Love Bites in ‘Interview With the Vampire’

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It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets vampire. Boy becomes vampire. Vampires become a messy couple, adopt a teen vampire who grows to hate them, and someone ends up getting their throat slashed during a gory, garish 1939 Mardi Gras party. Well, maybe not as old as time, but definitely as old as Anne Rice’s seminal 1976 gothic bestseller, Interview With the Vampire. And in AMC’s luscious, pitch-perfect adaptation, which is returning for its second season, Rice’s iconic characters—New Orleans scion Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson); the cruel, sexually voracious, centuries-old bloodsucker who turned him, Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid); and their perpetual-adolescent “daughter” Claudia (Delainey Hayles)—are heading abroad to tackle the novel’s brutal second half.

“I’d say actually Part 2 is even more faithful to the book than the first season in many ways,” previews Game of Thrones alum Anderson. As a reluctant killer desperate to maintain his humanity—and a free Black man living in the 1900s South—Anderson’s stirring, melancholy turn has won over even book purists who may have been initially rattled by AMC’s move to race-change Louis.

That key alteration aside, the show diligently honors Rice’s work while allowing the writers to slyly tweak the literary classic just enough to keep readers familiar with the books and 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt guessing and gobsmacked. “A lot that ended up in the show was kind of surprising to me,” Anderson says. “I was reading the scripts and was like, ‘What are you doing?! What are you doing to these characters?’ But I mean that in the best possible way.”

Last we saw the undead’s most dysfunctional family, we were asking the same things. At her wit’s end with the coldhearted Lestat’s abuse and manipulation, Claudia had poisoned her maker during a high-society Mardi Gras soiree turned Grand Guignol, but the kill she so craved (and solely attempted in the novel) was stolen from her when an equally broken Louis then slit Lestat’s throat. After disposing of his corpse, the two fled the Crescent City for Europe. This was all being recounted to Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), the journalist to whom Louis first granted the titular interview back in the 1970s San Francisco of the source material. Decades after their ill-fated meeting, Louis has summoned the aging, sickly writer to his palatial home in 2022 Dubai to give him the real story of his life, under the watchful eye of his assistant, Rashid (Assad Zaman). In the season’s final moments, it was revealed that Rashid was actually Armand, the wickedly powerful 514-year-old vampire with an unexpected tie to Molloy…and the love of Louis’ life.

Interview With The Vampires

Picking up shortly after this jaw-dropper, the interview resumes with Louis recounting the story of life with an increasingly discontented Claudia. Not only are they miles away from the well-heeled glamour they’d grown accustomed to in New Orleans, but they are literally living underground. “We start the first episode of Season 2 [with them] in war-torn Europe searching for vampires,” explains Mark Johnson, the executive producer tasked with overseeing AMC’s Immortal Universe of Vampire and Mayfair Witches. “In their pursuit, they go to Paris.” While it becomes clear that Louis’ recollections of this time are compromised, either by trauma or trickery, readers of Rice’s books know this is where it all goes down. “Paris is at the heart of what happened to Louis’ memory,” notes Johnson’s co-EP Rolin Jones. “The business that happened there is the thing that shattered him. Whether he’s putting it back together or whether he’s digging it out, it all happened in Paris.”

Settling into their new home—actually Prague standing in for the early 1940s City of Light—the isolated pair finally begin to sort out their familial issues (immortal teens can be so moody!). A tricky feat, given that relative newcomer Hayles (who replaced Season 1’s Bailey Bass) was stepping into a role that required her to already have that love-hate vibe with Anderson’s over-protective paternal figure. “I’m so thankful that my first month was just kind of me and him, because we got to learn a bit about each other, how we liked to work, and that gave us the bonding time to try things in the scenes that might not be in the script,” raves Hayles, who delivers a fascinating mix of teen petulance and simmering ferocity. “Some of my favorite scenes and memories are with Jacob in the first month of filming.”

Maarten de Boer

Before long, the duo fall in with the Théâtre des Vampires, a baroque coven of vampiric actors led by (surprise!) Armand and the troupe’s sinister leading man, Santiago (Ben Daniels, Foundation). There, surrounded by a colorfully entertaining cast of international performers who have tricked audiences into thinking their onstage savagery is all an act, perpetual-child Claudia finds community. “In the beginning, she’s observing it all and likes what’s happening,” offers Hayles. “They all have their own personalities, but I would say I think she’s found a bond with them.”

Not so much her traveling companion. “Louis doesn’t like theater, much less hanging out with theater people,” cracks Anderson. “He’s more introverted and they’re very loud and very extroverted. I think that immediately gets his hackles up and he’s like, ‘No, I don’t like these people.’ They’re a lot.” Adding to his discomfort are the lingering grief, guilt and sins of his past. Turns out the theater troupe’s revered, absentee founder was Lestat, which proves to be an ever-present reminder of his first love—often a very intrusive one that refuses to leave Louis alone. “We call him Dream-stat,” Reid tells us. Aside from discussing flashbacks that illuminate Lestat’s French roots, the enthralling Australian actor is supernaturally skilled at avoiding any spoilers as to how he remains on the canvas following his Season 1 fate. “There was a lot of negotiation about what we were going to show of [Lestat], pre-Louis,” he admits. “Before he became a vampire, he was an actor onstage in Paris. I suppose everyone’s seen the trailer now, so you do get the idea that there’s going to be some 1700s Paris plot that turns up.”

“Once he starts getting vampiric powers,” Reid goes on, “he realizes there’s a whole other world out there that he wants to go and explore. And he is pretty fickle, so whether or not he lasts as an actor very long after becoming a vampire is a longer story. But at the start, he has very specific reasons for starting that theater company. Very, very specific reasons.”

In addition to Dream-stat, there is the nightmare awaiting Louis and Claudia should word get out that they have another vampire’s blood on their hands. By coven law, the two would face the ultimate punishment for slaughtering Lestat, meaning the metaphorical stakes have never been higher. “I think for them it’s a journey of discovering how much they really need each other or don’t need each other, and what their dynamic actually is,” says Anderson. “Is it father- daughter? Is it brother-sister? Do they need each other at all?”

Larry Horricks / AMC

“It is an origin story,” Johnson asserts. “Season 1 was pretty much a pure love story between Lestat and Louis, and then the introduction of a daughter. This is much more an origin story about a mature Louis.”

A Louis, Anderson continues, who, amid his Parisian angst, is drawn to the comfort of Armand, a sort of anti-Lestat. “There’s a tenderness to their relationship,” he says of the couple, before admitting with a laugh that 80 years later, Louis still hasn’t entirely figured out what he wants. “You really see a level of comfort between [them] that, I think, in real relationships can be both a plus and can also lead to ambivalence or resentment…. I mean, Louis loves a bit of drama. He’s not averse to a problematic relationship.”

That is made even more evident in both timelines. In the past, Santiago’s distrust of the new vamps in town causes chaos. “Louis comes in, he is a newcomer, he’s this incredibly gorgeous American and everybody wants a piece of him,” says Johnson. “That immediately puts Santiago on his heels.”

“As soon as he lays eyes on Louis and starts to talk to him, it takes one to know one,” posits Daniels, an old friend of Jones from the TV series The Exorcist. “He knows that there’s a lot of bulls–t going on.” A pompous, relatively new vampire with startling abilities, the scene-stealing Santiago does, however, take a shine to Claudia. Not only for her interest in the stage, but also for her ties to Louis and whatever the two of them are hiding. “It’s kind of a manipulation,” says Daniels. “He lures in Claudia to get information, but he loves her. He thinks she is totally admirable as a vampire.” Daniels took an online quiz in character to measure Santiago’s level of Machiavellian intent and “scored, like, 98” out of 100. “He’s truly conniving,” Johnson states ominously. “And he becomes incredibly more important as the season goes on.”

In the Dubai present, Louis is just as troubled by the prickly dynamic emerging between his beau and interviewer. Armand “has revealed himself in the last episode of Season 1, so there’s already something shady going on [with him],” Zaman explains of the tension. “This person has been masquerading as a servant yet it’s obvious he’s been pretty influential in the way Louis conducted that first season interview. We’re not going to trust him right from the get-go.” It will take much of the season before Molloy, or viewers, get to the bottom of Armand’s intentions, but Zaman promises that those questions will be answered thanks to “Molloy’s tactical prowess as a reporter.”

Portraits With The Vampires

Photos by Maarten de Boer

Helping fill in those blanks is the trove of resources left by Rice (her son, author Christopher Rice, is a credited executive producer). “If you’re telling a relationship between Armand and Louis, I have a full book on Armand now,” points out Jones of The Vampire Armand, the sixth entry in the author’s 13-book Vampire Chronicles series. “If they’re walking and talking along the Seine, I got things to say that I could not have said from the first book.” Likewise, Johnson, Jones and Co. have pulled elements from Interview’s Lestat-centric sequels The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned and The Tale of the Body Thief, including some Easter eggs that pop up early in the season. “If I was a hardcore fan of these books and Episode 3 came up, I would be very pleased at the end 52 minutes later.”

But will they be pleased with the show’s central romance between Louis and Lestat being upended by Armand? Should diehards be ready to ship “Loumand,” or is there hope for “Loustat”? Anderson agrees that “inevitably, you’re going to have comparisons, but I’d say that we made a very conscious decision in the beginning, Assad and I, that there’s just no point in trying to re-create the dynamic between Louis and Lestat. It has to be a different thing.” For Reid, it’s not so much about Lestat finding love or getting the guy as much as it is taking all of these characters on the journey Anne Rice has determined for them. Just maybe with some unexpected turns. “If you’ve read the books, if you know that we’re following the books, and are really excited to see specific beats that we’re going to show in this season, I would like to send out a word of caution and just say: Stick with us.”

Fangs for the warning!

Interview With the Vampire, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, May 12, 9/8c, AMC and AMC+