Premiering last week the new CBS vampire drama “Moonlight” took a cue from Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt’s “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” spin-off series “Angel”, about a vampire detective with a soul fighting the good fight in Los Angeles.
The series, originally called “Twilight” from producer Joel Silver never actually had a full pilot filmed initially, and instead presented the network with selected scenes to get a green light.
Alex O’Loughlin plays our new leading vamp named Mick St. John, a Los Angeles detective who has sympathy for human kind. He gets his blood from a fellow vamp at the local morgue and generally tries to do something positive with his immortal gifts.
His greatest temptation is the love of his afterlife, Beth, played by British actress Sophia Myles. O’Loughlin took a few minutes out of fighting the good fight to fill ‘iF Magazine’ in on the series that never was, and what we can expect from a new breed of undead hero.
iFMagazine.com, October 2007
iF: You’ve said you are a big Anne Rice fan. Will that blend of blood, sex, lust, love and everything in be incorporated into the vampires on MOONLIGHT?
Alex: Yeah, I’m a big Anne Rice fan. We’re on CBS network TV and there’s only so much we can show and only so much we can do in front of the cameras.
We can incorporate anything emotionally behind the characters and how they work. I don’t think the world of MOONLIGHT is quite as erotic as the world of Anne Rice, but the levels of mysticism and the depth of character and the romanticism in her books is definitely there.
All of those things are especially present in my character.
iF: How much changed from the original pilot to the current way the series is?
Alex: There are some fundamental differences. There is a lighter touch. The original pilot wasn’t really a pilot, it was a pilot presentation. It was like a pilot with all of the extraneous exposition taken out and it was just fiery scenes back to back.
It was two hundred hours we shot in twelve days of really intense highly emotional scenes and we tied all these big storylines together in one thirty minute episode. So, what we’ve done now is brought those big storylines and spread them across the first three episodes; it’s diluted six to one essentially.
The magic of the story hasn’t been diluted and the cast hasn’t been diluted. We’ve just spread out these pinnacles of storytelling that we’re going to go into.
iF: So did your character change then?
Alex: No not really. Not too much. Actually, you know what, no. Essentially what has happened for me is I am now able to be lighter which is great. It’s what I really wanted.
He’s a pretty dark dude, but he was a dark and brooding dude before when I did the pilot. Essentially, it was just the way he came together and how it was cut together; like a lot of the smiles were cut from the original presentation.
It was really dark before and that’s not the most interesting way to spend a Friday night, if you know what I mean.
We want people to let this guy into their living rooms every week.
iF: So the vampire can be dark but he also has to be charming and appealing?
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. As an actor I approach this character, as a guy who just happens to be a vampire. He just happens to have this curse that he didn’t want and didn’t ask for and now it just so happens he has to live off of human blood. Other than that; he’s just a normal guy.
Here are some of the differences between the original pilot (or 30 minute pilot presentation as Alex calls it) and Moonlight, which we highlighted in a story last year.
Alex O´Loughlin ~ An Intense Study 
thank goodness they made those changes. The Mick we know and love is the one who shows his humanity and that beautiful smile 🙂
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