‘I got to a point where I was out of control’
True Blood actor Stephen Moyer tells Daphne Lockyer about how marriage and fatherhood tamed his wild ways
Actor Stephen Moyer has been thinking recently about the subject of honesty. How much of it can a relationship stand and, if you fail to tell the truth, then, who exactly are you protecting: your partner or yourself? He’s lucky, he says, to be married to the unflinching Anna Paquin who won an Oscar for her role in The Piano at the age of 11. They became romantically entwined in real life when they played a pair of unconventional lovers – he a 175-year-old vampire, named Bill Compton and she a telepathic cocktail waitress, Sookie Stackhouse, in HBO’S southern US, schlockyhorror series, True Blood.
“My missus told me from the outset that she would rather have the blatant, unvarnished truth than discover things that she wasn’t aware of further down the road,” he says. “Relationships work in different ways but, for us, 100 per cent transparency feels like the right way to go.”
We’ve moved on to the subject about honesty in relationships because Moyer, 47, is about to take over the starring role in the second series of the crime drama Safe House. Honesty and its opposite – concealment – is one of the four-part programme’s main themes.
He’s playing Tom Brook, a charismatic and impulsive former police detective.
“When we first meet Tom, he and his partner, Sam (Zoe Tapper), are running a sailing school and a police safe house on the wild and beautiful coast of Anglesey,” he says. “Their life seems idyllic – always the moment in a drama where the chair gets kicked away from under you.”
It’s Tom’s lack of honesty about his past life to his partner that leads to the unravelling: “If you ask me, men tend to reach emotional maturity a bit later than women,” he says, laughing. “When I met Anna, I was 37, she was 24 – there were nearly 13 years between us, but I was only just about reaching the same level of maturity as her!”
In the flesh, he is rangy, twinklyeyed, gregarious, funny. Despite having made his home in LA, there is no transatlantic twang and instead his accent meanders somewhere through the estuary that links Essex, where he was raised in an ordinary working-class family, to London, where he trained at LAMDA and lived for many years. He uprooted to be with Paquin in Los Angeles, but still owns a houseboat that he now rents out in Little Venice and a North London pied-à-terre that the family visits frequently.
“When I’m in LA there are things I miss,” he says. “I’ve found a shop that sells Marmite, but there’s no substitute for the winding roads of England or for Hampstead Heath. For a while I lived at the back of it and I’d swim in the ponds every day. I’d even sit in the rain on a bench. Aside from the people I love here, it’s the thing I miss most.
“But, still, both Anna and I have this knack of being totally at home wherever we are in the world. Anna is a Kiwi who then studied at Columbia University and is a New Yorker in her guts. I’m a total London boy. If it hadn’t been for meeting her I’d have done that show and then come back here [to England]. We totally changed each other’s lives.”
He’d had a chequered romantic past when they met, he was the father of two children, Billy, now 17 and Lilac, 15, from two failed relationships. “We were both still going through ‘stuff ’. But there we were and there was this crazy magnetism between us.
“We tried not to and when that didn’t work we didn’t tell anyone we were together – either on or offset. We wanted to make sure that this was
‘I’m the grown up I never thought I would be – the grown up I was running from’
really something before we felt ready to tell anyone.”
In 2010, two years after meeting, the couple married flanked by friends and family, at a beachside ceremony in Malibu. Two years after that, between seasons of True Blood, Anna delivered twins, Charlie and Poppy – who are about to celebrate their fifth birthday.
“There were already three sets of twins in Anna’s family,” Moyer recalls. “So when we found out there were two babies, it wasn’t a total shock. The doctor said, ‘I have news for you.’ And Anna said, ‘Twins?’”
He’s clearly a doting father – to all four of his offspring. Billy still lives with his mother in the UK but spends time with his father both in the UK and US. Lilac lives in Los Angeles with her mother, the journalist Lorien Haynes and sees her father often.
It’s a modern, blended family. “My kids are my absolute raison d’être,” he says. Becoming a father, he adds, changed his life in “500 different ways. And all of them for the better.”
Top of the list, was his decision to quit drinking and to enter rehab for the problem shortly after his first son was born.
It’s not a subject he talks too much about, although last year, while sitting on a panel for the Clare Foundation, an anti-addiction charity he’s an ambassador for in LA, he admitted his problem had been rooted in the drinking culture that surrounded British actors. Let’s call it the Peter O’toole syndrome. “There’s a rush that happens from doing this job, this whirring buzz and [by drinking] you want that buzz to continue,” he said.
Although he chooses every word carefully today, he opens up a little more. “I got to a point in my life where I was totally out of control. I was shocked into doing something about it and fatherhood was definitely a big aspect of that – the catalyst that shook me. And I would never want to go back there again.
“People, say, ‘When are you going to be able to have a drink again? And my answer to that is, ‘I’ve already drunk all the drinks that I was supposed to drink in one lifetime’.”
It’s nearly 17 years since he gave up alcohol. “For me, it’s been about getting clean and getting over the wildness and it’s been the best thing I could ever have done because while the oblivion of drink can be exciting and attractive, I’m so much happier now without it.
“This morning I was up early to let the dogs out (the couple have two that travel everywhere with them – Dave, a black Labrador cross, and Banjo, a Louisiana leopard dog). I had a coffee and watched the sunrise with a clear head and it occurred to me that I’m the grown up now that I never thought I would be – the grown up that, maybe, at one time, I was running away from because I thought it would be so incredibly dull to be that person, whereas the absolute reverse is true.”
The last seven years with Paquin, especially, he says, have sealed his stability and contentment. They both work consistently and cope with long periods of separation – Paquin, for example, is currently filming a Fifties romance, Tell It to the Bees, in Scotland while Moyer is in Atlanta starring in The Gifted, a big budget sci-fi adventure series for Fox TV.
However, the couple also co-own a production company with a raft of projects at various stages of development, including The Parting Glass, a film they made last year about a family dealing with a sister’s death in which Paquin stars and Moyer directs.
He has directed her before, most notably in three episodes of True Blood. “There was a love scene with Anna and Joe Manganiello (Alcide Herveaux) and I’m saying, ‘Ok, Joe, put your hand on Anna’s t--! Babe. Babe… scratch his back!” Moyer beams. “Afterwards you do slightly think, ‘What the f---?’”
Just as well, perhaps, that the safe house in question here is the metaphorical one that Moyer and Paquin have built together. “You said that, not me,” he laughs. “I wouldn’t want to jinx it.”
The four-part series Safe House begins on Sept 7 on ITV