Michelle Forbes
Michelle Forbes
Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo is an American actress who has built a career of work in television and independent film and has acted in productions in both the United States and in Britain. Forbes first gained attention from her dual role in daytime soap opera Guiding Light, for which she received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination. She has also been nominated for multiple Screen Actors Guild and Saturn Awards during her career...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actress
Date of Birth8 January 1965
CityAustin, TX
CountryUnited States of America
In this age of vampires, what I love about 'True Blood' the most is that it's a post-modern take on it. 'Sookie Stackhouse' series author Charlaine Harris and 'True Blood' creator Alan Ball turned that whole mythology upside-down... It's not just about vampires. It's about a lot of different things.
At one point I had a stretch where it was working on 'In Treatment,' then 'True Blood,' then 'Durham County,' then 'True Blood,' then 'In Treatment' again. If I didn't have that little dose of 'True Blood' in the middle, I might have lost my mind.
People ask me what the appeal of 'True Blood' is and I think there are so many answers to that question, but I think that when there is so much excitement for what you do there is no way that that doesn't become palpable and comes shooting out like bullets.
Everyone always wants to talk about 'True Blood' and 'Battlestar Galactica' - no one's even interested in 'Durham County.' It blew my mind when I came to Canada and no one asked me about the show. So many people didn't even know about it. They didn't even know it was on the air! It's very curious to me.
I had so many offers after 'True Blood' for things that were someone in the same vein, but nowhere near Alan Ball's vision. Or something that was over-the-top and fantastical. And I've always wanted to play the regular, working-class mom, and I've never really had the chance to do that.
I try to keep things as varied as possible in my career, and after playing something as fun and over the top as Maryann on 'True Blood,' I wanted to find something antithetical to that.
I was deliciously happy filming 'True Blood.' I even kept all the scripts in my office, which I never do with any script. Although I did shred them all in one go when the series finished; it seemed like a ritual, somehow.
I've never had a plan. You look for different actors you want to work with or different subjects you want to explore, or sometimes it's just a momentary fancy.
If you look at some shows that have an ugly feel to them, or a nihilistic sort of feel to them, you'll usually find a group of cynical, unhappy, miserable people behind the production. If you see a show that's rather boring, or a cookie-cutter factory show, you'll usually find some pretty uninteresting, boring people behind it.
It's a wonderful thing working with young actors. I know a lot of people don't like working with children. I actually adore it, because you watch their imagination open up and you watch them start to learn this job that I've been doing for so long. They come with such a lack of cynicism.
That's what I think is smart about 'Durham County.' It's not derivative of anything American. It's more in the vein of the BBC miniseries I grew up with.
When I did 'Battlestar Galactica' it was the first time I really understood science fiction. That was a very political drama, but set in spaceships so people didn't really take it seriously. But some really fascinating things were explored in that.
One of my last few vices is coffee, but with a spot of almond or soymilk, it's never tasted better!
When I do watch shows, or projects that I've been a part of, I'm pretty good at watching them objectively. And that's mostly because I want to see how it came out overall, what the overall story was and how it came together visually, what my mates were doing.