Secret’s safe with ‘True Blood’ actress Rutina Wesley

If she ever grows tired of acting, Rutina Wesley has a bright career waiting for her in the intelligence field.

Trust her with state secrets and nuclear codes. Confide in her your PIN numbers and that dream you had about Tom Waits, the dachshund and the pint of Ben & Jerry's.

The woman's like a vault.

As the subject of the biggest cliffhanger yet on the breakout hit "True Blood" (9 p.m. Sundays, HBO), the Las Vegas native shared her character's fate with exactly one person: her husband.

"I wanted to make sure I kept it a secret, because you just never know. And," she says, laughing about the consequences if the plot twist had gotten out, "I love my job."

In the final seconds of last season's final episode, Wesley's Tara tried to save her best friend, mind-reading fairy Sookie (series star Anna Paquin), from a jealous, shotgun-wielding werewolf - believe it or not, one of the more down-to-earth moments of the drama's fourth season - only to have a sizable chunk of her head blown off.

Panicked fans stormed the Internet. Was Tara dead? Was Wesley leaving the show?

For nine months, the Las Vegas Academy graduate danced around the subject - danced like she hadn't since her breakthrough role in the 2007 film "How She Move."

"I was like, 'I'm coming back, guys, I just don't know how,' " Wesley says of her interactions with fans. "They were like, 'I dunno how, either, since half your head's missing.' "

That was enough to placate some, but others were more persistent.

"I just tried to play a lot of different sides of it without saying too much. But it was incredibly difficult, because people were very shocked and didn't want me to be off the show," she continues. "And that made me feel great, too, to know that there were so many people that were, like, 'Hey, wait a minute! Not Tara!' "

Wesley was understandably eager for Sunday's season premiere to finally air, so she'd no longer have to be coy.

SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading now if you don't want to know Tara's fate. Seriously. You've been warned.

Tara's cousin Lafayette (Wesley's Juilliard classmate Nelsan Ellis) and Sookie begged Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) to turn the dying Tara into a vampire, which Pam grudgingly obliged. Then, nearly an hour later as it appeared the transition hadn't worked, Tara burst from the ground with evil in her eyes as the episode drew to a close.

The vampire life - so to speak - is just the latest twist for a character who already has been under the spell of both a witch and something called a maenad, held captive and duct-taped to a toilet by a vampire, had a fling with a shapeshifter and had a run as a lesbian cage fighter.

"It's still Tara," Wesley says, "but I get to sort of create a whole new physicality and inner life and things with her. And that's awesome for me. It's like I get to kind of start over."

The actress learned about three-quarters of the way through filming last season that she'd need to be fitted for fangs. She says producers took her aside and told her, " 'We're really excited, and we hope you will be, too.' "

Wesley remembers freaking out, being surrounded by people on set who had to be kept in the dark - yet another test of her secret-keeping prowess - and just wanting to go back to her trailer to scream.

That was only the second time she can recall being taken aback by "True Blood's" over-the-top storylines. The other?

"Second season when I was like, 'Oh, orgy in the middle of the woods. OK. Umm, that's all right? And a long orgy? With, like, 50 people? OK,' " she says, laughing at the memory. "That was the one time that I was reading and I, like, stopped and turned the page back and was like, 'OK, wait, no, that can't be right.' 'Nope, we're having an orgy. OK!' "

While she misses playing one of the few humans to reside in the drama's tiny, tormented Bon Temps, La., she's excited about the challenges of portraying a vampire. And, judging from the next three episodes, those challenges will be plentiful.

Tara's new direction also means greater opportunities for one of Wesley's least favorite parts of the series: being covered in blood. Well, being covered in the bloodlike concoction that's made mostly of syrup and food dye.

"We all sometimes try to get out of it. We'll be on the mark, and the goo will come, and we'll kind of try to move out the way," Wesley admits with more laughter. "But sometimes you can't avoid it, because they want it all over you, you know.

"It's just become part of the job. You get home and you shower and then you wake up the next day, and you're, like, 'Oh, there's still blood. OK.' It's like it doesn't wanna come off."

This season is still in production, so Wesley can't say for certain if she'll be around next year. Odds are, though, she wouldn't divulge that even if she knew.

But could she handle being such a big part of yet another cliffhanger?

"I don't know, it's so tough. I might be like, 'Please don't do that to me again!'

"I wanna relieve (people) of their misery when they really wanna know something, because they're just, like, dying to know. And I wanna say it so bad, but I can't. It's tough, but I would be able to do it."

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567.