Joe Manganiello’s honest confession about ‘True Blood’ cast

Joe Manganiello has recently admitted the cast of True Blood were “overqualified”.

During an appearance on the latest episode of the Penn Badgley’s podcast, Podcrushed, Joe, who played the role of werewolf Alcide Herveaux in HBO’s supernatural vampire series, noted the cast had thespian experience.

“What’s funny about True Blood was, you know, we were all really, really overqualified,” said the 47-year-old.

Joe stated, “It’s all theatre kids.”

“It’s like people with Tonys and Oscars and, you know, Mike McMillan and I were the Carnegie Mellon kids, then there was Rutina [Wesley] and Nelsan [Ellis] were the Juilliard kids, then Chris Bauer was the Yalie, then you get West End of London, then you get this international cast,” explained the Magic Mike actor.

Joe continued, “You got [Alexander] Skarsgård from Sweden. You had [Stephen] Moyer from England. And Anna [Paquin], obviously, from New Zealand by way of Canada.”

“It was really, really intelligent, trained actors,” he remarked.

Reflecting on the series content, Joe mentioned, “The material was deceptively tricky because it was kind of written in like Tennessee Williams. It was very operatic at times.”

Joe described the show, which ran for seven seasons since 2008, as “wild, crazy and intelligent project that pushed the culture forward”.

Interestingly, the series is based on author Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels.

Joe pointed out, “It was a really important show.”

“And we were all treated like rock stars because of the nature of the show – people were watching us doing insane things to each other,” he added.