From Paste Magazine:

Paste: You had an interesting opportunity while filming a scene from Margaret at the Met. Can you tell me what that was like?
Paquin: We got to shoot inside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, which was incredible. Although they weren’t actually performing on the stage, the singers that we had in the scene are some of the most prestigious stars of that community. That was pretty amazing. My character and her mother go to the opera and we actually got to shoot inside the Metropolitan Opera House, which very few people have ever done, and hasn’t happened in a really long time to the best of my knowledge. It was absolutely incredible. It’s such a huge iconic place in New York City, and we have this scene where my character is running down the spiral staircase, and there’s all these sort of things that just feel so amazing. It was all very exciting.

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From The A.V. Club:

At age 25, Canadian-born, New Zealand-raised actor Anna Paquin has already had a longer career than most. She won an Oscar at 9, for her performance in Jane Campion’s The Piano. She’s appeared in more than 20 films, working with directors as varied as Steven Spielberg (Amistad) and Spike Lee (25th Hour). She’s been a goose wrangler in Fly Away Home and the mutant superhero Rogue in the X-Men trilogy. When she graduated high school, she moved to New York City and enrolled in Columbia University, allowing her to work onstage, starring with Kieran Culkin in an Off-Broadway production of After Ashley. She even made her way to the London stage, working with playwright Kenneth Lonergan in a production of This Is Our Youth in the West End.

More recently, she and her brother Andrew have started a production company called Paquin Films; its first release is the politically fueled, romantic road comedy Blue State. She stars alongside Breckin Meyer, whose character decides to move to Canada after the 2004 presidential election when his candidate, John Kerry, loses to George W. Bush. Recently, The A.V. Club sat down with Paquin to discuss politics, dropping out, black leather, and claws.

The A.V. Club: You moved to New York a few years ago to attend Columbia. How is that going? Or is it over?

Anna Paquin: Well, it’s over, not because I finished, but because I kind of stopped going. I started working a lot and kind of forgot to go back.

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I meant to post this last night but offline issues took importance. I want to apologise for the downtime on Friday/Saturday (depending on where in the world you are), my host moved me to a different server and I didn’t know what was going on until it was already happening. I also want to apologise for the gallery being offline for some time yesterday, as soon as I saw the site was back up, I took it offline to remove the intermediate pictures from the gallery and that took a little longer than I had thought it would. So now when you click on a thumbnail, it will take you straight to the fullsize photo. I removed them mostly to save space on the server since the gallery is getting pretty huge.

Moving on, there’s an article in the recent issue of Business Week about HBO which mentions “True Blood” and includes a small picture of Anna, Alan Ball, Stephen Moyer. I’m going to be picking up the magazine itself to scan for the site tomorrow since just about everything is closed since it’s Easter. The article is online here or you can read the snippet about the show below.

All the while Plepler and Lombardo had been pressuring Strauss to hire a senior programmer to add more firepower. She balked, say insiders, and tension between Strauss and her new bosses intensified. Finally, she was out—leaving her former colleagues feeling uneasy, even though she was offered a production deal with HBO. David Simon, who created HBO’s critically acclaimed The Wire and is developing an HBO show about New Orleans, says he was “absolutely shocked” when Strauss told him she was leaving. “She’s the reason I’m still in television,” says Simon, who acknowledges feeling “nervous about getting a new boss.”

Now, with Strauss and Albrecht gone, it is the Plepler-Lombardo show. Among a slate of upcoming shows, one they’re pinning their hopes on is True Blood, a one-hour drama about vampires in Louisiana (which they greenlighted after seeing a pilot that was approved by Albrecht shortly before his departure).

True Blood, set to air in September, has one thing going for it. Its creator is Alan Ball, the man behind Six Feet Under. Ball got the idea for the show after discovering novelist Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries series in an airport bookstore. True Blood, now shooting in Los Angeles and Shreveport, La., centers on modern-day vampires who live openly in society because they can feed off new synthetic blood. Anna Paquin, who played the daughter in the film The Piano, stars as Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress mind reader smitten with a vampire.

Plepler and Lombardo were ecstatic to work with Ball again. And they’re careful to keep Albrecht’s light touch. “Alan certainly doesn’t need a lot of handling,” says Lombardo. “It’s his pen, not ours, thank God.” While HBO asked Ball to recast one actor, it has requested minimal script changes. “They allow you to focus on the work,” he says.

True Blood is undeniably a risk. A show about vampires could have a limited audience, however brilliantly realized. But Plepler echoes the Albrecht mantra: True Blood, he says, haslarger themes that will resonate with a mass audience. “We see the vampires as a window into the disenfranchised in America,” says Plepler. With Six Feet Under, he adds, Ball examined how death is treated in the U.S.—and he’ll deliver Big Themes with True Blood, too. If the show is a hit, maybe HBO will bury The Sopranos, once and for all.

Anna has been busy the past week with press for Blue State. I have added three articles to the press archive from MovieWeb, The Chaffey Breeze and BostonNOW.

Also, check out the interview that Anna and Breckin did for Sidewalks TV here.

From NY Post:

THE old Hollywood cliché for actors used to be: “What I really wanna do is direct.” Nowadays, however, more and more actors are realizing that the real power lies with producing.

Take 25-year-old Anna Paquin. The veteran actress, who won an Oscar at 11 years old for “The Piano,” just co-produced (with her brother Andrew) her first film, the politics-tinged romantic comedy “Blue State,” using the opportunity to cast herself in a role vastly different from her usual dark dramatic fare.

“Blue State,” out Tuesday on DVD, stars Breckin Meyer as John, a liberal campaign worker for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run who vows to move to Canada if Kerry loses - and winds up keeping his promise.

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From Stuff.Co.Nz:

Some of the biggest names in film and television have refused to cross promised picketlines in support of striking writers.

The Writers Guild of America strike, which began November 5, has effectively shut down Hollywood.

Faced with the boycott, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced this week that the awards ceremony planned for January 13 would be replaced by an hour-long news conference announcing the winners of the 65th annual Golden Globes awards.

Paquin, 24, is nominated in the best supporting actress category for her role in the television movie Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

A publicist for Paquin said the young New Zealand actress was standing firm with colleagues, refusing to cross a Writers Guild of America picketline.

“Anna will not be crossing a picketline,” the publicist said.

Asked if this meant she would decline an award, the publicist repeated: “It means that she will not cross a picketline.”

Oscar-winning actress - and Cape Cod Theatre Project alum - Anna Paquin graces the cover Boston Common magazine’s holiday issue and talks to the maggie about her upcoming HBO series, “True Blood.”

The drama, to air on the cable channel in January, follows a small Louisiana town where “vampires have integrated themselves as the current minority group,” the 25-year-old “X-Men” star tells BC.

Paquin plays a bleached blonde diner waitress who lives in the vampire-infested town where things “get dark and twisted, funny and creepy, very quickly,” she says.

Paquin also takes the opportunity to flog her upcoming film, “Margaret,” in which she stars opposite Cambridge cutie Matt Damon. She fails, however, to say anything about Damon. And we’re just sick about that.

Source: Boston Herald

I am already working on getting a copy of the magazine