Carrie Preston Breaks Down True Blood's Exploding Vampire, "De-Fellatio"

The Emmy winner talks about the special effect that had her covered in blood on the HBO hit series

By Chris Harnick Jun 30, 2014 7:30 PMTags
TRUE BLOODTony Rivetti/courtesy of HBO

We need to talk about what happened to Carrie Preston's True Blood character.

Arlene Fowler Bellefleur successfully—well, almost successfully—negotiated her way out of imprisonment. Pleading with one of her vampire captors, who just so happened to be a former teacher to her kids, everything was looking up for the feisty redhead. That is until the Hep-V infected compassionate vampire fed on her and, well, exploded.

"The way they did that effect, they built an inflatable Betty...what they would do is they would deflate it really, really quickly and they would pump blood into it and all the blood would come pouring out," Preston told E! News. Yep, that wasn't a special effect. No green screen involved, all that blood shot out all over her.

"It's a practical effect that actually happened between my legs," she said with a laugh. "I ended up calling that doll De-fellatio [Laughs]—lady between my legs! I don't know if you can print that, but that's what I called her. De-fellatio remains very much part of that scene and it gets very scary, it gets very scary as the next couple of episodes are pretty terrifying…These Hep-V vampires are no joke…[T]hey're still vampires and even though they're weak, they're still vampires and they're stronger than humans.

"The carnage does not end after episode two," she said.

Well, crap.

True Blood airs Sundays, 9 p.m. on HBO.