Anne Rice Approves of True Blood Vampires Having Sex, Thinks Joe Manganiello Is Hot

Bestselling author Anne Rice has a new interview with The Daily Beast following some cheeky comments she made about Twilight on her Facebook page, and she talks a little about Charlaine Harris and True Blood in the process.

So what’s your take on the Twilight series? It really does seem to go against the grain in its depiction of vampires.

I think the concept is so rich in itself. It’s like the concept of the cowboy or the detective. Vampires have become almost like a genre, like the Western. What I see happening, with writers like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, is the domestication of the vampire. I was more interested in a powerful, Old World figure that had a lot of knowledge, experience, and was surrounded by a lot of glamour and mystery. I wanted to keep the romance. I loved the idea of these people gaining wisdom as they aged, and how that might cause them to be ever more tormented by the fact that they don’t really belong in the world and they prey on human beings, who they’ve really come to appreciate. Charlaine Harris is doing something different by imagining what it’s like if vampires are legal and you have them living in your Southern town, and I think she gets a tremendous amount of energy out of that. She’s very witty—there’s a lot of satire there—and on the HBO show True Blood, there’s even a romance with Vampire Bill.

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Back to True Blood, how do you feel about the show’s depiction of vampires as these uninhibited, primal, sexual beings?

I’m a fan of the show. I see it as a logical part of it all. [Harris] has expanded the sexuality that’s inherent in that idea. I didn’t think of that, but as my books went on, I involved my vampires in more sexuality. But I couldn’t go as far as Charlaine Harris did, because I had said that my vampires can’t have sex; that the act of drinking blood is orgasmic for them. She’s doing it a different way. She’s saying that this blood drinker must also be dynamite in bed. Makes sense!

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I think True Blood does werewolves justice with Alcide.

Oh, yeah, I like Alcide. I like that actor [Joe Manganiello] a lot, and I think the character’s hot.

(Read the full interview here…)