Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin‘s days playing star-crossed vampire and fairy lovers on True Blood are long gone, but working together is still one of their biggest thrills.
“Perks are easy. We know each other inside out,” Moyer, 54, exclusively told Us Weekly on Friday, March 22, of the highs of filming with Paquin, 41, on A Bit of Light. “We’ve worked together for many, many years as actors and as producers.”
Moyer, who directed the new film adapted from Rebecca Callard’s screenplay, said there’s a “shorthand” with Paquin on set.
“There [are] often moments where I’ll look across at her and she’ll just go, ‘I’ll go in again,’” he explained. “She just knows that there’s something that she wants to recalibrate. And so I have the luxury of knowing that I can leave her to it because [she’s] very good at working out what she wants to change.”
When Moyer does intervene during a scene, he said Paquin often fixes his note before he can finish a sentence. “I can go in and say one word and she’ll just go, ‘Stop. Got it,’” he revealed.
Moyer and Paquin met while playing Bill Compton and Sookie Stackhouse, respectively, on True Blood, which ran on HBO from 2008 to 2014. The pair tied the knot in 2010 and welcomed their twin son and daughter two years later.
Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images
The England native previously directed Paquin in three episodes of True Blood (where he made his directorial debut) as well as the 2018 movie The Parting Glass and two episodes of her show Flack in 2020.
While they have both remained busy acting and directing, when the couple get to work side-by-side it leaves little issue in their household.
“Downsides, it sounds absurd to say this, there aren’t any,” Moyer told Us. “Because when we work together, it means the kids get to have both of us there at the same time.”
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The actor explained that “historically the kids have always gone with Anna and the dogs have always gone with me” when they work on separate projects.
“But when we’re working together as a couple, the kids come with us,” Moyer said. “It’s great they have both of us and they’re not in some distant sort of Australian village or Toronto snow scape or Vancouver rainstorm or whatever. They’ve got both of us there.”
In addition to looking forward to seeing his kids after work, Moyer told Us that showing up on set to direct his wife on A Bit of Light felt right. In the film, Paquin plays almost-40-year-old Ella, who is forced to move back into her father’s house in an attempt to stay sober and regain custody of her kids.
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“Obviously I’m biased because I’m married to her, but Anna as a performer is not scared of going to places that sometimes deal in trauma,” Moyer said of the serious nature of the movie. “What’s interesting about the character is that she’s at the lowest of her low. She’s at the rock of the rock bottom.”
Once Ella gets into her new rhythm, Moyer said the character’s life seems “boring” but that’s what he liked about the story.
“People [like] that never get seen in the films, it is that bit where it’s just boring and she doesn’t feel like she deserves it [is great],” he continued. “So Anna just brings this kind of quality of —she’s not sort of asking the audience to like her. And I thought that that was something that usually we don’t see that very often.”
A Bit of Light opens in theaters on Friday, April 5. It will be available on demand and digitally the same day.
With reporting by Leanne Aciz Stanton