10 Things You Might Not Know About True Blood's Bill and Sookie

The couple met at the audition for True Blood. When they read their lines together, the director certainly spotted chemistry enough to cast them. But that was not feigned.

A very real attraction was buzzing between Sookie and Bill, and it spilled out into real life.

By the end of the first season, they were dating. By the second, they were engaged.

Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin married in a private ceremony in Malibu, California, on August 21st 2010. Security was so tight that even the famously invasive Hollywood press only secured a couple of highly grainy, long distance photographs.

Stephen Moyer was already a father. Due to a previous relationship, his son Billy was born in 2000. Two years later, he had a daughter named Lilac with British journalist Lorien Haynes.

Billy lives in London with his mother, but Stephen speaks to him regularly using Skype and visits often. Lilac lives in Los Angeles. The proximity ensures that he sees even more of her.

By 2012, two years after they tied the knot, the showbiz gossip columns went into overdrive. Anna Paquin was very obviously pregnant. She received a round of applause, when she turned up at Comic Com with a large bump.

Fans of True Blood will need to look very carefully at the camera angles, during filming in season five. They were done to disguise the fact that Sookie is apparently expecting!

Anna gave birth to fraternal twins - a boy and a girl - in September 2012. There was a scare, when they were born prematurely, but both babies are doing well now.

In real life, Anna Paquin has naturally long, black hair. Stephen described it in Byronic fashion as 'raven tresses'.  She dyes it blonde in order to play Sookie Stackhouse. The waitress has that coloring in the books written by Charlaine Harris, upon which True Blood is based.

Dark-haired Bill also gets his look with the help of a bottle of hair dye.  In reality, Stephen Moyer has light brown hair. So light, in fact, that it is easily bleached blond by sunlight.

In between stints of filming True Blood, the couple revert to their natural colors. It helps keep them from being recognized in the street!

One of the things that I absolutely adore about True Blood are the accents. The show is set in Louisiana, so everyone sounds like they hail from the American South.

Bill Compton, in particular, has a syntax a little like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. As he well should, as he was alive during the American Civil War.

But those accents have been developed with the help of dialect coaches. In reality, Anna Paquin has a New Zealand accent. She was born in Canada, but moved there when she was four years old.

Stephen Moyer does come from the south, but not the American South. He's English. He normally speaks with a broad Essex twang! (Of every fact uncovered for this article, this was the one which floored me most of all!)

The actor behind Bill Compton has not forgotten his roots, despite the shift in on-camera accent.

In 2007, before True Blood was even made, Stephen Moyer was a reasonably successful actor. He'd played parts in staple British dramas, like Casualty and The Bill, before crossing the Atlantic to appear in shows like Waking the Dead.

But it had all begun for him in his local theater in Brentwood. He wanted to give something back by becoming its patron.

His work there has extended into the Stephen Moyer Kids Theatre Fund, which aims to provide the funding for child actors to follow their dreams.

When Anna Paquin's name popped up on the True Blood opening credits, those of a certain age had a double-take. We knew that name!

It had been a good few years, but who could forget THAT performance in The Piano. We all wept with her, when the child received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Anna Paquin was only nine years old, when she accompanied her sister Katya to the film's auditions. She hadn't planned to try for the role herself, but kind of got swept up in the mood. Nor was the independently made, New Zealand movie predicted to be so BIG!

It was so good. She was so good. On a global scale, audiences talked about nothing else for weeks! I remember it happening. I bought the film in 1993!

In an unguarded (and probably unwise) moment, Stephen Moyer upset Twilight fans.

He'd been asked his opinion of Edward Cullen as a vampire. Stephen responded that Cullen was a bit of a 'pussy'. To make things worse, he added, '(Edward Cullen) is the slim-fast, diet Coke of vampires.'

The Twilight fandom (over-)reacted instantly, internationally and viciously. Not only did blogs, social media and forums fill with shrieking indignation, but Stephen still receives some pretty full on hate mail.

Even if Anna Paquin had taken her husband's name upon marriage, she still wouldn't be Mrs Moyer.

Stephen Moyer is a stage name. The name on his birth certificate and legal documentation is Stephen John Emery. Until he came to join the actor's union Equity, it was also the name by which he'd been billed in all those plays for LAMDA.

In Britain, professional actors have to be registered with Equity. But there was already another Stephen Emery on the books. This is why our actor scrambled about for a new moniker and came up with Moyer.

It was worth it though. His Equity card made him eligible to work for three years at the world famous Royal Shakespeare Company!