Trinity Blood pg. 1

Troy: No, they don't sleep. I've never seen Abel Nightroad sleep. I have seen him eat.

Mike: And be in pain. And change forms.

Troy: But never sleep. Maybe he doesn't sleep. Has he slept?

Mike: It hasn't been covered.

Troy: He said that he doesn't sleep. He asked for a pillow one time because he wanted to try and sleep while he was on the train, but I don't think he ever slept. Now we're giving away the show.

Mike: Just the pillow part.

Troy: That's a critical point in the story, though. The pillow.

Is he really a vampire? He just eats vampires, right?

Troy: He is a Crusnik. A vampire that feeds on the blood of vampires. He no longer feeds on people. Actually, in the show itself, it seems that the vampires themselves don't feed on people. It's kind of like they'd almost be eating a lesser-than-rodent. They have risen above such things.

Mike: It's kind of a Roman society there where the men, which in this case would be the vampires, are very much more elevated, more elitist. Compared to the human race, they feel that they are the superior race. So yeah, you see them drinking blood, but I don't think you ever see them feeding.

Troy: They put caplets and wine and stuff to compensate for feeding on humans. They still can, but it's usually out of meanness.

Mike: It's more of a vicious act than it is sustenance.

Do you think vampire blood provides different nutrients than human blood?

Mike: I think it does for the Crusniks. I think there's something in it that Crusniks can use to sustain themselves. Also, as it appears with Abel, they have some means by which to circumvent that as well.

Troy: Well, the same thing goes with Abel whenever he's consumed with righteous indignation and justice. The only time you see him transform into his Crusnik form is when he is exacting justice on someone. It's not a barbaric act, nor is it “I need to eat,” because he has an affinity for milk tea with 13 sugars. He likes to eat, and is actually quite famished throughout the entire show. It's not a nutritional thing with him. It's really cool because once you watch the show, you see that Abel is very much a standard archetype. To some people, until they actually get involved in the show, they feel like it's a detriment, because they feel like the character has been done before in other shows. Really, he is an archetype and you find his type of heroism, his type of character, his type of personality, from Greek tragedies to modern day.

He's a very reluctant hero who has innate and inherent power, who is constantly in torment about it. He wants to do right, but he hates the way that he has to go about it. He's very torn every time he transforms, like, “I don't want to do this again, but I know that I have to,” because who he becomes isn't Abel. Even though he's incredibly smart, incredibly strategic, and very militant, he knows himself and know that what he possesses as a person, as Father Abel Nightroad, isn't enough to battle the opposition that he's always faced with.

Are there parts of Abel that you have learned from? From the way he acts, from the way he carries himself?

Troy: Yeah, he's incredibly humble. It's a true humility; he doesn't feign humility. It's not a Clark Kent/Superman kind of thing. This is truly who he is as a person, and it's not that he has an alter-ego, because there are certainly people who know who he truly is under the cassock. As you do a character like this, even though Abel has already been very much established by the original Japanese show that did very well, and we're simply putting that in a different format, we're not trying to change anything. We're actually very passionate about paying homage to it and keeping it as close as possible to the show. Whenever you have an actor that is going in and doing this character, you will kind of find a symbiotic relationship where you will come to him, and he will come to you. So there's things that I'm doing that are obviously different than what was done in the original Japanese.

Mike and I have really sat down and talked about the character, and there's been script things like, “Would he really do this?” and we've actually had deep discussions about this one line, and say, “Would Abel say that?” It's been really cool to actually get to know this guy, and get to say, “Would he really be scared in this?” or “He would be really scared in this. He wouldn't be powerful and unafraid.” There are parts of my personality in it, and there are arts of his personality that I've kind of acclimated to me. It's been really cool.