Joe Jonas: "Nothing Wrong With Being Gay"

Pop star Joe Jonas isn't gay but doesn't seem to mind the gay rumors that have dogged him in recent months, according to a new profile in Details magazine.

"There's nothing wrong with being gay," Jonas says, "but I'm not." The middle Jonas brother, 21, was bluntly asked if he's gay by paparazzi last January. Details speculates that part of the reason for the rumors may have been Jonas's playful video homage to Beyoncé's "Single Ladies," in which he dressed in a leotard and heels and danced to make good on a sports bet with some friends. The video of his performance was watched by more than 25 million viewers on YouTube.

Here is the complete Details magazine interview:

Joe Jonas is going grocery shopping, walking along a busy commercial section of Hollywood. No one notices him, no tween girls shriek, as he weaves through the sidewalk traffic. Joe doesn't much look like a Jonas Brother anymore. Gone is his telltale luxurious sweep of black hair. Now it's cropped in a look one of his handlers likes to call "Top Gun-Tom Cruise," and he's wearing a rakish beard and mustache, along with skinny jeans that hang low enough to reveal the pattern on his boxers. These signs of testosterone seem to defy the boy band's squeaky-clean image—the three brothers wore "purity rings," pledging chastity until marriage. Joe, 21, looks all grown up. And there isn't a purity ring in sight.

"'Does anyone ever tell you you look like Joe Jonas?' I get that a lot," Joe says in his mild, soft-spoken way. "Or they'll say, 'You're so much cuter in person.' Or 'Where are your brothers?'" He laughs. "It's not like we wake up in the same bed."

Joe moved out of the home he shared with his parents and his brothers, Kevin, 23, and Nick, 18, a year and a half ago, to rent a house with some buddies in Los Feliz. But it was haunted, he says—"We'd hear footsteps"—and he often thought about getting his own place. Then, about nine months ago, he started dating Twilight star Ashley Greene, and the idea of a little privacy became more appealing. So last November, he found a bachelor pad in this part of town, which he likes because "it's like my mini New York. I got my gym a few blocks away"—where he's been working out five days a week with his trainer.

"I like to watch all the crazy characters in the neighborhood," he says. "I saw this gay homeless guy that got arrested. When the cops said, 'Spread 'em,' he was like, 'You'd like that, wouldn't you?'" Joe grins; he likes a good comeback.

In addition to hitting the gym regularly, Joe is also a fan of bars in the area, like the Bowery on Sunset, because it's "really laid-back." Wait a minute—didn't the Jonas Brothers, who provided the voices of cherubs in 2009's Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, swear off alcoholic beverages?

Yes, but that was back when Joe was living with his mom, Denise, and his dad, Kevin Sr., a former evangelical preacher who now comanages the band. It was also before Joe decided to do a solo album, the first single from which will be released next month.

"I'm growing up, the fans are growing up," Joe says. "I've gone through a lot of stuff in my life so far. There are stories I haven't really been able to tell. When you're writing with three people, you wind up with a sound that might be—not average—but, you know, expected."

The moment he walks into Trader Joe's, the sound system starts playing "Year 3000," a Jonas Brothers hit from their first album, 2006's It's About Time. The boys' cheerful guitar riffs and boisterous voices fill the giant store. "I didn't call and arrange this," Joe says, amused, as he grabs a cart.

Joe's apartment, a loft studio in a brand-new high-rise, is sizable, but it's modest for a young man who, with his brothers, made $35.5 million last year, putting them at No. 40 on the Forbes "Celebrity 100." There's a stunning 180-degree view of Los Angeles. There's a vintage Pac Man game, a Batman pinball machine, a Baldwin piano, and an 8-month-old English-bulldog puppy named Winston. There's a Warholesque painting of Mick Jagger by a local artist. Joe—who is known for his on-stage brio, his jumps and kicks and orgasmic facial contortions—has said that he idolizes the performance styles of Jagger and Freddie Mercury, "the big frontmen."

There's also a framed photograph of Joe and his brothers at the White House with President Obama and Paul McCartney—on the wall right by the front door, so you can't miss it. "I didn't know who to be more excited about," Joe says of the meeting, which took place last year when McCartney received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The Jonas Brothers performed a cover of "Drive My Car" at the event.

"I heard [McCartney] told somebody, 'I want the new Beatles to come and play for me,'" Joe says, his chocolate-brown eyes growing wider.

Joe will tell you stories about famous rockers giving props to a band that the New York Times has called "among the most culturally important American rock bands of the last decade."

"Pat [Patrick Carney], the drummer for the Black Keys, I met him at a Kings of Leon concert in London"—coincidentally, it was at that same concert that Joe met Greene—"and he was like, 'I used to shit on you guys, but then I actually listened to your stuff, and you're so rad.'"

A Black Keys record is playing on Joe's turntable as he makes taco filling, simmering chicken in olive oil and lemonade. He's into cooking. After he got his own place, he says, "I fell in love with it. I became friends with a lot of chefs. I was a judge on Top Chef last year. It was a dream come true."

Then he pauses a moment; his thick, dark eyebrows knit together. He looks like a teenager again. "You know what? I forgot to get tortillas."

The taco filling winds up being wrapped into big pieces of lettuce—a fine, healthy, Asian-inspired solution. Joe stands at the counter as he tucks into his new culinary invention and starts talking excitedly about his solo album (which is as yet unnamed). He has been recording in L.A. for the past couple of months but says the idea came to him in the summer of 2009 when the JoBros were in Rome. "We were sitting in this beautiful Colosseum-looking hotel. And I was starting to think, 'I really wanna do a solo project.' My brother Nick did one. It wasn't really as big as..." Here he catches himself. Nick's solo album, Who I Am, released last year, received mixed reviews and sold fewer than 200,000 copies in the U.S.

"He wasn't really hoping for it to be huge," says Joe, who calls Nick "my best friend." "It was more for himself. He wanted to do a record that he really believed in. And so I was like, 'I would really like to make music that inspires me,' 'cause with the Jonas Brothers stuff, we can be constricted in what we can and cannot do.

"I wanted to do something you could hear in a club or something you could dance to, something that's fun—something that's me. I think it was definitely because I was getting older. But it was also a kind of a scary thought. 'Cause you go, 'I don't want to offend my brothers.' You know?"

But when he approached Nick and Kevin, they were all for it. He also got the blessing of Hollywood Records, the Jonas Brothers' label, which is owned by Disney and which sold 8.5 million copies of the band's last three albums—Jonas Brothers, A Little Bit Longer, and Lines, Vines and Trying Times.

But the boys in the band aren't really boys anymore, and the sales of their recent albums have slipped slightly. Their 2009 Disney Channel sitcom, Jonas L.A., didn't catch on with viewers and was canceled after two seasons. Their debut film, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, was a disappointment, earning just over $19 million.

The thinking at Disney HQ seems to be that a solo turn by Joe might be a way for the Brothers to recapture their maturing fan base and possibly develop a new one. "We're not breaking up, we're just taking a break," Joe says. "I really have a hope for the fans that got older and went, 'You know what, I'm really not into the Jonas Brothers anymore,' that I'm able to catch their ear again with my project and they're able to go, like, 'Hey, this is cool stuff, I'm happy listening to this, I'm not embarrassed listening to this.'"

"I'm wildly supportive," says Rich Ross, chairman of Walt Disney Studios. "Going solo is a very good idea for Joe at this age. It's like graduating from college."

But will Joe Jonas be believable as a real rock star? Can the fans ever forget that they loved him in fourth grade?

"I look at Joe's scenario as kind of like when Justin Timberlake broke out of 'N Sync," says Rob Knox, a producer working on Joe's solo project who previously teamed up with Rihanna and Jamie Foxx. "Justin was 21 when he came out as a solo artist. Joe is coming to producers who know how to create that edgier pop feeling. We're not doing any boy-band songs."

What they are doing, Joe says, is an eclectic mixture of "electro indie pop rock." "It's Joe's album, it's not just something put together for him," says Danja, another veteran producer on the project, whose past work includes Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds. "He's collaborating with the writing. He's very different from what you'd expect. All I can say is he's an adult man. He has a rock-star edge about him."

If Nick was always the cute Jonas, and Kevin the other Jonas, then Joe was the sexy one. The shrieks of the Brothers' 10,000-plus crowds are usually induced by his hip-swiveling-and-mic-twirling routine.

"Being on stage makes me come to life," Joe says. "When all eyes are on you, they're watching every move you make."

His gyrations have apparently caught the eyes of a number of fetching young female entertainers. He's dated the troubled Disney star Demi Lovato ("I wish her the best") and the actress Camilla Belle. Taylor Swift was so bitter after their breakup that she wrote a song about it ("Forever & Always") and went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, in 2008, to complain that Joe had dumped her in a phone call that lasted 27 seconds.

Joe countered by saying that it was Swift who had hung up on him. Now he says, "I think all artists have a right to write about what happens to them. But," he adds with a smile, "I have a right to write about things too."

He won't say whether his album will contain a Swift rebuttal—just that there will be songs about "different love scenarios that I've been through, breakups, hurts. Me hurting somebody and feeling bad about it. I think there's a lot of scenarios where people might wanna hear my side of the story."

But who would break up with Joe?

"Some guy," he says with a laugh.

It's a nod to the gay rumors he's been fending off ever since he got into a verbal altercation with some taunting paparazzi earlier this year. "There's nothing wrong with being gay," he says now, "but I'm not." Adding to the buzz, he dressed up in a leotard and heels and danced to "Single Ladies"—to comic effect—to square a sports bet with some buddies. He got the idea from his fans. The video of his performance got more than 25 million hits on YouTube.

But he really did have his heart broken; it was about two years ago, and the young woman was someone in the entertainment world. "I won't say her name," Joe says. "But I was in a relationship, and we tried to work things out, and she, you know—I was really upset because she—she broke up with me." A sadness lingers in his voice.

By contrast, his relationship with Ashley Greene, who's 24, "feels good," he says. "I think what works about it is she really puts my feelings first. She understands my busy schedule. She'll fly out to my shows—she's been to places in South America that I can't even pronounce." And in January, he visited her in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while she was shooting the next two installments of the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn: Part I and Part II (Greene plays the psychic vampire Alice Cullen). He also flew to Jacksonville, Florida, to meet her parents. "Her dad can drink me to shame," Joe says. "He's awesome."

Times are changing for the Jonas Brothers, with Joe going solo (for now) and Kevin marrying Danielle Deleasa, a former hairdresser, in 2009. "Actually, I hit on her first," Joe says of meeting his future sister-in-law when the band of brothers were on vacation in the Bahamas. "And after that she and Kevin hit it off, of course. Now we have a fourth person traveling with us everywhere, so that's a different thing completely."

It's afternoon. Joe's driving his big black Mercedes G-Class down Sunset to the studio to work on his album. He's thinking about the days when he and his brothers and his dad toured the country with a trailer full of instruments, performing wherever they could. Success did not come easily, he says, and it got to the point where "we were about to say, 'This sucks—we don't want to do this anymore,' but then it all sort of started to happen for us."

And happen it did. "We've seen every state in America besides Alaska and Hawaii, been all over Europe. It's been so much fun." Sure, there have been times when it's gotten a little weird, rocking out for little girls. "We did some things that were like, 'Really? We're gonna do this? Like, go and play for an elementary school, are you serious?' At the time I was like, 'I'm 17, I wanna go meet girls at high schools.'

"And now I'm 21," Joe adds. "I wanna go play my music in a club."

Joe draws inspiration from one of his heroes—Bono—in moving forward with his dream: "I just want to believe that people are gonna really accept me for who I am and the music that I'm making now."

Joe went to see U2 play in Toronto last year. "After the show we got an e-mail saying Bono wants to invite you to the after-party. He comes waltzing in with his jean jacket buttoned down to here, pointing his finger at everybody. We hung out with him till three in the morning. He told me, 'The songs you write, really be honest, don't hold anything back. The reason for being an artist is you gotta be honest.' And I was like, 'Wow.'

"He said, 'I have countries that hate me, but I don't care. I have dictators that wanna put my head on a stick. So the next time you write a song, write from the heart, and really be honest, and don't be afraid of it.'"

Joe arrives at Henson Recording Studios—Charlie Chaplin's old studio. He parks the car. "When I was younger," he says, getting out, "I was always trying to make people satisfied with the way they thought I was supposed to be. And finally understanding that, in music, you can really be yourself and people accept you for who you are, that was a big thing to me." Work awaits, and as he heads inside, he adds: "I'm really excited to get the ball rolling and write some more stories in the book of craziness."

Glee's Matthew Morrison: I'm Not a Good Boyfriend

You might be really into Matthew Morrison. Trouble is, he might not be that into you.

"I'm not a good friend right now. I'm not a good boyfriend," the Glee star tells Details in its December/January issue.

But it's not personal. "It's not that I'm selfish," he says. "I'm just focused."

Working 15 hours a day leaves the actor little time for romance. "It's been a while," he says. "Meeting people, you wonder, 'What does this person see in me?' "

It wasn't always so. Morrison, 32, fondly recalls being smitten with the opposite sex as a young actor performing in musicals in New York. "I definitely hooked up with a lot of girls when I was a young guy on Broadway," he says. "It was exciting. Very joyous and free."

Still, he remains a bit conflicted about his attractiveness to women. "I'm not comfortable with the idea of my sex appeal, but I know in my job I have to use it," he says. "I wish I could say I got to this point in my career based on my talent, but I don't think that's true."

The maturity Morrison found on the other side of 30 allows him to be a teacher not just in the Fox show but also on set.

"I am a teacher to them," he says of his younger castmates, whom he refers to as "the kids." "I've taken a few under my wing."

And he wishes some of them could be less publicity driven. "I find myself learning a lot from the set," he says. "I do look at stuff people on the show are doing, and I don't judge them, but I question it. I say to myself, 'Keep quiet.' Fame. It's like a handgun – in the wrong hands, it's dangerous."

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

On being a straight actor in a theater scene dominated by women and gay men:“There was so much opportunity. There were all these beautiful, beautiful dancers. As a straight guy I had some room. There were the shared interests in singing and dancing, and I always find dancing with someone very evocative and sexual. I definitely hooked up with a lot of girls when I was a young guy on Broadway. It was exciting. Very joyous and free.”

On being perceived as a sex object which still confuses him: “I’m not comfortable with the idea of my sex appeal, but I know in my job I have to use it. I wish I could say I got to this point in my career based on my talent, but I don’t think that’s true.”

On his dating life now: “It’s been a while. Meeting people, you wonder, ‘What does this person see in me?’ ” That’s not where his head is at. “I’m not a good friend right now. I’m not a good boyfriend. It’s not that I’m selfish. I’m just focused.”

Here are pictures from the photo shoot:

Gavin Rossdale Admits to Fling with British Androgynous Singer Marilyn

Gavin Rossdale has been married to No Doubt star Gwen Stefani for ages, but his love life before he met her was pretty experimental. Rossdale had a fling with gender-bending singer Marilyn in the 1980s, but he didn’t admit to the relationship before because of the “glare” of the media.

Gavin said: “I think at the outset there was a sort of fear -- that was right at the beginning of Bush, and I didn't want it to be part of it. It felt like a cheap shot, so I was like, ‘I'm not getting involved.’

“I've never wanted to appear closed about it. It's not something I've talked about really because it's always been in the glare of a tabloid world. It's just one of those things -- move on.

“When you're 17, Jesus Christ, I don't think there's anything strange about any form of anything -- you're learning about life. It's a part of growing up. That's it. No more, no less.”

Asked if it was a one-time experimentation, he said: “Yeah. That was it. You have to know what you like, and I know what I like.”

Gavin has also spoken candidly about his relationship with his 21-year-old model daughter Daisy Lowe.

The 44-year-old musician admits he feels more like a friend to Daisy, whom he only found out was his daughter in 2004 after her mother Pearl Lowe revealed her parentage.

Gavin, who had been Daisy’s godfather, added in an interview with Details magazine: “With the boys it’s traditional. I’m all they know and I’m with them all the time. With Daisy, I don’t know her in that context.

“The way I nurture those boys, I never got a chance with Daisy. I love my connection with her, but I don't have any say in who she is. With the boys it's my job to correct them and shape them. With Daisy, I just have to be respectful. I suppose it's more like a friendship.”

Marilyn previously claimed he had a five-year relationship with Gavin, which he agreed to keep secret for the sake of his rock career.

Marilyn (real name Peter Robinson) said: “He was the love of my life. We were together five years, but it felt like 40. He was just becoming successful in America. I agreed to lie against every grain of my being."

The androgynous singer’s close friend Boy George alleged the two men had a relationship in his autobiography 'Take It Like A Man.'

Detail Magazine: The Men of True Blood

The recipe for TV's hottest show is simple: one part sex, two parts blood, and three parts played by actors Stephen Moyer, Ryan Kwanten, and Alexander Skarsgård.

Below is the article by Meghan Daum from Details Magazine on these three hot stars.

ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD

Three weeks before Alexander Skarsgård was scheduled to leave his native Stockholm, Sweden, for acting school in New York, he met a girl and fell in love. He went overseas anyway, promising to sustain the relationship from 4,000 miles away. This was back in 1997, before Skype and ubiquitous e-mail, and Skarsgård was broke. He couldn't afford to talk to his girlfriend for more than a few minutes at a time, much less bring her over for a visit, and he was too proud to ask his dad—who just happens to be the film star Stellan Skarsgård—for money. He loved his acting program at Marymount Manhattan College, but he found the city lonely and exhausting. He lived in a student-housing building with a permanently broken elevator, which forced him to walk nine flights up to his room. When he couldn't take that anymore, he moved into a "tiny closet" in Times Square that he calls "the worst possible location to live in New York City." In the meantime, the girlfriend across the Atlantic started making noises about going back to her old boyfriend.

"So I was like, 'Fuck it—I'm going back to Sweden,'" Skarsgård, now 33, recounts. "I quit school and went back, and it was like I had created her in my mind. We hung out for two weeks and we didn't get along at all."

Skarsgård is both self-deprecating and unapologetic as he tells the story. Sure, the girl was still in high school and living at home. Sure, it would be another seven years before he'd manage to move back to the States. Sure, he should have known better than to derail his American acting career before it began. But even Eric Northman, the 1,000-year-old Viking vampire Skarsgård plays on True Blood, was young once. And Skarsgård, imposing and statuesque at six feet four, is far more human than his appearance—and certainly his onscreen persona—suggests.

That's not to say he's not participating fully in the Hollywood mélange. Previously romantically linked to his second-season True Blood costar Evan Rachel Wood, he is reportedly dating Kate Bosworth, with whom he appears in the upcoming remake of the Peckinpah classic Straw Dogs. And there he is playing Lady Gaga's paramour—with smoldering, chiaroscuric mystery (he wears an eye patch)—in the music video for "Paparazzi." Then, of course, there's the fact that he's the son of a movie star; the elder Skarsgård has starred in art-house classics like Breaking the Waves and blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean and Mama Mia!

But let's put that in perspective. Until the younger Skarsgård was in his late teens, his dad was famous only in Sweden. "Being a star in Sweden is like being a star in Omaha," he says, adding that there are no paparazzi or big paychecks there (though there's enough of a media machine to have gotten Alexander voted Sweden's Sexiest Man five times). And while it's true Stellan's son was a child star in Sweden in the 1980s, he hated being a preteen heartthrob.

"He didn't like it at all," Stellan recalls. "At the age of 12, he had girls standing outside the house. They would ask his younger brother Gustaf to let them in, and sometimes it worked."

Alexander wanted to be a regular kid who hung out and played soccer. "My father was totally supportive of my quitting acting," he says. "He said, 'If you feel like there's any other option for you, I recommend that option.'"

That turned out to be studying English at Leeds Metropolitan University in England, followed by a 15-month stint in the Swedish marines. "Sweden is probably one of the three countries least likely to get in a war, so the military's pretty safe," he concedes. The flip side of that is that many missions were downright stultifying. Imagine conducting round-the-clock surveillance of a radio antenna for four days.

"You couldn't talk or move," Skarsgård recalls. "You had to piss in a bottle. It gave me a lot of time to think about things. I realized I missed being onstage and on a set."

Eventually, after his aborted attempt at acting school, he began finding his way into Swedish films and the occasional Hollywood movie, such as Zoolander, in which he had a small role as one of Ben Stiller's male-model roommates. But Skarsgård's real break came with the acclaimed 2008 HBO miniseries Generation Kill, in which he played Sergeant Brad "Iceman" Colbert. Just before leaving for Africa to shoot that project, he heard the network was developing True Blood.

"I thought, 'Oh, vampires—I don't know,'" he admits. "But then they said Alan Ball was behind it, and I was a huge fan of Six Feet Under and American Beauty. I auditioned on tape from my hotel room in Mozambique."

The audition was actually for the part of Bill Compton, which went to Stephen Moyer. "Alex wasn't quite right for Bill," recalls Ball, "but I remember that he was giant and also beautiful. So when it came time to cast Eric, I thought of him. He's got the most amazing eyes. Because of their color—they're an amazing greenish blue—he's able to do this thing with them where he loses focus but remains totally focused."

It's a technique Skarsgård picked up from assiduously studying Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Murnau's and Herzog's versions of Nosferatu and even The Lost Boys. But that look—and the inscrutability and coiled tension he gives Eric—is also something he learned from hours spent watching nature documentaries.

"It's, like, you see this big male lion, and he's chilling in the sun, and he sits up and he looks at something, and you don't know if he's going to pounce or if he's just going to go back to sleep," Skarsgård says, his steely gaze unwavering, looking like he could easily break into a yawn. "You never know if he's bored or he's frustrated or what."

RYAN KWANTEN

Believe it or not, Ryan Kwanten is not a dumbass. Of course, you'd never guess that: His True Blood character, Jason Stackhouse, is a good old boy writ large, a studly simpleton who thinks with his little head because his big head seems permanently encased in granite. The only one of the show's leading men who's not a vampire or other supernatural being, Jason is a stand-in not just for the average guy but also for his masculinity crisis. He's a red-blooded mortal in a world suddenly colonized by phantasmagoric sophisticates, an affable if dim Everyman whose horndog exterior and prodigious sexploits mask a deep human need for connection.

Kwanten, on the other hand, is an aspiring highbrow. The 33-year-old Australian, who grew up in what he calls a "beach shack" in Sydney, likes to read philosophy, doesn't own a television, and has been writing a novel for the past 19 years—it currently fills 290 pages of a notebook he's been carrying around since he was 13. Kwanten has the rippling physique of a comic-book superhero but insists he's more of a yogi than a gym rat. Moreover, he doesn't like to talk about his body or how often it's on display on True Blood.

"We have amazing computer-generated effects," Kwanten says, his Aussie accent revealing no trace of Jason's aw-shucks-isms. "It's my head on someone else's body."

Still, the fact is Kwanten, who like costars Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin lives in Venice, Calfornia, is sitting at one of his favorite cafés not far from Muscle Beach, ordering one of the "bodybuilder specials" for lunch. He chooses an egg-white-and-buffalo-meat scramble —"In the mornings I get pancakes and egg whites," he explains—and tries his best to steer the conversation away from anything to do with working out or acting. Wearing heavy black glasses and a newsboy cap, he's virtually unrecognizable as Jason or any of the other likable lugs he has played. Though he's close with his castmates, he doesn't hang out with them and he certainly won't be found in Hollywood clubs or, as he puts it, "anywhere a paparazzo in his right mind would go."

Kwanten became famous in Australia in his early twenties, thanks to a prime-time soap called Home and Away, on which he played a lifeguard. He's quick to add that for part of his time on the show he was also working a public-relations job ("You need to cover your bases," he says). He went on to star in an American film called Junction Boys, coming to L.A. for a few days of vacation around its premiere and deciding to stay. He spent the next three months in a converted storage closet in a grungy Venice hotel, sleeping on his yoga mat and riding his bicycle and the city bus to auditions. Finally, after a few small TV roles, he was cast as an Australian surfer in the TV series Summerland and then landed a part in the 2006 girl-and-her-horse movie Flicka, in which he caught the eye of Alan Ball, who was casting True Blood.

"He played the lead character's hot, sweet, dimwit older brother," Ball recalls. "So when I was casting for Jason, I thought of him. He has almost zero vanity as an actor. He's not afraid to play stupid—a lot of actors that play dumb characters have to do subtle things to show they're not stupid. But Ryan doesn't have that hang-up. And he is so unlike his character that it's almost shocking."

As for Kwanten's physical attributes, Ball insists he didn't see him shirtless until they were shooting the pilot. "He came on to the set and I thought, 'What the hell is that?'" Ball says. "But it was a total asset. Part of what makes the whole Jason package attractive is that he's so comfortable in his own skin."

Good thing, since no one on True Blood, a show in which over-the-top carnal activity is the norm, has more onscreen sex than Jason. "I'm very comfortable with my body. Most of the time the girl is going to be more scared of the scene than me," he says. "So I make a pact with them like, 'Let's be in this together. I've got your back and you have mine.'" Though Jason is often described as a sex addict, Kwanten's deep character analysis has yielded a more forgiving interpretation. "He lost his parents at a very early age," he says. "So there are a whole host of things he's making up for, whether it be a mother figure or someone to hold."

This may sound like pop psychology, but Kwanten's been in that mode lately. He's busy writing a new book—this one a self-help book of sorts. "It's a satire of self-help books," he says, chewing his buffalo meat. "It's called The G Strategy. I am 'The G.' There are steps. The first is 'Ask yourself the question.' The second is 'Give yourself a G name.'"

Kwanten doesn't specify what "the question" is, but "the G name," he clarifies, needn't start with a g. It simply refers to a new name we can assign ourselves if our given name comes with excessive emotional baggage. "Say there's the name Ryan," he continues. "That name might have a stigma attached to it due to the years of abuse I've suffered as a child. But as, say, Ace, I can do anything. I can associate myself with a mythological creature or a made-up word. And through the invention of that word, it makes you want to break into a smile."

Kwanten's earnest tone and poker face make one wonder whether he might be engaged in an elaborate send-up not just of books like The Secret but also of popular culture, of the whole rather embarrassing enterprise of an actor sitting down to pontificate, and most of all of himself. When he trots out platitudinous nuggets like "I like playing ordinary characters and seeing what makes them extraordinary," you have to hope he really is putting you on. But then there are times when his humor is so laceratingly dry that all is forgiven.

"There are 11 steps," he says, returning to the tao of The G Strategy. "Normally there are 10, but I added one. I'm not going to tell you all of them. But one is that one and one doesn't equal two."

He holds his two index fingers close together and, eyes wide with faux mysticism, adds, "It equals 11."

STEPHEN MOYER

Stephen Moyer, at 40 years old, refers to himself as an "older bloke." Though he's often facetious, this characterization doesn't carry a trace of irony. Maybe it's that his two kids, Lilac and Billy, are now 7 and 10, respectively. Maybe it's that his fiancée—costar Anna Paquin—is just 27. Or maybe it's that the British actor has grown accustomed to playing the 173-year-old vampire Bill Compton. Granted, as vampires go, Bill's a mere lad compared with his 1,000-year-old nemesis, Eric Northman (played by Alexander Skarsgård). But whereas the tracksuited, club-owning Eric is youthful beyond his centuries, Bill is the epitome of a throwback. A laconic farmer turned Confederate soldier who was returning home to his wife and children when a female vampire "turned" him (don't you hate when that happens?), he has led a life mired in tragedy that's mapped itself across his face. And even though Moyer declares his life to be "fantastic," he somehow exudes a kind of personal ballast—a seasoned quality that suggests he's seen enough to know a thing or two.

Moyer grew up in the working-class county of Essex, about an hour outside London, where his father sold glass for a living. "He's 69 and still doing it," Moyer says. "No pension—it's the kind of job you just keep doing until you drop." When Moyer was 11 he played Tom Sawyer in a school play and knew he wanted to be an actor.

"I didn't want to do film or commercials or television," he says of his early days, first as a student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and then as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. "That was cheap. That was selling out. I was the classic liberal, left-wing, 'Theater is going to change the world' kind of person. You know, very, very boring."

He was serious, mind you, for quite a while. But then he was offered a commercial ("It was for coffee—fucking cheesy shit"), which he agreed to do because it would run exclusively in Scandinavia and no one he knew would see it (though Skarsgård grew up watching it in Sweden and likes to tease him about it). Moyer was well compensated for his trouble ("1,000 quid, which was shitloads back then") and used the money to buy a boat moored on the canals of London's Little Venice, where he lived for seven years. Today he and Paquin live on the canals of Venice, California—albeit in a house on terra firma.

"I have to live in places that are called Venice," he says. "I'm a Venice-zuelan."

Moyer takes a sip of the water he's ordered at an airy café—art gallery not far from his home. He compulsively taps out the rhythm to the Dave Brubeck tune playing over the stereo—"I'm really enjoying this musical selection," he says—stopping only to wave through the window at a friend passing by. Unlike Bill, whom he plays as a composed, almost motionless figure ("He doesn't have a pulse, so he wouldn't twitch or make unnecessary movement," he explains), Moyer is animated and charmingly revved-up, perhaps even a tiny bit hyper. He likes to swear, though his English accent makes this sound salty rather than crass (he also likes to call women "luv" and use words like chuffed, which is British for stoked). And he's talkative. Despite endless tabloid scrutiny, he has no qualms about discussing his relationship with Paquin, which he entered into with great caution. "To get a pilot that runs to a series, it's big shit to people," Moyer says. "And so to come along and go, 'Oh, let's have a quick fuck,' and then risk arguing and being a nightmare when you're playing the two people who are together the whole time—that would be immature."

Which is the opposite of how things worked out. Moyer, whose children are from two different relationships, has never been married, but he and Paquin publicly announced their engagement in August 2009 (just don't ask him if they've set a date; he's taken to saying it'll be in 2020). "It's HBO's fault," Moyer says of their hookup. "They put us in the same hotel." Not the same room—at least "not to begin with," he snickers. "No, I'm joking. They put us in these hotel suites, and we hung out for a while and got to know each other. The attraction was there, so it was a matter of whether we acted on it or not."

"When it got back to me that they were an item, I admit I thought, Oh boy," says Alan Ball, True Blood's creator. "But I trusted them to be adult about it, and they have been. And when they got engaged, Anna said to me, 'I've never been so happy in my life.' So how can you not be happy about that?"

If Moyer's relationship with Paquin seems both organic and infused with courtly devotion, the relationship between their characters is no different—despite the fact that Moyers gorges himself on her blood (it's a sugarcane mixture that tastes, he says, like "strawberry-flavored corn syrup").

"He's in many ways an old-fashioned romantic, like Mr. Rochester or Heathcliff," Ball says of Moyer. "A lot of people auditioning thought playing a vampire meant acting insane. I was looking for someone who brought a dignity and gravitas to the role."

And yet, like all the vampires on the show, Moyer delivers a primordial charisma. If Skarsgård plays it to ethereal, almost sylph-like effect, Moyer conveys a brand of sex appeal that's brooding, clenched, and so earthy you can almost feel its scabrous texture. And then, of course, there's that voice—husky and clipped and heavy on the consonants, particularly when he utters the name of Paquin's character, Sookie. For reasons that baffle Moyer, his pronunciation has become a subject of public fascination.

"We were given that pronunciation very early on by Charlaine Harris herself," says Moyer, referring to the author of the True Blood books, as we get up to leave. "Sookie rhymes with cookie. It doesn't rhyme with kooky."

I ask him if he calls Paquin that at home.

"All the time," Moyer deadpans. "When she's chained up."

Robert Pattinson's Nude Photoshoot Snub

Robert Pattinson offered to strip naked for a full-frontal photoshoot in Details magazine - but publishing bosses forced him to put his clothes back on.

The Twilight hunk was recently seen in a saucy spread in the monthly men's magazine, fully clothed and surrounded by nude models.

Pattinson admits he initially shed his clothes for the shoot, until magazine chiefs decided naked pictures of the star were not a good idea.

He says, "I offered to do a naked photoshoot - but no one wanted to see me naked. It started off with me naked and they were like, 'Actually, just forget it'." »

Robert Pattinson Covers 'Details' March 2010

Robert Pattinson puts on his best brooding face for the March 2010 issue of Details magazine, on stands February 23rd. Here’s what the 23-year-old Twilight star shared:

On the sexy Details photo shoot: “I really hate vaginas. I’m allergic to vaginas. But I can’t say I had no idea, because it was a 12-hour shoot , so you kind of get the picture that these women are going to stay naked after, like, five or six hours…Thank God I was hungover.”

On his dream job of political speech writing: “You’d have two or three minutes to affect someone. Make them hear you…I quite enjoyed doing the press for Twilight because there was a similarity. But you’d better have something to say. I felt a responsibility to be fascinating.”

On his emotional sight: “The only emotional connection of relevance is with my dog. My relationship with my dog, it’s ridiculous.”

Check out the full Rob interview at http://www.details.com/.

“White Collar” Star Matt Bomer is Asked About Gay Speculation...

Matt Bomer, who plays Nick Cafferty on the terrific new USA Network show White Collar, has never publicly come out as a gay man.

But a photo of him passionately kissing another man have surfaced online he has never denied reports about his sexuality. In a new interview with Details, Bomer is asked if it bothers him that so much that has been written about him is speculation that he is gay.

Here is his reply: “I don’t care about that at all. I’m completely happy and fulfilled in my personal life.”

The interviewer follows up by stating: “But you don’t want to talk about it” to which Bomer says: “I have a network and a show riding on my shoulders. I would say a big difference between my character and me is that I can be too trusting. And I’ve realized in this business, that’s not necessarily the smartest thing to be. I definitely have a thing or two to learn from the con artists.”

Matt was also asked about his first big break: “Guiding Light, nine years ago. I played a trust-fund baby who became a male prostitute, killed three people, kidnapped a girl, then killed himself in front of her father and her boyfriend. You know, just your average slice-of-life piece.”

Pick up the latest edition of Details magazine at a newstand near you for the complete interview.

Channing Tatum Gives “Details” of His Penis Injury

Poor Channing Tatum!

The hunky star of GI Joe, Stop-Loss, Step Up and the upcoming Dear John, suffered a penis burn while filming a scene of The Eagle of the Ninth in Scotland.

So how the heck did rhat happen? He explains in the new issue of Details magazine that it happened after he had to wade into freezing water:

“The only way to keep warm was by pouring a mix of boiling water and river water down your [wet]suit. We were finally done shooting for the day, and one of the crew guys asks if I want to warm up before I go. I’m like, Nah, I’m good. And then I thought, Why not? Thing is, he’d forgotten to dilute the kettle water. So he poured scalding water down my suit. And I was trying to pull the suit away from my body to somehow get away from the boiling water, and the more I pulled the suit away, the lower the water went. It just went straight down and pretty much burned the skin off the head of my dick.”

Ouch!

He even showed photos of his scorched penis to the writer who describes it as looking like “a hot dog that’s been left too long on the grill. The tip is hot-pink, singed, and shriveled. It appears angry.”

Says Channing: “It was the most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life,” he says, flipping through photos on his iPhone until he lands on a grainy snapshot of a scorched member. His scorched member. “I’m good . . . now,” he says with a grin. “Now my penis is fantastic! One hundred percent recovered. Put me back in the game, Coach.”

For the complete story, click on this link: http://www.details.com/celebrities-entertainment/cover-stars/201001/channing-tatum-dear-john-film-cover-stars.

John Mayer Covers December Details Magazine

John Mayer poses in a black tanktop on the December 2009 cover of Details, on stands December 1nd. Here are some interview snippets from the 32-year-old musician:

On creating pop music: “I don’t know if you know, but I’m not exactly Bob Dylan – I’m already a pop musician…I want to reach as many people as possible…I don’t mind compromising.”

On people hating him: “What if I had a booth on the street and I said, ‘Attention everybody who hates me: If you have a problem with me, I’m ready to hear your gripes! I will be outside the Barneys store on 60th Street from two to four this afternoon…I will only be speaking to people who do not like me. Come out and let me have it.’ How many people do you think would be standing there?…Ze-ro.”

Check out the full cover story at www.Details.com!

Adam Lambert’s Sexy Photo Shoot for Details

Adam Lambert is everywhere again!

The American Idol star has a new album out next month so the publicity machine is operating on all cylinders. He is on the cover of the new issue of Details magazine and the photo shoot pictures the openly gay Adam in some really sexy poses – with a naked woman!

And here’s the thing: Knowing Adam is gay does not make them any less sexy!

Here is an excerpt from the Details cover story which has this headline: Why Does Every Woman in America Want to Sleep With the American Idol?

It’s a testament to the sheer mainstream power of American Idol that a gay man with an unabashed affection for eyeliner and nail polish has emerged from this year’s competition as a new American sex symbol. “I think it’s beautiful,” Lambert says. “That’s the way it should be. It shouldn’t matter what a person’s sexual preference is—it doesn’t change their appeal.”

In the end, Americans of every persuasion proved defenseless against Lambert’s vigorous pelvic exertions. “When I’m onstage,” he says, “there’s definitely a sexual energy that goes into it.” Indeed, he gyrated his way through performances like Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” with a libidinous abandon that’s rarely seen on prime-time network television. Moral Majority types found his style scandalous, but Lambert offers no apologies.

“I have no problem telling people, ‘You know what? I’m not your babysitter, and I’m not your church,’” he says. “They go, ‘Jesus loves you, too.’ One time I just blurted out, ‘I’m Jewish, okay? I don’t need another crucifix! This is not an appropriate gift for me!’” He laughs. “I know people are coming from a good place, but it can be offensive. Like, ‘Thank you, I’m not Christian! I don’t read that book.’”

To see a slideshow of all the images (some NSWF!) go to Details.com.

Clive Owen Covers ‘Details’ October 2009 Issue

Clive Owen suits up for the October 2009 cover of Details Magazine. The 46-year-old British actor is the kind of be-stubbled brooder whom straight men find authentic and their wives find irresistible. Here’s what Clive shared:

On recent scripts: “They are not very good. And these are films that are funded and ready-to-go ­expensive movies. You’re amazed that people are funding them. I start to think it’s me that I’m being too choosy.”

On living a normal life: “I’m quite good at getting on with my thing. I feel I’m pretty nifty; I can spot trouble coming.”

On reconnecting with his father: “It was a very bizarre experience, looking at someone you’ve never known and going, ‘Oh my God, that’s my father.’”

Clive’s new movie The Boys Are Back opens in limited release next Friday, September 25th.

For the full Clive article and pictures, visit Details.com .

A-Rod Making Out with Himself?

If you had a gun to your head, who would you rather make out with: the dirty mattress against the wall or yourself in the mirror?

I'd go for the mattress (NOT!), but for A-Rod he would prefer to do himself!

In this month's Details magazine, Alex Rodriguez poses in a warehouse like room with a mattress, old car tire and a mirror. Apparently, he had to drink a bunch of tequila before the photo shoot to "loosen up."

[Editor's note: Quite interesting I must add!]

For the complete Details magazine article, click on the following link:

http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_8397