Deborah Ann Woll and Janina Gavankar of
HBO's True Blood say in new It Gets Better PSAs that they were
bullied in school.
Woll plays newly-turned vampire Jessica
Hamby and Gavankar plays Luna on the supernatural drama.
“I found a note in my locker that
said, 'Why don't you just kill yourself, because nobody likes you,'”
Woll says in her one-minute-forty-five-second
video. “I used to get phone calls in the middle of the night,
people saying mean things.”
The experience, Woll says, made her a
better person: “I can now be a friend to the lonely.”
In another PSA, 27-year-old Gavankar,
who played a promiscuous lesbian in Showtime's groundbreaking series
The L Word, also says she can relate to LGBT teens who are
bullied.
“I got verbally bullied in high
school,” Gavankar says.
“So, if you're gay, straight,
artistic, busier than everybody else because you actually have a life
and something interesting to think about besides the gossip, and they
hate you for it. That's OK. I know what all of those girls are
doing now.”
“It gets better,” she adds.
“Trust.” (The video is embedded in the right panel of this
page.)
Anna
Paquin, who plays Sookie Stackhouse, Alexander
Skarsgard, who plays vampire Eric Northman, Rutina
Wesley, who plays lesbian cage-fighter Tara Thornton, and Kristen
Bauer, who plays vampire Pam Ravenscroft, have also recorded videos
for gay activist Dan Savage's It
Gets Better Project, which urges teens being bullied because they
are or are perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender to
hang in there, because life gets better.
More recently, Nelsan
Ellis, who plays flamboyant gay prostitute and vampire blood
dealer Lafayette Reynolds, Sam
Trammell, who plays Sam Merlotte, and Joe
Manganiello, who plays werewolf Alcide Herveaux, also joined the
campaign.