In anticipation of the DVD release, Brit Films.tv have published an interview with JJ I dont think we have seen before. Read the interview on the Brit Films website.

You play a character called Luke who looks a bit of a shady individual. What part does he play in this massive good vs. Evil show down?

Oh I am shady – I’m not the nice guy. I’m an evil bastard (laughs). In the anime, there’s this sort of secret society almost like an FBI type group that use this half breed (Saya) to hunt the other vampires and she’s now hunting down the last of them. I’m one of the agents for this secret society.

In that case is playing the bad guy as good as people say?

It’s delicious. Deliciously naughty – just getting to be hideous is great. Yeah definitely, villains are always great fun to play. I had a lot of fun guns to use as well and a couple of fight sequences but it’s nowhere as much what the girls get up to, which is something you always see in Asian cinema, these incredibly vicious women. I was around them whilst they were bouncing off rooftops around me. So I had to keep looking nasty whilst all this was going on desperately wanting to just jump up and down in excitement.

Were you already familiar with manga and that massive phenomenon or was ‘Blood’ your first introduction?

My first memory of manga was ‘Akira’ and I remember just being blown away by it that was my first introduction. After I got the job for ‘Blood’ I watched the original animation and just thought ‘wow’.

But with the extreme gravity defying action that goes off in it did you ever wonder how they were going to manage such epic sequences?

Well it’s got to that point now that technology has come so far, you don’t need to worry. With the stuff that Peter Jackson’s done and you know, even ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ where we can make the films we imagined 30 years ago. Animation was always an extension of imagination that we couldn’t put into moving cinema form, and that’s essentially the great thing about animation – the limitlessness to it all. But now we’ve got to that point where we can start bringing things to life.

With the massive scale of the previously mentioned fight sequences, it must have been great to just look on at the creation of it all?

Well we shot it in Buenos Aires and China...

Poor you.

(Laughs) Yeah, poor me – happy days, it was amazing! But the scale of the sets in China was incredible; you couldn’t afford to build it anywhere else. They built ten square blocks of Tokyo with six cranes for the wire work because obviously to fly around like ‘Crouching Tiger’ and stuff it’s exactly like a doll on some strings. So you’ve got six cranes with steel cables strapped to you like a puppet, flying around at 40mph, it was unreal.

Were there any injuries during filming because there have been quite a few films recently where accidents have happened..?

Well it’s always going to happen. In action films there are stunts and without sounding cruel that’s why stuntmen do them, there are injuries and if there weren’t any actor would do them.

So you went a bit light on the action in comparison to the leading ladies, but can you see yourself getting stuck into another action film any time soon..?

I just love doing different things every time. When I was approached for ‘Blood’ I was told they’d written the character with me in mind and whilst it was flattering, it got me thinking (laughs), ‘what the hell did they see to put me in this?’ I mean, it wasn’t Jane Austen (laughs). In the future, my only rule is that my next film is different to the last one and as long as I keep doing that I’ll be happy. There’s always the risk of being type cast, I mean I’ll get sent stuff and if it’s similar to something else I’ve played I’ll avoid it, it’s a natural thing to do to picture someone assigned to a role but I’ll always try to do something different.

Well you can’t get more out there than this?

Standing toe to toe with vampires, which continue to haunt cinemas and have done for the past 81 years – what is it about the toothy gits that audiences are so infatuated with?
I see vampires as a symbol of ourselves – a darker side to humans. I mean you look at films like ‘Let the Right One In’ and they play with this idea of a dark culture, of humanity and vampires overall are sexy. They’re brilliant, just a manifestation of what humans could be.

And is there anything you’ve learnt from ‘Blood’ in future vampire encounters.

Run away. Really fast!