The new cover of Rolling Stone is doing what it does best — get your attention long enough to pull you inside the cover — with a trio of naked vampires drenched in blood. As contradictory as it may read, the cover, featuring the blood-drenched (and naked) stars of HBO’s hit vampire drama “True Blood,” it is meant to exude sexiness. The new Rolling Stone cover is also causing quite the Internet sensation.
Anna Paquin takes center picture, her leg held just high enough to eclipse Alexander Skarsgard’s middle, her left hand reaching back to clasp Stephen Moyer’s thigh. Moyer embraces Paquin from behind, his right arm crooked around her neck to clasp her left breast. She wears nothing but blood and an arrogant pout, while Skarsgard and Moyer have a slightly lowered, predatory look. If anything, they’re keeping in character, blood, sex, and all.
Alexander Skarsgard, who plays vampire Eric Northman on the hit series, notes that he’s comfortable getting naked — for Rolling Stone or on the set of “True Blood.” He recently told Us magazine, “I don’t want a sock around it, that feels ridiculous,” Skarsgard said, according to Us magazine, “If we’re naked in the scene, then I’m naked. I’ve always been that way.”
Stephen Moyer, who plays Bill Compton, however, does don a sock. Anna Paquin (“Sookie Stackhouse”), Moyer’s real-life fiancee, walks around topless on the set, but wears a “patch” over her nether region.
As for their characters and the sexiness they exude in the show, Moyer waxes psycho-analytical about vampires in the interview, “The Joy of Vampire Sex,” with Rolling Stone. “If we go from a base level,” he said, “vampires create a hole in the neck where there wasn’t one before. It’s a de-virginization… creating blood and then drinking the virginal blood.”
He adds, “And there’s something sharp, the fang, which is probing and penetrating and moving into it. So that’s pretty sexy.”
Later, with a nod toward “Twilight,” he notes, “Plus, Robert Pattinson is just hot, right?”
Sexy vampires have been with us for awhile. Even Bram Stoker’s Dracula had sexual undertones. “True Blood” and the modern vampire story’s sexual components are simply a reflection of modern sexual mores and the increased acceptability of sex as an open subject. Rolling Stone has been at the forefront of the sexual discussion for decades, probing, questioning, provoking…
Putting people on the cover of the magazine in various degrees of nakedness…
True to form, the latest Rolling Stone cover is a provocative cover, all sexy and eye-catching and edgy, just as anyone familiar with the magazine has come to expect over the years. A few weeks ago, Lady Gaga’s somewhat naked form (in black thong and matching machine gun bra) graced the cover. Still, she had been on the cover in even less a few months back, bubbles strategically placed to hide her nakedness.
Naked and Rolling Stone have gone together since John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous cover in 1968, where they showed their bare derrieres. And who can forget Janet Jackson’s cover, where a pair of anonymous hands covered her breasts, or the one where the Red Hot Chili Peppers stood in all their glory with only their hands crossing their manly parts.
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Sources:
RollingStone.com
Usmagazine.com
Rolling Stone via PeaceFMOnline.com
