True Blood's Carrie Preston on Playing Arlene, Dying Her Hair, and Being Married to Ben From Lost

Tell me about meeting Alan Ball. I remember you were in Towelhead, is that where the association began?

Uh-huh. Alan and I are both from Georgia, and he cast me in Towelhead and we just hit it off. We were both on the set and I asked him what he was doing next, and he said, "Believe it or not, but I'm doing this vampire pilot for HBO." I was like, "What?" I mean, that was the last thing I expected him to say, and then he said, "I think I might have something in there for you." So then my agents got ahold of the script and read it, and I didn't know what he was talking about. It's not like you read the description of Arlene and "Carrie Preston" is who jumps to mind. I know that if I hadn't worked with him on Towelhead, I wouldn't have even auditioned for that.

Now, tell me about What's Wrong with Virginia. Who do you play in that?

It's Lance's first film, and it's really funny and dark. It's kind of what you would expect from him -- it has lots of religious undertones. It's basically a mother/son story, where Jennifer Connelly is the mother and she's been having a longtime affair with Ed Harris's character, who's Mormon and married and has all these sexual hangups. It's all very tortured, and I play the next door neighbor, Betty, who's pretty middle class, Southern, a little trashy. Oddly, she ends up being this sort of support system for the kid, and he does get some good advice from her that he's not able to get from his mother. I dyed my hair dark for that, I'm a brunette in that one. The many hairstyles of Carrie Preston! [Laughs]

How was Lance as a director?

Lance did a beautiful job. I think he's incredibly bright and he kept a cool head on set. It's a low-budget film by Hollywood standards, and he was able to stay on track. He didn't even work with a monitor -- he worked with the actors and trusted the DP. It was kind of a nice experience, and it was fun to play a Southern character who's different than Arlene. I tend to play every color in the Southern rainbow, and the challenge is to make each character different so I'm not doing any generic "Southern acting."

Finally, Carrie, I was looking at your IMDb profile: Did you really play three different characters on Law and Order: Criminal Intent?

[Laughs] I did! I played two killers and a victim, and they're all vastly different. One killer was suffering from postpartum depression and she ends up blowing her kids up in a car, and then I played this really rich, ambitious woman who talks her sister-in-law into killing each other's husbands, kind of like Strangers on a Train, only the sister won't do it and I end up having to kill both the husbands. [Laughs] Then I played this woman who's been bamboozled by this guy who infects her with an animal virus. That was my victim.

And I imagine they all had completely different hairstyles.

Absolutely. In one of them I was a brunette again, in one I was a mousy blonde, and then in the other one I was a super blonde with highlights. Law and Order does that, you know. Like, I have a friend who's done something like twelve different roles in the entire Law and Order franchise.

Wow.

There's a lot of actors in New York who've done that! Like they'll play a lawyer, then a victim, then a lawyer, then a doctor. But there are rules. You have to let at least a year and a half go by before you can do any of the others.

And now I know. Thanks, Carrie. By the way, if you ever put out Carrie Preston's guide to hairstyles, I will totally buy it.

[Laughs] Thank you so much. I will work on that.

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