SPOILERS: Guess Who’s Coming Back in True Blood Season 5?

Film School Rejects has an interview with a True Blood alumnus who reveals that their character will return in season 5. Who is it?

Denis O’Hare! Denis confirms that the erstwhile King of Mississippi, Russell Edgington, will return to True Blood at the beginning of next season. We bet he’s gonna be pissssssssed.

To start off, it was disappointing  to hear that you’re not coming back this season.

I know, I know. It was up in the air. They were definitely bringing me back, it was just a matter of if they wanted to bring me back the last couple episodes or bring me back at the beginning. So they decided to do it at the beginning of season 5.

That’s good to know.  An interesting thing about Russell is that he just felt like a character so unhinged. For you, was there ever a limit as to where Russell could go?

I think there is no limit.  It’s funny because when we started talking about the character, obviously characters evolve, and part of the reason he evolved was they kept making him older and older. At first he was supposed to be like 1,100 years old, and so I was doing a lot of research about Charlemagne and all these people and figuring, “Oh, he must have been in Charlemagne’s court.”

And then he kept getting older, and finally he got to like 2,800-3,000 years old. I was looking at history about where he might be able to come from, and there’s only two sources. He can come from the Levant’s from Palestine, or what they call Philistine, or he could have been somewhere really interesting like the Danube. I just thought, “Let’s not make him a Roman or Greek. Let’s make him something else.”

So we made him this Pagan Celt. They are just wild people. They have a very different relationship to everything in terms of nature and in terms of their own belief system. I just love that. That kind of helped make him just a different kind of character.

(read the rest of the interview here…)