with it.  That’s kind of my pass through this season.  But it’s neat because it really does kind of ping-pong back and forth through Sookie and Bill and Eric; their whole vampire deal, and the people.  The regular mortal people is where a lot of the theme of the show is.  People tend to think that the theme is just the vampires, but I think just as much of it hangs on these average citizens of the town who are trying to sort everything out, how they think and feel about stuff.

Shaun> A lot of the fans really seem to love the scenes between you and the Sheriff’s character, William Sanderson’s character.  He kind of talks to you like a father.  It’s great the way the two of you have this chemistry.

Chris> Thank you.  I’m so grateful to work with that guy because he’s been around the block like ten times.  And he is a real humble, real sweet, real funny man who has really taught me a lot.  I love a lot of that stuff we get to do.  My drunkenness this year kind of challenges the respect I have for Bud, the sheriff.  There’s hell to pay for that, but he is amazing!  Bill Sanderson is one of those guys who, they put an X on the floor, he stands there and says exactly what they wrote, and it’s hilarious.  Not all of us have it that easy.

Shaun> Everything you’ve done, it must be the character, you must change the delivery of the lines.  You don’t even think about Nickel on Tilt, or Destefano on the Lost Room.  You’re just Andy.  You must tweak your acting style to fit the character?

Chris> That is a really cool thing to say, and I appreciate hearing that.  This is my one skill.  I think I’m lucky to be good at one thing, and this is it.  I did my training, I went to school, I opened my ears and listened to people who are better than me, and who I admire and respect.  At the end of the day, it’s really fun to do something like this and talk to you about my work, because, for the most part, nobody has any idea who I am.  They know who the characters are that I played and the shows that I’ve been on, but anything about me, they don’t really know much.  I pretty much just tend to stick to doing my work.  I think because of that I tend to get a lot of diversity in the characters that I play.  But it’s fun to talk about.  The directors I hang out with tend to hire the guy who can play the part, rather than hire somebody who might look best in the costume.  That’s the deal, it’s a vocation.  You’re lucky enough to be good at something, and you’re even luckier to get a chance to do it, so you better do it well and leave your ego behind.

Kenn> Do you have a favorite role that you’ve played, given all these great things you’ve done?

Chris> Yeah, right now, because True Blood is on-going, I can’t leave Andy Bellefleur out of the equation because you never know what is left to be discovered.  But Andy Bellefleur would definitely be in a race with Frank Sobotka on The Wire.

Kenn> I have to agree, that was an incredible character.  It’s really strange, so many people have been coming up to me lately talking about The Wire.  They are getting it on DVD and watching the whole series straight through.  It seems like a lot of new people are discovering it now, a few years later.

Chris> Thank God!  If anything is illustrative about what is exciting about the DVD market, it’s how much feedback and how many people have been turned on to The Wire because of the DVD.  I remember coming out to LA immediately after shooting and airing the second season of The Wire, and sitting down with network people and casting people telling them I’d just been on the wire.  To a person, it was like, “Yeah, I’ve heard that was good.”  Nobody had seen it. 

Kenn> Have you read the Sookie Stackhouse books?

Chris> I’ve read only up to the second.  I read the first one when we did the first season, and the second book when we did the second season.  It feels like the ratio of writers inventions compared to inspirations from the book is sort of expanding.  The first season was pretty close to the plotting of the book.  And the second season, I think we’ve departed a little bit more.  I’ll read the third book because I feel like it keeps me connected to the pop sensibility, the comic book sensibility of the books, but I probably won’t read past that unless there is a reason too.

Kenn> Do you have any input into Andy, or how the character is played?

Chris> Well, as the actor who plays him, I’d probably naively say yes.  At the end of the day, the directors have a lot of power, the writers have a lot of power, but when they pull the trigger, I’m the one saying the lines, so that makes me feel like I have a little bit of power with the character.

Kenn> Can you ever go and say, “Andy wouldn’t quite do it this way.”?

Chris> What I tend to do is to just do it, and I factor in all of those decisions previous to any rehearsal or any take.  That kind of cuts to the chase and if they see something they don’t like, or they want an adjustment, they’ll ask for it and I’ll happily accommodate that.  Once you get the essence of the character, it’s just tweaking.  You tune your stereo into a particular frequency and you just want to get it clear as possible.  I’ll tell you what’s great about a TV show.  A TV show gets to run two, three, or more seasons, and you get a chance to get into a kind of symbiotic thing with the writers.  They are watching what you do, and that is informing what they write for you next.  It becomes this kind of tennis match back and forth where the character can evolve in real time.  That’s really fun. 

Kenn> What do you think about doing a show on cable?  On HBO you can be a little bit rougher, a little more violent with more blood and more sex.  Does that kind of free you up to do what you want to do?

Chris> That has definitely been my experience, both with The Wire and True Blood.  As an audience member, when I switch an hour of Sopranos and then an hour of CSI, there is stuff to appreciate in both, but in terms of the story telling and getting into a more sophisticated take on character, all of the limits of network TV are felt pretty quickly and pretty strongly.  I’ll put it this way, if I was a writer with any inspiration and a real Jones to tell a story, I’d definitely want to make a deal on cable.

Kenn> It’s amazing the way it’s changed, especially the last two years.  It seems like all of the good stuff is on cable.  The networks just seem to be doing procedurals over and over.

Chris> Or soap opera. It seems that the soap opera has really penetrated prime time. 

Shaun> Right, every show has a soap opera thing going on.

Chris> But True Blood, in a lot of ways, is a soap opera.  It’s a great thing to hang theme on, but at the end of the day, I always look at it like this.  If I have a couple of hours in the day and I’m going to use that couple of hours to watch TV, you’d better give me something that doesn’t make me regret loosing that two hours.  We can all choose what that is for ourselves, which is an amazing thing.  But I really like it when there is a bunch of good stuff to choose from, and I think cable has made that so.  Cable has made for a lot better choices on TV.

Shaun> Any chance that Andy is going to become Sheriff?

Chris> Hey, I like that idea. 

Shaun> What would we do with Bill though?  We can’t kill him off.

Chris> That was my next thought.  I can just hear him saying, “There’s only one sheriff in town!”  I just wouldn’t want to dethrone Bill- that guy is just too great.

Shaun> Whenever he starts talking, and maybe I’m just too old, I get that Newhart flash going on. 

Chris> Well, you know what?  It was a pretty indelible impression.  I’ll tell you what is so endearing about him, is he is very honest about the choices he has made in his career in the past, and over-indulging some parts of his career in his work.  That red-necky southern comedy stereotype, and he is very aware that he dug a very deep hole with that.  But he got paid a lot, and made a lot of money from it too, so there are a lot of ups and downs.  Every time I do a scene with him, while he is talking, I still thing about the Larry character from Bob Newhart.  I think it’s a compliment as to how enduring that character was in the first place. 

Shaun> I notice the Steppenwolf  theatre from Chicago, on your biography.  I’m from Chicago, and the Steppenwolf is great.  You learn your craft there, don’t you?

Chris> Oh my God!  I owe that place so much.  Not only did I meet my wife there, but I learned how to act there.  And I’d spent three years at the Yale school of drama before that.  I consider that I never really learned how to act until I worked at the Steppenwolf.  That whole town to, to me, is the most creative place.  I’d take it over LA or New York any day, in terms of just getting down and making it work in theatre, film or whatever.  They know how to do it there.

Shaun> What shows were you in there, that come to mind?

Chris> I was in the American premiere of Clockwork Orange.  It was the stage version that Anthony Burgess made.  Then with Frank Giolotti, I did an adaptation of As I Lay Dying, from the Faulkner book.  Then I did a bunch of stuff at the Goodman.  Those were the good old days when I could do plays. 

Shaun> How have you avoided getting typecast in your work?  You could easily have fallen into the stereotype of being a detective or a precinct captain.  How do you avoid getting sucked into playing a certain character throughout your career?

Chris> I think a lot of that is luck.  I also remember playing a couple of bad guys in a row.  I just decided to stop even auditioning for those kinds of things, and that kind of broke that pattern of being the bad guy.  More than that, no body knows what to do with me right off the bat.  Then I take the part, and say, “Well, we could do it like this.”  And I’m lucky enough to get the job.  But so far, there is no Chris Bauer type, where they say, let’s get Chris Bauer.  I’m still the character, and people think of me as the character I play.  I’m just really fortunate.

Kenn> I know you’ve done a lot of stuff that was really popular, but with True Blood, you could almost say the fans are fanatic.  It has almost a cult following.  Do you see any difference in terms of getting recognized more, or in the reactions you get from playing this character?

Chris> Yes, you know it’s funny.  I don’t know if this anecdotally will mean much.  You can walk down the streets in New York or LA, and people look at you, and they expect it.  They see your face, they recognize you, and might say hello or give you a complement.  But when I knew that True Blood was maybe going to have some legs, was when I was walking down the center of a mall in Long Island, and I couldn’t go two stores without somebody talking about True Blood.  Its the mall people, it’s the kids; the people in the suburbs.  That’s when I thought, “Wow, man! People are watching this show!”  I just hope more and more do.  I think it’s worth it, and it’s a fun sixty minutes. 

Shaun> Especially if you can catch Anna Paquin naked!

Chris> I’d call that fun!  She’s amazing.

Kenn> Maybe you’ll get some of that with Michelle Forbes this season.  It seems like you have a bit of a connection there?

Chris> She’s another one.  She is like the coolest girl ever, and just so good, and so funny, and incredibly sexy.  You start talking about a couple of the characters and the actors, and you have to give credit to Alan Ball.  His eye for casting is really specific.

Shaun> Is he stunned at how successful the show is?  It’s just an enormous pop-culture hit and it’s blown up.

Chris> Yeah, he is extremely pleased.  He is a pretty unflappable dude, and is hard to read.  But he is pretty clear about how much he enjoys working on the show, and how glad he is that people are responding the way they are.  

Shaun> Someone in the chat is saying they hated you first season because of how mean you were to Jason, but now they love you!

Chris> As long as they eventually love me, I can live with their hatred.

Kenn> It’s probably good to be hated so passionately too; it means you are doing your job!

Chris> I could kind of sense some of the feedback because people love the Jason character so much.  They were just like, “My God, Andy is the meanest, we hate that guy!”  Somebody in Houston said, “You must be doing your job right, because that’s the way scene goes.”

Shaun> What does your wife think about this crazy show about vampires?  Did she think it wouldn’t last?

Chris> It’s funny that you should say that, because the truth of the matter is, when HBO was making Generation Kill, that was a project I was going to do.  And this show came along, and I had a meeting with Alan while I was making that deal.  I read the pilot script and I gave it to my wife to read.  She said, “You have to get out of that Generation Kill thing and do this.  This thing is going to be huge!”  I was so grateful for her input, but she was right.  I did that, and she had a really good feeling about it.  She loves the show.  From what I understand, a lot of women love this show.

Shaun> Men and women.  The guys like looking at Anna Paquin, and the girls like looking at Jason Stackhouse.  Also, you’ve got a little something for everyone.  You’ve got the vampires, and Maryanne and all of that.  You’ve got the murders, so it’s a little bit of a cop show. 

Chris> It really does.  It’s a win-win thing for whoever is watching it if you ask me. 

Shaun> Also, someone is asking about your last name.  How do you pronounce that?

Chris> Bell-fleur is how you say it.  It’s funny, because our executive producer, whenever we do the read throughs, continues to pronounce it Bell-flower.  But he’s from Orange County here in California, so what are you going to do?  It’s Bellefleur, which means pretty flower.  The Bellefleur family in Bon Temps is one that goes way, way back.  One of the other things about True Blood that is really, really fun is that nothing happens by accident.  There are a lot of little exchanges and looks and connections that turn into story a season or two later.  I don’t know if you remember in the first season when I was introduced to Bill Compton, the vampire, he said Bellefleur, and stopped and listened to that name before we went on.  So the name has some significance to his past and to the town. 

Shaun> So maybe that’s going to lead to your role getting beefed up as we go along this season?

Chris> Just about anything that would beef up my role would be interesting to me. 

Shaun> As long as they don’t kill you off!

Chris> Exactly, but what can you do though?  It’s like, at the end of the day, you just play your part.  One thing that people don’t understand about actor’s lives, and character actors in particular;  we’ve got to go audition all the time.  We walk into a room full of guys in competition, but there’s always another chance.  There’s always another shot.  You get on a show and get killed, then maybe you’ll get on another show.  I will say for the record, I would love for True Blood to run for a good six, seven, or eight years.  There’s enough material there to keep it interesting for that long.  But we’ll just have to see.