Old monsters, new blood
TV adaptation makes major changes to Rice’s novel ‘Interview With the Vampire’
CHALMETTE, La. — Actors Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid had just finished filming a scene last March inside a cavernous studio here in the seat of
St. Bernard Parish, about a 20-minute drive from the French Quarter of
New Orleans. The evening air was steamy, and they looked exhausted from a shooting schedule that required them to keep vampire hours under hot lights.
As they spoke, they gave off a sparkle, and it wasn’t just because of the handpainted contact lenses that made them look like tigers — or ravers.
It was also because they were in their sweet spot, having grown up as self-described outsiders with an affinity for the darker side of art — Poe’s literary demons for Reid, Portishead’s spectral soundtracks for Anderson. And here they were, years later, costumed in ragtimeera suiting to play two of popular culture’s most beloved misfits: Lestat and Louis from the Anne Rice novel “Interview With the Vampire,” a new serieslength adaptation that recently debuted on AMC and is streaming on AMC+.
“I’m a very proud nerd,” said Anderson, 32, who plays the reluctant bloodsucker Louis. “I love fantasy. I’m an emo. I’m a bit of a goth, I guess. This is a dream.” (“Game of Thrones” fans know the British actor as Grey Worm, leader of the Unsullied.)
Reid, 35, had grown up with a similar sensibility. As a boy in Australia, he liked dressing up as a vampire for Halloween and later devoured Rice’s sweeping blood-magic sagas. He said he felt a responsibility in playing the debonair Lestat to do right by the author, who died in December at age 80.
“When you love the source material and you’re a fan yourself, you put the same pressure on yourself that other lovers of the book would do,” he said. “My own pressure is to do justice to something that I love very much.”
And there is pressure. In an era dominated by endlessly expandable telecinematic universes like Marvel and “Star
Wars,” AMC has a lot riding on the show’s success; the network, which acquired the rights to “Interview” and 17 other Rice novels from two of her literary series, plans to spin that catalog into at least five
new series over the next decade.
Maybe more important, the series has to try not to alienate a huge existing fan base. “Interview” is the first time Rice’s book has been made into a television series, and it’s the first major Rice adaptation since she died, leaving behind more than 40 genre-defining books and a very devoted — and very protective — readership.
Based on episodes
provided in advance, the series doesn’t just adapt the novel; it fundamentally alters it, shifting the central timeline forward by over a century, exchanging the book’s suggestive homoeroticism for outright gay sex and changing the racial identity of main characters, among other changes.
Given the pedantic and often racist pushback recently to Amazon’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel,
“The Rings of Power,”
and HBO’S “Game of Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon,” this new version of “Interview” is bound to bring out the trolls, as indeed it already has. The series also has to compete with Neil Jordan’s big-screen adaptation from 1994 — which, whatever its faults, was wildly successful and helped cement the popular image of Lestat and Louis as Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, respectively.
Rolin Jones (“Perry
Mason,” “Weeds”), the show’s creator and showrunner, said in a recent interview that he knew there would be haters.
But he also insisted that the series remains “wildly reverential” to the spirit and prose of the book, which he called an “essential piece of American literature.”
What made the novel great “is the interior life,” he argued, but “that makes for poor drama almost all the time.” The trick, then, was to try to find new ways to externalize that drama for a modern TV audience, as he imagined Rice might have wanted. As he and the other writers worked, Jones kept this question in mind: “What would this savage writer in 1976 do if she were in this room right now?”
“There’s something inherent in this story that wants to be revisited every generation,” he added. Doing so, he said, was “a celebration of Anne, not a desecration.”
When AMC announced in 2020 that it had acquired the rights to “Interview,” Rice called it “one of the most significant and thrilling deals of my long career.”
She wasn’t creatively involved with the series, but what has emerged two years later — its full title is “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire” — is loyal to her source material in many ways. (Season one is based on a portion of the first novel.) There’s still an interview with a vampire, a treacherous eternal romance, an uncontrollable daughter and monstrous bloodsucking. New Orleans, Rice’s hometown, is a pivotal location.
But it’s also more romantic: Where the original book traded more in homoerotic undertones, Louis and Lestat are, unmistakably, a gay couple. The series is darkly comic, bloody, at times brutal and, depending on your tolerance for horror, terrifying. There’s gay and bisexual sex, grisly threesomes, lots of flesh. It’s very sweaty.
Jones described it as “Cassavetes with a lot of feelings and not a lot of edit buttons,” like “some nasty Fiona Apple album of a vampire story” but with gay vampire dads in “the toxic relationship of 2022.” AMC, he said, “spent a whole boatload of money on a real strange beauty.”
With its timeless themes, the vampire myth has obviously proved to be an exceptionally flexible and durable framework, ripe for endless shape-shifting — there can be a vampire story for everyone who feels like an outsider, as Anderson grew up feeling.
“I hope that people see in these characters, who feel so deeply about shame and grief and guilt, that they are not monsters, even though they feel like monsters,” he said in a follow-up interview in August. “I hope people see this is a celebration of searching for acceptance of yourself, and that searching for meaning is not an indulgence.”