Roush Review: The Seductive ‘Interview’ Continues With Vampires in Paris

Matt Roush May 9, 2024, 10:30 am

Interview with the Vampire

Matt's Rating:

Horror takes a back seat to passion in AMC’s ravishingly voluptuous adaptation of Anne Rice’s Gothic masterpiece Interview with the Vampire. Elegant and literate even at its most ghoulish, the seductive second season even adds a theatrical flourish to its bag of dazzling tricks.

“Are you kidding me?” scoffs the all-too-mortal interviewer, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). “It’s a telenovela!” he barks, when the undead Louis de Pointe du Lac (suave Jacob Anderson) reaches a particularly florid twist in his story of nocturnal searching and yearning. The new chapter takes him and his eternally young and hormonally frustrated “daughter” Claudia (the spirited Delainey Hayles, replacing Bailey Bass) to Europe, fleeing New Orleans and the chaos that appears to have claimed Louis’ centuries-old lover Lestat (Sam Reid).

We first encounter them amid the carnage of human warfare in World War II, exploring their ancestral lands and seeking evidence of their kind while feeding on the flesh of soldiers. After this macabre start, they arrive in 1940s postwar Paris, where they find community with a garish theatrical troupe that stages its bloody feedings as a form of snuff pageantry. The audience eats it up even as some of them get eaten.

Claudia, described as “a fierce vampire trapped in the body of a little girl,” is thrilled by the company, though less enchanted to be stuck playing a child for what seems eternity. Louis is enthralled by the group’s ancient manager, Armand (enigmatic Assad Zaman), revealed to be Louis’ current companion, who’s awfully ambivalent about Louis opening their past to a prying journalist. These undead lovers share a past with the capricious Lestat, who’s never far from Louis’ mind, mocking his every move.

Love Bites in 'Interview With the Vampire'

Suffused with eternal desire and poetic pain, Interview balances its repellent gore with moments of transcendent and operatic wonder. Get bitten. You’ll like it.

Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, Season Premiere, Sunday, May 12, 9/8c, AMC (also AMC+)