Any similarities you may find between the two series, both of which are produced by David Greenwalt and are about a vampire who – ho, ho – moonlights as a detective, are, of course, complete coincidence. Right…?
Says Greenwalt, “My agent said in May, “You’ve got to read this ‘Moonlight.’ It’s fantastic. And I read a couple of pages and discovered it was (about a) vampire detective, and I said, ‘Not only am I not going to read this, I’m going to sue them. This is my show!’ But he kept talking to me and, eventually, I did read it, and I did fall in love with it.
“It’s vampire 2007. It’s a new ball game. You know, it’s certainly a genre show. But just some tiny examples. You know, there are no other demons, there’s no other monsters. You know, it’s not that supernatural of a world. It’s a sleek modern world, Los Angeles. And literally the vampire makeup is different, the mythology is different, and it’s a world where they really live among us. And there’s not that many of them. And the show has all my favorite things. It’s got deep heart, and big love, and funny, which I am attracted to.”
Actor Alex O’Laughlin, meanwhile, is just plain attracted to playing a vampire, so he’s quite psyched about scoring the lead role of vampire detective Mick St. John. “I’ve been kind of obsessed with the genre since I first discovered it,” he admits. “I discovered Anne Rice when I was sort of late teens. And I read the first five or six books of “The Vampire Chronicles” twice, actually, which was a little obsessive. But I loved her character development, (and) I learned so much about the mythology of vampires through her storytelling. Also, I grew up in Australia with American TV and American cinema, because we didn’t really have that much of our own, so I grew up with all of the films that you guys did; ‘The Lost Boys’ was a huge film for me when that was made, and the ‘The Hunger’ was also something that I really loved. So, yeah, I’ve always sort of wanted to play a vampire!”
Basically, what fans of Greenwalt’s previous show should be aware of is that this is a very different universe from the one in which Angel and company reside. There are comparatively few vampires in the world of “Moonlight” (“Maybe there’s a thousand or two in all of Los Angeles,” says Greenwalt, “(so) it’s a small thing”), and, as it stands right now, there aren’t trolls, demons, and whatnot wandering around.
A closing note: during the “Bones” panel, someone asked David Boreanaz if he was planning to do a cameo on Greenwalt’s new vampire-turned-detective show. “Yeah,” he said, with a laugh. “Maybe I’ll show up as the guy who kills the vampire.”
