So, I’m a bit late to the party when it comes to AMC+’s excellent adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. But boy am I glad I hopped on board this particular train, because let me tell you – you are really missing out if you’re not watching this exceptional series. Is it campy? Sure – anyone who has read the original novel or seen the film version of the story knows that this one can get a bit campy at times. I mean, it’s immortal vampires playing with the lives of the humans around them over the course of a century – we’re starting from an outrageous premise here. But unlike the film – which definitely veered into the realm of too much camp at times (those wigs, those costumes, that make-up) – this series is grounded in something that was only subtext in the original tellings of this tale: the deeply queer, deeply emotionally compelling, deeply dark romance between Lestat (Sam Reid, embodying Lestat’s dark, possessive, and at times, abusive energy with seductive grace) and Louis (Jacob Anderson, making sure we understand how conflicted Louis is about his actions – while never hiding how his power and strength is a drug for him in a world that sees him as lesser due to the color of his skin).
The basic structure of the story is the same as the novel: Louis is telling his vampiric life story to the writer Daniel Molloy (a great Eric Bogosian, the only character in this story who, so far, is able to sardonically tease out information from a reticent Louis about what is fact and fiction in his tale), a tale that spans the 20th century and details his life with and without Lestat. However, this interview is a do-over, seeing as their initial interview, 50 years earlier in 1973, ended with Daniel getting brutally attacked. So, this version of Daniel is wary of Louis and his world – and comes into the interview with a major chip on his shoulder, meaning Louis needs to earn his trust. But the tale he tell is more or less in-line with the major story beats that will be familiar to fans of Rice’s books. Lestat sires Louis, the pair become inseparable (although, here, as is common with vampire stories*, albeit main-text rather than the traditional subtext, their relationship is as queer as queer can be – allowing us to witness how deep their love (and, at times, hate) for each other flows throughout time), and find success in a New Orleans that is starting to grapple with the testy racial tensions within the city limits. In a switch from the novels, Louis is bi-racial in this version of the story (as is Claudia, here played with menace by Bailey Bass in season one and Delainey Hailes in season two – and aged up to around 14 to make the character a bit more palatable from the five-year-old of the novel), and his race is just as much a sticking point for the character as his vampiric nature is. 1917 New Orleans wasn’t a great place for Black individuals, but if you happen to have the ability to take out your anger on the racist white men with power by drinking their blood, well, that doesn’t hurt.
*In my freshman year of college, I took a seminar titled “Vampires Among Us,” much to the consternation of my parents – who still tease me about it to this day. However, having spent a semester reading all the “classic” vampire stories – which included Interview with the Vampire – I can speak with some authority in saying that, from the first appearance of vampires on the page, they’ve been deeply linked with peoples’ fear of queerness and sexuality. Thus, having a version of this story told without holding back the queer relationship between its two central characters is a really lovely step in vampire storytelling – embracing the otherness that helped make vampires so terrifying to homophobic, misogynistic, or simply sheltered readers back when the first vampire stories were told centuries ago.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes this version of Interview so compelling. The performances are perfectly calibrated. Anderson makes for an excellent Louis in that every time he gives us a look deeper into the character, he’s also just as quick to close him off, allowing us to puzzle over just why he stays with Lestat when he’d clearly be much happier somewhere (anywhere!) else. And Reid is mesmerizing in his performance as Lestat. Brash, charming, exuding power, this Lestat has fully embraced his immortality to the point where he really no longer cares about the humans that surround him. Sure, he’s careful not to arouse undue suspicion with his actions, but he isn’t still connected to the living world the way Louis continues to try to be. It’s a beautiful juxtaposition. And Bogosian understands what’s being asked of him as Molloy, the audience surrogate in many ways. This version of the character is unafraid to ask the hard questions and probe deeper underneath the veneer that Louis shrouds himself under. He’s not easily impressed by Louis’s displays of power, prestige, and status (in the present, he lives in a gorgeous apartment high above Dubai – that’s opulence in all its grandeur). And he forces Louis to confront some very hard truths about his past and who he was – and how those past instances turned him into the being he is at present.
Interview with the Vampire isn’t a story one might think would be filled with emotional layering and complex performances that ask the audience to separate the horrors characters inflict from the emotional pain they are suffering from throughout those actions – to see that there’s still some humanity lingering beneath the most vicious actions taken by our central characters. But it’s there. And the story doesn’t see its vampires as othered – because the humans they encounter don’t treat them as something special or something to be revered (or, at least most don’t). Instead, the story asks us to see just how horrific humans are, especially when they aren’t vampires who need to kill to survive. The ugliness of humanity is shown, unflinchingly, and compared to the horrors wrought by the vampires among them – just as vicious, much more bloody – the ledger shows that they aren’t all that different, in the end. A drive for power, a need to subjugate those one sees as lesser, and an inability to see beyond one’s position in the food chain infects all of the characters in this story dead or alive. And it’s that close inspection on the human condition – along with some incredibly nuanced and compelling performances and some spot-on writing – that make Interview with the Vampire the best show you aren’t watching.
