Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [28]
It was also during this time that Ellis’s sister, Alice, was shot and killed, an experience Ellis used to fuel his creativity, reworking his grief in a play about domestic abuse. “[My sister] was in an abusive relationship for about five years,” recounts Ellis. “She was pregnant, and my brother-in-law shot her point-blank with a sawed-off shotgun in front of my six-year-old nephew.” Ellis’s play, Ugly, which premiered off-Broadway, was inspired by the events that happened between his sister and brother-in-law, and won the Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award. Of the abuse, he concludes, “You can’t ostracize the victims for staying . . . I call it the ugly side of love — you love a person so much you stay with them no matter what.” Ellis’s brother-in-law was murdered while in jail serving time for his crime.
Undeterred from his quest, Ellis stayed the course, auditioning for and landing guest roles on The Inside, Veronica Mars, Without a Trace, and a role in the football film The Express. He poured all of the money from these gigs into remounting productions of Ugly and a second play Darkly, I Die, leaving him homeless for a time and living out of his car.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of perseverance it would take for a person to remain optimistic in these circumstances. When he talks about his past, Ellis, who does not consider himself an emotional guy, gets straight to the point. “I don’t think I would be in prison, but I definitely think I would be a little shady, only because it’s the path that’s often taken.” And while True Blood is graphically violent, the line between fiction and reality is not blurred for Ellis. “Violence, in reality, is strikingly different than what you do on the set.”
So, too, is the difference between the questionable moral character of his role as Lafayette and Ellis’s personal spirituality. Raised a strict Baptist, his family acknowledges his recent success on True Blood but refuses to watch the show. “I come from a very religious family, and I didn’t tell my mother about this [role] at all. My mother lives in the woods and doesn’t have cable.” And Ellis’s father is a deacon in the conservative Church of God in Christ. “Truth of the matter is, he don’t want his son prancing around in lipstick and makeup, playing some gay dude,” Ellis says. “He believes the character is supporting an ideal that Christians don’t normally support.” Ellis continues, “But I tell him I feel blessed to be playing this character because I love it. I think Alan Ball is a genius,” a word Ball has also used to describe Ellis.
Ellis has also worried about the reaction from the African American community. “I thought, Oh, my people are gonna just banish me to hell. My people are gonna hate this! But actually, I have gotten more Timberland-wearing, saggy pants–drooping, tattooed-up dudes coming up to me saying, ‘Man, I love that hustle! I love that character.’ . . . I am fortunate.”
Fortune ain’t the half of it, as fans of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series know. Lafayette’s character actually dies very early on in the books. Ball, however, had plans of his own. “[Alan] said you can’t have a small southern town like Bon Temps without black people.” And with a number of awards under Ellis’s belt, including a Satellite Award from the International Press Academy for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Series, a Brink of Fame award from NewNowNext Awards, and an Ewwy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, Ball’s decision to keep Lafayette around might have just as much to do with Ellis’s raw talent. “[Alan] sees something nobody else does,” Ellis gushes. “[H]e sees things