We met Ryan Kwanten on the red carpet for last night’s PGA awards, where True Blood would lose to Mad Men for Best TV Drama Series. Well, if you can’t wrest the big awards from Mad Men, you might as well do what that suit-and-tie-bound show can never do for your next season: Ramp up the male shirtlessness. As the dumb-yet-lovable Jason Stackhouse, Kwanten spent the majority of True Blood’s first season half-naked: The women he slept with kept getting killed, so he was constantly shot pre-, post-, or mid-coitus. But last year, Jason found God, and piousness always comes with a shirt. “Jason was relatively tame in terms of the skin exposure last season,†Kwanten told us. “Joining a religious cult will do that to you. But he is going to get back to his gallivanting ways in season three [which premieres in June] until he finds love. So I’ve had to spend some more time in the gym.â€
Unlike professional athletes, who get to spend part of their off-season slacking off, Kwanten admits that maintaining Jason’s signature abs is a year-round job. “I don’t have time off to let myself go,†he said. “The number of people who will see me with my shirt off in HD on their giant flat-screen is incentive to stay in shape.†He doesn’t subsist on protein shakes alone, however: “I eat, believe me. They call them guilty pleasures but I hardly ever feel guilty enough to say, ‘no, honey.’ I am a dessert fiend. And I love being invited to awards shows and parties because they have the best dessert tables. Chocolate cake, ice cream, pie — you name it, I probably like it. I just go for a longer run the next day. I’m a masochist at heart.â€