One of the reasons why everything in the early 2010s was so heavy in the vampire craze was because of the massively popular True Blood series. Based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries books by Charlaine Harris, the HBO television series served as an allegory for otherness and social prejudices as it chronicled the vampire populations' struggle with equal rights. However, much of the series revolved around Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic part-fae waitress, and her many love triangles. Although not as huge as other love triangles of the time, the guess of who Sookie will choose became a major theme of the series as she went back and forth between vampire gentlemen Bill Compton and former Viking Eric Northman. However, in the end, fans were left thoroughly disappointed when neither got the girl.
Despite the buildup given to Sookie and her partners, including the werewolf Alcide, she ended the series pregnant and married to an unnamed character who never showed his face. The finale season of True Blood has remained the least favorite among fans for numerous reasons but it was the end of the triangle that really struck them in the heart. Bill and Alcide end the series dead and Eric ends off almost exactly where he started, while Sookie ends up married to a regular human. So, who was her mysterious husband?
He was nobody and that was the point. Showrunner Brian Buckner reported that the character was intended to be an everyman whose identity was irrelevant. The very same thought went into casting him. The man who played Mr. Sookie Stackhouse, who fans also refer to as Mr. Faceless Beard Guy, was played by actor and stunt performer Timothy Eulich. Buckner cited Eulich's physique as the reason for casting him, they needed the “the man with the best arms from our stunt crew" to play the guy who won Sookie's heart.
The finale wasn't actually the first time Eulich appeared in the series. He shot several stunt scenes in Season 3 and 4 before serving as a body double for Michael McMillian's character Steve Newlin in later seasons. However, the most notable scene featuring Eulich was a fight sequence with Alexander Skarsgård's character Eric Northman in Season 2, where he played a character named Rich who ended up being saved by Sookie when Eric was moments away from killing him. After the finale, in an interview with Vulture, Eulich joked that it may have been Rich that ended up with Sookie, though that idea remains a theory at best.
However, as nice as it would be to give him a name, it's pretty clear that he's meant to remain faceless. His role was almost symbolic, the presence of normality and peace after so many years of death. Much of True Blood Season 7 was about healing from the chaos that took over the earlier seasons. Characters got closure and Sookie had to make a choice about herself, and in a twist, she chooses to live a normal life while also preserving the very thing that made her abnormal in the first place -- her fairy powers. It was a balancing act of both worlds that showed you don't have to remove something from yourself to live happily.
At the time the series ended, it felt like a cop-out. However, upon revisitation of the series, it was the only logical solution for both Sookie and fans. If she picked one of the three available to her, the series would forever be judged for that choice as Eric fans, Bill fans, Alcide fans and others would spend years complaining about how they were wronged, just as fans of The Vampire Diaries, Twilight, How I Met Your Mother and to a lesser extent Buffy, have been doing for far too long. The author of the books was met with this type of fan rage when she paired Sookie off with Sam at the end of the novels. In the end, Mr. Faceless wasn't the safe choice but the right choice.