Denis O'Hare : NYTimes

NEXT weekend the Tony Award-winning actor Denis O’Hare opens on Broadway in “Elling,” playing an anxious mental patient trying to re-enter society. But if you’re a fan of the HBO series “True Blood,” in which he plays the arrogant and acerbic Russell Edgington, the vampire king of Mississippi, what you no doubt want to hear about are his fangs.

Mr. O’Hare has two sets, hard and soft. The soft are used in bite scenes, so he does not hurt anyone. He does not keep fangs around the house; they’re the property of the show. He did get a pair made up for his longtime partner, whose dream is to slip them on while traveling in a plane first class and order a martini.

The blood on “True Blood” is both edible and nonedible. The edible tastes minty. Confections vary, but a popular mix is pomegranate juice mixed with cornstarch to make it gelatinous. For one scene, in which Mr. O’Hare tossed back a goblet’s worth, there were 15 takes, and he got extremely sick.

And no, Mr. O’Hare, who seized on his role with the mad glee of a dog in a sausage factory, did not go out in character on Halloween.

“Amateur night,” he said. “I don’t dress up unless I’m getting paid.”

A character actor has many faces, and none. Onstage Mr. O’Hare has played an accountant who falls in love with a gay baseball player in “Take Me Out,” which won him his Tony; a homophobic senator in “Milk”; and the usual array of characters (killer priest, rapist delivery guy) on “Law & Order.”

The real Mr. O’Hare is 48, slight, with a receding hairline. He lives in a former stable converted into a duplex in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn — the sort of place with a rain-forest shower in the bathroom and big, unsecured columns in the living room. Since his partner, Hugo Redwood, is a decorator, Mr. O’Hare never knows what he will come home to, he said. (How Mr. O’Hare met Mr. Redwood is best left until his sensitivity as an artist has been established.) There is a white Shiba Inu named Cleo, with fur like a husky; two fat exotic fish in a tank; and an upright piano downstairs, at which Mr. O’Hare sits and nonchalantly knocks off a Beethoven sonata after Mr. Redwood texts and asks him to toss his jiu jitsu outfit into the washer. It’s that level of domesticity. As for the piano playing, in the old days Mr. O’Hare could do that drunk. While onstage.

“Elling,” in which Mr. O’Hare stars with Brendan Fraser, is drawn from the novels of Ingvar Ambjornsen. (The books also inspired an Oscar-nominated 2002 film.) It’s about two mental patients, newly released from an institution, who share an apartment in Oslo as they try to become part of normal life. Mr. O’Hare’s role is a frightened obsessive, afraid of answering the telephone or leaving his apartment, and who frequently loses his temper.

Mr. O’Hare said he understood this character instantly.

“Probably I have more phobias, fear and eccentricities than I would care to admit,” he said. “I don’t think I’m in danger of losing my mind, but I do often question my own behavior. I have a very bad temper, and it’s not always healthy for me and for others. I make my way in the world more difficult, and I could do with a little more yoga.”

This is an understatement.

“Anybody who knows me has said, ‘I had a Denis O’Hare moment,’ ” Mr. O’Hare said. “I suppose in the kindest instance it means standing up for yourself.” “In the unkindest,” he added, “it means the crazy guy in the street.”

Mr. O’Hare’s most famous scene in “True Blood” comes while the vampires are pushing for an equal-rights amendment. His character bursts into a television studio, rips out the spine of the newscaster and delivers an enraged monologue, saying that vampires do not seek equal rights with humans because they are not their equals — they are their betters. “We will eat you, and then we will eat your children,” he says. Then with an unctuous smile: “And now for the weather. Tiffany?”

Mr. O’Hare had previously said that he used his rage over politics regarding gay marriage to fuel that scene. But it was also, he said now, “broader than that.”

“I somewhat resist the whole gay rights-vampire rights metaphor because it is fraught with problems,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen as a gay man as a blood-sucking killer. I don’t think it is the way to win hearts and minds.”

“The point for me was, it was a way for me to understand Russell’s rage,” he added. “I have had this argument for years that as a gay person no one gives me my rights. They are mine. I don’t need to have them conferred on me. I don’t need anyone’s approval. You do need to get out of my way.”

Is Mr. O’Hare, who is part of the “It Gets Better” campaign to prevent suicide among young gay and transgendered people, still calling the White House once a week?

“No, because the White House is good now,” he said. “I did it for seven years, at least once a week. Maybe not always. I’d take a couple of weeks off. I also called the Family Research Council and all the wavering senators when the gay-rights legislation in New York was voted down.”

Mr. O’Hare was born in Kansas City, Mo., the fourth of five children, and grew up in the Michigan suburbs. His father, John, was a labor negotiator; his mother, Karene, who died of ovarian cancer two years ago, was a nurse. Mr. O’Hare knew he was gay from the time he was 5, or at least he knew whom he liked, he said. He had his first boyfriend at 12 but tried to fight being gay, and in high school he also had girlfriends.

“They all looked similar,” he said, “short haired and flat chested.”

He came out to his father when he was 19, drunk and home from college, waking him up at 4 a.m. to give him the news. While he speaks openly about the deaths of his mother and a former lover, and mentions casual hookups, that night is one subject he shies away from revisiting. It did not go well, he said. There was a television set in the room that was off, and his father kept his eyes on it the entire time, Mr. O’Hare said. Yet when he became an actor, his parents rarely missed a show.

Mr. O’Hare graduated fromNorthwestern University, spent a number of years in Chicago, working as a bartender and waiter (he was fired once for insubordination and sued), and performing with the small, nonprofit Stormfield Theater Company. He also drank, and not just socially. He frequently blacked out; one Sunday morning he was drunk in a bar when he remembered — almost too late — that he had a matinee to play.

He stopped drinking only because the man he was seeing then gave him 30 days to get sober. He waited until the 30th day, then called a rehab center and argued for about an hour. His sobriety date is May 22, 1989.

There were other big dates: 1992, when he came to New York in John Logan’s play “Hauptmann”; 1994, when he met Derek Anson Jones, with whom he lived and bought the apartment in Brooklyn; Jan. 17, 2000, when Mr. Jones, who became a successful director, died of AIDS. Mr. Jones had told Mr. O’Hare he was H.I.V. positive two weeks after they met. “I thought about it and decided you don’t get to pick who you love,” said Mr. O’Hare, who remains healthy.

About five months after Mr. Jones’s death, Mr. O’Hare met Mr. Redwood. They met, Mr. O’Hare told Sanford Marcus on the blog Queer Sighted, in a chat room on AOL, from which he was booted after he sent Mr. Redwood an X-rated photograph of himself.

How X-rated was it?, a reporter from the mainstream media asked.

“You send the picture with the information you need,” Mr. O’Hare said, adding that he sent the photo a month after they began chatting. “We’re gay men. How else do you meet? It’s: ‘What do you got? Cool, I can work with that.’ ”

He talked about the evening Mr. Redwood came over.

“He shows up in a black Town Car, in black ribbed sweater and architect glasses. I thinking, I’m not ready for someone this stylish. I just wanted to have a little fun, and he looked so daunting. Then he sees the buzzer, my name is on it and Derek Jones. He goes, ‘Oh, the cat’s away, the mouse will play.’ He wouldn’t let it go. He said, ‘Where’s Derek tonight?’ I said, ‘He’s dead.’ Without a pause Hugo says, ‘That’s a buzz killer,’ and I thought, this is going to be just fine.”

The reporter has found a very different picture from the one Mr. O’Hare originally sent online. It shows Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Redwood, fully dressed, in an embrace. Mr. O’Hare — provocateur, angry man, tearer of spines from bodies — has his eyes closed in an expression of contentment like that of well-fed kitten.

The reporter put the photo on the table. As an actor, whose business it is to understand body language, how would Mr. O’Hare describe what is going on between those two men?

“Peace, being completely at home,” Mr. O’Hare said. “I am completely myself with him. It’s very comfortable. I just keep coming up with the word ‘serene.’ ”

The reporter has been thinking it is someone luxuriating in secure love.

“I was thinking that word too,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Luxuriating.”