Anna Paquin drinks blood -- diet blood. Just one day after wrapping her new vampire romance, True Blood, Paquin has come back into the light after months in the dark and has tales to tell. “There’s congealing blood, eye blood, dark blood, drinking blood. There’s a hundred kinds of blood,” she explains. Drinking blood? “The drinking blood is very corn syrupy,” she says, laughing. “They asked if I wanted sugar-free blood, and I said, Sure. But at six in the morning when it is freezing cold, you are covered in goo, and you are sucking on a prosthetic arm, you think, Maybe I should have said yes to the watermelon-flavored blood.”

Does the blood come in cherry? It’s hard not to get distracted as Paquin recounts the fright-night smorgasbord of the set. But what presses for attention most loudly, as Paquin snuggles into a borrowed sweater, which is almost all that shields her from the gushing torrents of air conditioning chilling her in a Los Angeles photo studio, is not a question but an observation: her hair is blonde, and her skin looks...spray-tanned. What happened to Anna Paquin, pale brunette, waif pin-up, shy and brainy enough to nourish Weezer’s entire fanbase? She’s still lurking somewhere in that bombshell exterior -- check out her smile, and the charming space between her teeth, which are mercifully unbonded, naturally expressive, free from the pressure to be perfect. “Vampires have really great teeth,” notes Paquin.

Only an actress who played the mouthy kid in a movie about a mute, as she did in The Piano -- for which she won an Oscar at the age of 11 -- would upend expectations so handily. For True Blood, Alan Ball’s television adaptation of the best-selling Sookie Stockhouse series of novels, the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Paquin traded pale skin and brown locks for the looks of a Louisiana Pi Phi. “I have a very talented colorist,” says Paquin of her new come-hither look. As she exists in print, Sookie also has blue eyes, but Paquin thought that tinted contacts would just be too much to take on for a job that has the potential to last years.

The buzz on True Blood is building and with Alan Ball (writer of American Beauty and creator of Six Feet Under) at the helm, the pedigree is a killer. Paquin read the script and wanted in immediately, pursuing the role of Sookie with the stride of a creature who can walk through walls. Ironically, she had to convince an initially skeptical Ball to look past her crepuscular palette, but hard work paid off and, though it took a full year, she clinched the part. “I just really wanted it,” she says.

There were other forms of seduction at play, beyond working with Ball, whom Paquin calls the “favorite parent” whenever he is on set: “Everyone just loves to be around him. He is so brilliant and funny.” It was also time to find a place to come in to land. “I’ve been a gypsy for half my life,” she says. “I like the normalcy of having a job that is more consistent than being on a different film every three months.”

Normalcy has hardly marked her life up to now. Born in Canada, Paquin was raised in New Zealand before moving to Los Angeles. Creative journeys followed, swinging from the precociousness of 1998’s screen adaptation of David Rabe’s play, Hurlyburly, to the touching avian migration weepy, Fly Away Home, a supporting role as a minx of a groupie in Almost Famous, and from there to the four-way Spandex-stretch as X-Men’s soul-draining “Rogue.” Last year, she received an Emmy nomination for her work in another HBO project, the historical drama, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Throughout that span, hers is a resume that stayed free of silliness, and a life that never ended up splashed across the tabloids, shot from a canon of bad choices and public overexposure.

While many of her generational peers were working fake ID’s and pliable bouncers, Paquin spent her time in New York, attending a year of college at Columbia University, and exploring what has become a lasting love of theater. The season of academia offered refuge from the rigors of a working childhood. “Turns out,” says Paquin, “school is not so hard when you don’t have a full time job. I got to roll into class looking horrible. I didn’t have to wash my hair or put on makeup if I didn’t want to. I got to be with people my own age. It was awesome.”

Her heart still resides in New York, but for now, both Manhattan residency and romantic love appear to be out of the picture. Does she have a boyfriend? Paquin laughs and responds: “In what time?” When asked whether her omnivorous schedule is hard to bear, she turns serious. “No. I choose my lifestyle,” she says. “I’m 26. I’m allowed to have my primary relationship be with my job. It’s a time to be as committed to something as I want to be.”

Onscreen, as Sookie, she is committed to something far sexier than 18-hour workdays. Her vampire beau Bill Compton, played by British actor Stephen Moyer, is lip-licking good from every angle. His is the arm that fed her the Blood Zero. “It tasted like latex and had fake hairs stuck in it,” Paquin recounts.

But two can share that sip of house red. After her hungry chomp session, it’s clear that Sookie, badly beaten, is suddenly no longer bloodied. Is this a lapse in continuity? Please, this is Alan Ball, her rolled eyes say. Anna then cues perfect comic timing, affecting a prim, flustered demeanor. “Well,” she says, batting her lashes, “He, the vampire, you know… cleaned me up.” The nervousness is contagious.

“He licked you clean?” “He licked me clean.”