Stephen Moyer biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Actor. Born October 11, 1969, in a small village called Herongate outside of Brentwood in Essex, England. Stephen Moyer is best known for his portrayal of seductive vampire Bill Compton on the HBO series True Blood. The actor began performing at the age of six as a choirboy at his local church, and his precocious stage presence allowed him to quickly become the head chorister. Moyer was singing at church one Sunday when the headmaster of his preparatory academy heard his voice and immediately signed him up for the school play. Moyer recalls, "The headmaster saw me, and he made me Tom Sawyer in the school play, and that was it! I played the lead in most of the school plays from then on, and I kind of knew, then and there, that I wanted to do it, from about the age of 13."

In working-class Herongate, there were few, if any, established paths for Moyer to follow toward an acting career. As Moyer explains, "I didn't know what to do, because nobody had ever done it from where I'm from. None of my family. It's not the same as going, 'I'm gonna go to Hollywood and say that I'm an actor.' … The only way in is to go to drama school, but nobody knew how to do that either." He eventually found an advertisement for drama school in the back of the periodical Stage and Television Today and immediately filled out the application. Soon after, he auditioned for and was accepted into the London Academy for Music and Dramatic Arts and graduated as a classically trained actor in 1988, at the age of 19.

British Theater and TV Roles

For the next five years, Stephen Moyer performed with such prestigious stage companies as the National Theatre of Wales and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He performed in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and an acclaimed production of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy that featured all three plays in one night. "Six hours long," Moyer recalls. "If you got through it, it was rewarding, but most people were asleep after about two hours." After spending one year as Romeo in a touring production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, in 1993 Moyer broke into television with a role on the British sitcom Conjugal Rights. The show was best known for featuring a talking dog, a gimmick Moyer later called "heinous" and "a crime against television."

Moyer went on to star in a variety of British TV shows through the 1990s, including Castles (1995), A Touch of Frost (1997), The Grand (1997) and Life Support (1999). With the money he earned from his television career, Moyer purchased and moved into a purple houseboat on a London canal, where he threw posh parties attended by celebrities such as rock star Pete Townshend.