Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [23]
(Dave Longendyke/Keystone Press)
Sam Trammell (Sam Merlotte)
“Seeing yourself run naked is the worst.”
— Sam Trammell
“You willing to pass up all your favorite foods and spend the rest of your life drinking Slim-Fast?”
— Sam to Sookie about the impossibility of a vampire changing its true nature
Sam Trammell was born on May 15, 1971, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Charleston, West Virginia. He has a brother Paul and a sister Elizabeth. His parents still live in Charleston; his father, Willis, is a surgeon and his mother, Betsy, is an artist. “[Charleston is] such a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful town, which you really realize once you get out and see the rest of the country . . . I loved growing up there,” says Trammell.
After graduating from George Washington High School, he attended Brown University, where after a brief flirtation with physics and philosophy, he switched over to semiotics, the study of communication, and took classes on psychoanalysis and linguistic theory. During that time, he spent a year at the University of Paris, returning to the United States looking for a change.
Trammell had never given acting much consideration as a career option; he hadn’t even performed in a school play. But when a friend suggested he audition for a play, he came out of the experience changed. “It was a real lightning bolt for me,” Trammell says. “It was intense and fulfilling and inspiring.”
The acting bug took hold — “I was hooked” — so Trammell took the actor’s rite-of-passage bus ride to New York City, hitting the city sidewalks armed with head shots, and taking odd jobs to pay the bills and cover acting classes. Trammell attended auditions, securing a few roles on daytime serials, finally making his primetime debut in the CBS/Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation Harvest of Fire (with Jennifer Garner) and Childhood’s End (both in 1996).
Trammell continued to hone his craft as a stage actor, and in 1998, earned himself a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!. The night of the Tony Awards was an evening he recalls as so nerve-wracking that he almost hoped he wouldn’t win so he could remain in his seat and avoid having to make a speech. Shortly thereafter, Trammell got his first regular television role on the short-lived ABC series Maximum Bob, starring Beau Bridges and based on the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name.
Trammell was getting wider recognition, winning guest roles on such television series as House, Bones, CSI: NY, Numb3rs, and Dexter — and has since appeared on Medium and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Before True Blood, he was most familiar to audiences from his co-starring role in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). “Let me tell you something: that was awesome . . . It’s one guy in the [alien] suit, one guy running the electric motor for the mouth, and then one guy doing the tail . . . [G]etting eaten by that thing was one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to do.”
Meanwhile, Trammell had heard about a television project that was building buzz around town. When the script for True Blood arrived, he immediately took a shine to it. “I realized it took place in Louisiana . . . when I read that, I just thought I’d be perfect for it, because I’m from Louisiana.” Because the series was attached to Alan Ball and HBO, he acted instantly. “I [said] immediately, ‘I’ll do it. I don’t know even know what it is, but I’ll do it.’ . . . [And] it’s very stressful . . . all of these HBO executives are sitting in these leather chairs, and you go up on the stage . . . But I got a call