Beautiful, Byronic creatures of the night existed before Interview with the Vampire, but in the 46 years since Anne Rice’s debut novel, nearly every major pop culture vampire – Spike, Bill Compton, Damon Salvatore, even the kinky, comedic bloodsuckers on What We Do in the Shadows – has taken a midnight stroll through her Savage Garden.
Interview with the Vampire
Rolin Jones (head writer), Anne Rice (original story), Alan Taylor (director)
Jacob Anderson, Bailey Bass, Eric Bogosian, Sam Reid
AMC
October 2, 2022
AMC’s impeccably produced Interview with the Vampire television series has closed the delicate and lacy curtains, lit the long, yellowed candles, and cracked open the classic novel – exposing its crimson, pulpy heart for a new generation of fledglings.
Previously adapted by Neil Jordan as a 1994 feature film, the novel Interview with the Vampire was, true to its title, a dishy tell-all. The undead Louis de Pointe du Lac meets a naïve young journalist in San Francisco and unravels the story of his afterlife: his early days in 18th century New Orleans, his seduction at the well-manicured hands of his “sire” Lestat, their decades together raising the vampire child Claudia, and what befell them afterward. It is a sumptuous, baroque tale, full of feverish embraces, ravaged throats, and centuries of tender longing. (It is also, at times, deeply and twistedly funny.)
AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, developed for television by Rolin Jones, immediately reveals itself as a clever reimagining of the material. The show is both an adaptation and a sequel — Louis and the journalist Daniel Molloy had their fateful taped conversation in the 1970s as depicted in the original book, complete with its violent ending. Now, in the pandemic-ravaged year of our lord 2022, Louis (Jacob Anderson) is ruminating on that past encounter.
He contacts Daniel (Eric Bogosian), a Pulitzer Prize-winner author dealing with Parkinson’s Disease, to meet with him so that he can finally set the story straight. But Daniel is older, wiser, far more cynical than the “boy” on the tapes. Joining Louis in his Dubai penthouse, Daniel sees through the vampire’s sonorous speeches, poking the contradictions and half-truths about his violent deeds like a bruise. “Let the tale seduce you,” Louis implores him, “As I was seduced.”
Keeping the Louisiana setting, Interview has moved forward to the 1910s, giving the series a vital facelift. Originally written as a wealthy, white plantation owner, Louis is reimagined as a Black, closeted gay man operating a brothel in Storyville, New Orleans’ red-light district. This decision excises the shadow of slavery from the story without absolving Louis of his sins; he was guilty of preying on human beings long before he became a vampire. (The show acknowledges race more directly than Rice’s novels ever did, which widens the saga’s scope significantly.)
Jacob Anderson is superb in the starring role; he is the show’s grounded and captivating center, even as his life spins deliriously, deliciously out of control. He is a man of warring, explosive impulses, justifying his illicit business ventures as saving his family from bankruptcy and keeping his mentally ill brother Paul out of a sanitarium. Not that the fervently Catholic Paul appreciates this; when he shows up in Storyville one night, preaching to an unimpressed working girl, Louis forces his brother to go home by drawing a blade out of his walking stick. Having carved out a powerful niche in a white man’s world, Louis must maintain a strong façade even at the cost of his soul.
Enter Lestat de Lioncourt. Stepping into the part of Anne Rice’s immortal creation, Sam Reid is a beguiling little Lucifer with an irresistible French accent and a grabbable mane of blonde hair. (“I’m a lot,” he admits in a later episode, and it’s true — his tasteful cravat doubles as a red flag.) An aristocratic vampire cutting a bloody swathe through the New World, Lestat is instantly smitten with Louis. He circles him like the animal in his surname, and for the very first time, Louis feels seen by another person. Lestat’s love is as liberating as it is damning – when they have sex, they float off the ground.
Oh yes, let’s talk about sex. In Interview with the Vampire, the hothouse homoeroticism of Rice’s novels is finally realized onscreen – the show is unabashedly sensual and unapologetically queer. The exact nature of Louis and Lestat’s relationship existed between the lines in the original novel – published nearly half a century ago, it counted on savvy readers to note when the pair shared a coffin or that they were effectively same-sex parents to Claudia. (Oh, and just wait for Bailey Bass as Claudia.) Any lingering ambiguity is torn to shreds halfway through the pilot episode when an attempted tryst with a sweet, doomed sex worker (Najah Bradley) leads to an explosive – and elevated – sexual encounter between her gentleman callers.
Though later books in the Vampire Chronicles were direct about Lestat’s pansexuality and his romance with Louis, the topic has proven thorny with previous adaptations. In the 90s, a wary Anne Rice considered a version of the story where Louis was rewritten as female to be played by Cher – which would have been amazing (and still, somehow, very gay), but it wouldn’t have been Interview with the Vampire. The 1994 Neil Jordan film kept most of the homoerotic subtext surprisingly intact for a movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, aside from a line mentioning Louis’ dead wife and child. And the 2002 Queen of the Damned cut Louis out entirely so Lestat could have a new female love interest.
This is a long way of saying thank God for this show. Lestat and Louis are one of the great gothic romances of the modern era, the original murder husbands (sorry, Fannibals). Reid and Anderson give them a spiky chemistry, a feeling that the two are always teetering on the precipice of something, a kiss, or a kill. There is no way it won’t all end in tears, blood, and a body in the incinerator, but they’re immortal, so why rush things?
Dark, seductive, and grand, there are strands of Poe in the DNA the vampires splatter all over the walls. The present-day scenes echo “The Masque of the Red Death” as Louis welcomes Daniel into his towering penthouse, living like a prince amid a pandemic and surrounded by ominous Francis Bacon paintings and floor-to-ceiling UV-protected windows. There is a deeper story here, too, about the nature of identity and absolution, the lies we tell ourselves, and the elusiveness of memory – even for someone lucky enough to live forever. (How appropriate that Lestat turns Louis in a church after violently interrupting his confession.) And if I’ve made this show sound too pompous or self-important, well, there’s a scene where Louis invites Lestat to meet his family, and the dinner that follows is as awkward, dramatic, and over-the-top as anything on Vanderpump Rules.
AMC’s Interview with the Vampire bursts out of its coffin as one of the best fantasy shows of the year. Let the tale seduce you, as I was seduced.
