The Sunday Conversation: Sam Trammell

“True Blood’s” fourth season opens Sunday night with Sam Trammell returning to HBO’s racy vampire drama as Sam Merlotte, a cafe owner and shape-shifter who can turn into any animal he likes and back again. Offstage, Trammell, 40, is also preparing for his debut as the father of twins with his longtime girlfriend, actress Missy Yager.

Tell me about Sam Merlotte’s adventures in the new season. I understand you have a new love interest.

Yeah, I do. Last season, Sam sort of excommunicated his biological family, and he gains a new family in a sense because he meets this person who’s also a shape-shifter, named Luna [Janina Gavankar]. And she has a lot of mystery about her, and as the season goes on, he discovers more and more about her and is surprised. She’s an exciting, very intriguing, very alluring person for Sam.

The last time we saw you, you had a gun to your brother’s head. How’d that go?

He stole some money from me, from a safe in my office, and I tracked him down — literally ran him down in the woods. I pulled a gun on him, said, “Give me the money.” He said, “You’re not going to shoot me” and walked away. Cut to me and I fired the gun. It’s already been revealed that Tommy is not dead — he’s in the fourth season — but there’s a cliffhanger about what happened when I fired.

Do you also explore the mythology of shape-shifters this season?

Yeah, we’re going to meet a group of shape-shifters. We’ve learned the rules of what vampires can and can’t do. With shape-shifting, we really haven’t seen that much. We met one shape-shifter, Daphne, in Season 2, but we really haven’t looked at that community and what it’s like to be a shape-shifter. We’re going to explore all of that, and that’s what I get excited about, when you look at the rules of the supernatural beings.

What’s the source of that mythology? Is it Native American?

The shape-shifter appears in many different cultures, but one is Native American. That’s one of the ones we’re going to take a look at this year. Every culture has a different view of what they are, and they play different roles in different cultures and different rules govern them. We’re going to have to pick and choose and create our own reality with shape-shifters. It’s really cool.

So you’re from New Orleans, near the show’s small-town setting.

Yeah, I was born in New Orleans. I also lived in Alexandria, La.; and Dallas, Texas; and North Dakota. West Virginia is where I consider home. Louisiana is where I consider my roots. I was born there and then we moved around and then we came back for five years, from kindergarten to early grade school.

What do you think it is about the South that makes it such an appropriate backdrop for a mystical story like “True Blood”? There’s a Southern Gothic literary genre, but no Midwestern Gothic.

When you get into Louisiana, it really is like a different country in a lot of ways. The plants you see are a little different, like the weeping willows and the cypress trees that come up out of the bayou. And it’s steamy hot. There’s something about a humid, dusky evening that’s kind of sexy. In the country, it feels like you don’t have control over nature anymore — nature is in control of you. It’s like the naturalists at the turn of the century, that idea that nature is so much bigger than you and man is a small thing. You walk out to the bayou and you’re overshadowed by these strange plants and the heat and the mists, and I think that lends itself to supernatural creatures because there are things that can hide in the shadows.

There’s also the tradition of voodoo, the Haitian magic arts, in New Orleans. And because New Orleans is below sea level, when they bury people in New Orleans, it’s mostly above ground. So you have this idea that the spirits are more accessible and can access you more easily because they’re not even buried.

But I must say, Sam Merlotte has a much heavier Southern accent than you do.

I know. It’s so funny because when I moved from Louisiana to West Virginia, I actually got teased about my accent. I had a real Southern accent, as does my family who live down there. I’m one of those people who assimilates wherever I am, and I went to high school in West Virginia and college in Rhode Island. And then I was in Paris for a year and ended up in New York.

I was enrolled at the Sorbonne and I was also at [other schools within the university], Paris VII and Paris III. I was studying semiotics and French philosophy.

Did you write a thesis in semiotics? That’s not very Hollywood of you.

It was really, really in vogue in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. It was exciting. I went to Paris and met a lot of those semiotic rock stars we were studying [in college].

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