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Watch: 'Interview With the Vampire' bites into Louis & Lestat's 'bold love story' in AMC series
"It’s just slaughtered with Anne’s writing!"
Tilt the head to the side, expose the neck, and sink your fangs in. A new Interview With the Vampire series is coming to AMC this fall, which aims to be the quintessential adaptation of Anne Rice’s mesmerizing vampire novels. At last weekend's San Diego Comic-Con, the world got their first look at the buzzy series, including a tasty full trailer.
Hoping to differentiate between this new series and the two-hour 1994 film starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Kirsten Dunst, AMC is kicking off the first season with seven episodes. If they draw enough viewers, there are overarching plans for additional seasons building out the Anne Rice supernatural universe.
Like the film, Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire will chronicle the love affair between the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid) and human Louis de Point du Lac (Game of Thrones' Jacob Anderson), from the courtship to turning him into a vampire, and the messiness of their life together. While the film danced around the queer subtext, this series is an aggressive and unabashed portrayal of the attraction.
Check it out below:
A clip was shown to the audience (including SYFY WIRE) where Lestat and Louis meet for the first time. The descriptive words of Rice are apparent in the detail of the show, the movement of the actors, and especially the script. This show is hoping to land square with fans of the vampire and supernatural genres, but above all, the admirers of Rice’s body of work.
“We have a great advantage,” said showrunner Rolin Jones during the panel. “We’re in the first half of this book and we are almost at 7 hours. We’ve taken so much of her prose and dialogue, and manufactured scenes from a very centered place. It’s just slaughtered with Anne’s writing!”
Executive producer Mark Johnson boiled Interview With the Vampire to its essential elements. “It’s a bold love story between Lestat and Louis that dooms them, the seductive allure of New Orleans, and a family of three whose own selfishness can’t keep it together.”
Speaking of holding it together, the linchpin of the series is investigative journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), who comes across a box with tapes marked 1973, which contain the interview he did with Louis. As a young, brash and egotistical reporter, Molloy, who is now a successful and seasoned writer, thinks he missed the real story and that he asked the wrong questions.
“This interview is his chance to grab the brass ring, his white whale,” Bogosian told the crowd. “He’s a much craftier journalist. He’s not going to get lied to. He’s going to get the story.”
Expect battles between Daniel and Louis to occur as he tries to get to the truth. Louis can be an unreliable narrator, but Anderson insists that not everything Louis says is a lie. “Viewers will wonder if it is something real, is that Louis’ memory, there’s Lestat’s point of view as well, and that questioning of where the truth lies is a lovely nugget that exists within the show and will continue to.”
“Molloy in episode two says early on that ‘memory is a monster.’” Jones adds. “Molloy wants to revisit an interview with Louis, which spans from 1910-1940 – this Fiona Apple version of a relationship with Lestat. But the idea of memory is a big deal. What we remember versus the story we tell about ourselves. ... The two most aggressive differences are Molloy is better at his job ... and that some primordial version of the 'Brat Prince' [Rice’s nickname for Lestat] has been put back into this.”
Not to be forgotten is the tragic story of Claudia, a child who Lestat turns into a vampire, who is made to suffer into adulthood in a child’s body forever. Bailey Base plays her in the series, though she admittedly didn’t know much about the story initially. But once she won the role, she read the books, made annotations in the margins, and created multiple google documents with quotes from the book and their connection to the scripts.
“Posture was a big thing for Claudia,” Base explained. “I played 14, 17, 20, 25, 30 and all the way up to 37. She’s becoming a woman, even though she’s stuck in this body, little things change. She’s seen how women walk and she wants to achieve that. Whether it’s changing her clothes or tailoring them herself, killing a victim and stealing her clothes because she’s jealous. It's a full arc.”
“The one thing this show is not, is shy,” Reid explained. “It is definitely not afraid of what it is. Sometimes it’s confronting and surprising, but it’s very competent. So I feel very proud to be in it and lucky to have Rolin at the helm of it. It’s a very confident show. When we talk about these characters and these intense emotions, it's directly from Anne Rice’s writing. The way they speak, the intensity at which they love goes to the extreme point of death, if they could die.”
Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire debuts Oct. 2 on AMC.
Click here for SYFY WIRE’s full coverage of San Diego Comic-Con 2022.
Got a taste for blood? You can stream Van Helsing and plenty more horror on Peacock. Or if you're in the mood for some bloody good laughs, check out the teaser trailer for SYFY's upcoming series, Reginald the Vampire.
