*Courtesy of John P. Johnson/HBO.*It’s difficult enough making it as a working actor, but it’s even trickier if you’re an actor on the HBO vampire-fetish drama True Blood. The show has a Cannonball Run–sized cast, with storylines competing, like a gang of prepubescent boys with a stick and a dead frog, to see which can be the grossest. If you’re in the True Blood cast and you want to be noticed, you have to either have explicit and blood-soaked sex in which you or your partner (or both) is bitten, mauled, disfigured, or had his or her head turned 180 degrees, or be a hot guy with ridiculously ripped abs who repeatedly takes off his shirt for no apparent reason. And then there’s Pam, played with sassy swagger by Kristin Bauer, who has gone from being a barely noticeable minor character—she runs the Fangtasia nightclub and is vampire sheriff Eric Northman’s B.F.F.—to one of *True Blood’*s most beloved and memorable vamps. And she did it without once flashing an areola. On last Sunday’s episode, Pam stole the show yet again with just one badass line: "I'll give you 24 hours to deliver that witch to me,” she announced to a group of very freaked-out wiccans. “And if you don't, I will personally eat, fuck, and kill all three of you." Juicy dialogue like that has become de rigueur for Pam, who always gets the best zingers while the rest of the cast are busy flexing their pasty-white muscles. I called Bauer as she was preparing for a busy few weeks—first with a True Blood charity concert tonight in Los Angeles, and then with San Diego’s Comic-Con, where she’ll be appearing in a True Blood panel (along with her mostly naked co-stars) on Friday, July 22. Eric Spitznagel: I just watched last Sunday’s show, and once again you had the best line of the night.Kristin Bauer: Which one? “Fuck, eat, and kill”?

That’s it. Was Pam being hyperbolic, or was that a real threat?

No, she was being very literal. And I also took the order literally. You have to do that stuff in the right order. If you fuck somebody after you kill them, that’s a whole other ball game.

So she’s a monster but she’s also classy?

Exactly, a serial killer with integrity.

What a great lesson for the kids, who might take this show too seriously.

God, yeah. I do worry about some of the fans. The majority of them are fantastic, but there are about two percent for whom the line between reality and fantasy is blurred.

When you’re at Comic-Con next week and you’re surrounded by hundreds of True Blood fans, how do you know who the freaks are?

I just stay away from anybody wearing a cape.

That’s going to be tough at a comic convention.

Well, rules are made to be broken. If they’re dressed like Darth Vader, they get a pass. Obviously. Star Wars is where I cross over into geekdom. I was at Comic-Con last year, and I just wanted my picture taken with Chewbacca. Who doesn’t love Chewie? But I’m well aware none of it is real. Chewbacca isn’t a real guy. It’s a guy in a suit. Not long ago, some True Blood fan gave me her journal, and I got a little disturbed while reading it. She had these very vivid imaginations that I was her maker.

Sweet Lord.

I don’t even know how to respond to that. It’s a little spooky and weird. It crosses a line.