‘True Blood’ Season 7 Spoilers: Adina Porter To Become Series Regular; Did Lettie Mae Try To Kill Tara In The Season 6 Finale?

After being with “True Blood” from season 1, Adina Porter is finally a series regular on the hit HBO vampire drama. Porter, who plays Tara’s mother, Lettie Mae Thornton, will be reprising her role for the upcoming seventh and final season in 2014.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that former recurring character Lettie Mae will be getting a bigger role in the final 10 episodes of the HBO series. Adina’s character previously made minor appearances on “True Blood” -- mainly to stir up trouble with Tara. However, over the past couple seasons we’ve seen her character evolve from an abusive, alcoholic mother to a preacher’s wife.

Viewers last saw Lettie Mae during the season 6 finale at the Bellefleur’s Bar & Grill party (formerly Merlotte’s Bar & Grill). Picking up six months after Governor Burrell’s Tru Blood contamination plant was shut down, vampires are now in danger of being infected with Hep V and humans are at risk of being killed by those vampires infected with Hep V. New mayor Sam Merlotte threw a party inviting the local vampires and Hep V-free humans to get acquainted and potentially form a clean blood for protection relationship.

Lettie Mae had previously told Tara that she was dead to her after discovering that she was turned into a vampire. However Lettie Mae began to feel guilty for her years of neglecting her only child and offered her blood up to her daughter at the party.

While it seemed like a nice gesture, “True Blood” fans began to suspect that Lettie Mae wasn’t actually Hep V clean, and instead was trying to poison Tara. However after the season 6 finale executive producer Brian Buckner shot down the theory that Tara would become infected with Hep V from her mother.

“Let me just say this, and I realize that there has been an abrupt change in the kinds of storytelling that we do, but going into a seventh season of a show, if our characters can’t grow and change, then we have a problem,” Buckner told Entertainment Weekly.

“So we need to be able to allow ourselves to believe that Bill can see the error of his ways and want to change, and then the question becomes about forgiveness, and that Lettie Mae -- I mean, what mother wouldn’t feel badly about that? The idea that there must be plot behind everything that we do -- I don’t want to have the audience constantly demanding that everything be plot-driven. It was genuine on Lettie Mae’s part. It’s not to say that there won’t be complications that arise, but people can be telling the truth.”

The season ended with a hoard of crazed and infected vampires heading toward the Bon Temps town party. Since Adina Porter’s been upped to a series regular, we know that she’ll survive the potential attack. The new question now is whether Tara will be able to protect her -- or if she’ll be forced to turn her mother into a vampire.

“True Blood” returns for its seventh and final season in summer 2014.

What do you think will happen to Lettie Mae this season? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.