Stephen Moyer's best screen work is a man out of his time: the stiff, courtly vampire of True Blood, manners played straight, heat supplied by whoever is looking at him. A narrow gift, and lately he has spent more time behind the camera.
Fi1m perspective
Bill Compton walks into Merlotte's in the first episode of True Blood (2008) and Sookie Stackhouse, who hears everyone's thoughts, hears nothing. Stephen Moyer plays him stiff and courtly, a gentleman who has not updated his manners, and he never once winks at us about it. The joke of the character is that the dead man is the only one in the bar who behaves, and Moyer lets the joke sit there without pushing it. It is a quiet, old-fashioned piece of acting in a series that is anything but quiet.
He came to it the long way round. LAMDA, then two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then British television through the 1990s and 2000s, NY-LON (2004) and Lilies (2007) among them, and an early film part in Quills (2000) alongside Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet. True Blood was the break, and it ran seven seasons. He directed three episodes of it between 2012 and 2014, and that is the turn: since then the acting has continued, a supporting part in Priest (2011), the lead in The Gifted (2017–2019), The Night Agent (2023), but the directing has grown, with the features The Parting Glass (2018) and A Bit of Light (2022), the latter starring Anna Paquin, and episodes of Sexy Beast (2024).
What works is plain from the one thing of his we have reviewed. Paquin plays Sookie tired of other people, and Moyer's reserve is exactly what she has been waiting for; her relief when she looks at him is the whole romance, and we felt the heat between them for three seasons, which is longer than we expected to feel anything in a show about Louisiana vampires. The limit is just as plain. When Alexander Skarsgård arrives as Eric, tall, amused and bored by everyone, the series goes off with him, because stillness next to amusement reads as stiffness, and Moyer's Bill has nowhere else to go. Courtliness is a fine note. It is one note.
His directing we cannot yet judge, because we have not reviewed the films. The dossier suggests a man who works with people he knows, Paquin most often, and who thinks of the job as sitting down with each actor and finding the best way together, which is what actors who direct usually say and occasionally mean. If you want the case for him, it is still the first three seasons of True Blood, before the plotting stopped trying and before the Swede walked in.
Biography
Stephen Moyer is an English actor and film director. Born Stephen John Emery on 11 October 1969 in Brentwood, Essex, he trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He began his career in theatre, appearing in productions including Romeo and Juliet with the Oxford Stage Company, before making his television debut in the 1993 British sitcom Conjugal Rites.
Moyer is best known for portraying Bill Compton in the HBO series True Blood (2008–2014), a role that also saw him direct episodes of the show. His other credits include the series The Gifted (2017–2019) as Reed Strucker, and films such as Priest (2011), Concussion (2015) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). He has appeared in earlier British television including NY-LON (2004) and the film Prince Valiant (1997).
In 2010 he married actress Anna Paquin, his co-star on True Blood.
