I first learned of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire when the movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt came out in 1994. I remember there was great controversy over Cruise being cast as Lestat. Anne Rice herself came out against him. Cruise was a major star at the time, but wasn’t considered a great actor yet. My memories here are vague, but once the movie came out, everyone realized Cruise was wonderful.
I didn’t have an opinion. I’d not read the book. I did like Tom Cruise, but didn’t really care if he was in this movie or not. I was a freshman in college when the film finally came out. My girlfriend at the time was a big Anne Rice fan and was super excited about the film. She had opinions on Tom Cruise.
We watched the movie together, and I liked it. I must have liked it quite a bit because my mom bought me a boxed set of the Vampire Chronicles books. I read Interview with the Vampire over Christmas break and loved it. I think I started the next book, The Vampire Lestat, but couldn’t get into it. Partially, this was because that book focused on Lestat and not Louis, who was the protagonist of Interview, and partially it was because Lestat becomes a modern-day rock star, and that seemed ludicrous to me. Much of Interview is set at the turn of the century, so modernizing him felt wrong somehow.
I kept telling myself I should read it anyway, and I kept not doing it. Everyone says Queen of the Damned, the third book in the series, is terrific, and I very much wanted to read it, but I felt like I needed to read Lestat first, and that never did happen. Eventually, I moved completely away from Rice and vampires, and it all seems like a distant memory to me now.
I rewatched the movie a couple of years ago. It’s not great. It has some interesting stuff going on in it. Tom Cruise is quite good. As is Brad Pitt. And a young Kristin Dunst is terrific. But I find chunks of it rather dull, and I don’t find the way that it plays with vampire lore nearly as interesting as I once did.
When they announced AMC was making a TV series out of Interview with the Vampire, I wasn’t particularly interested. It was the sort of thing I thought I might check out at some point, but really, I knew I’d be too interested in other things to bother.
But then the same people adapted The Vampire Lestat, and I got a really good price on an annual subscription to AMC+. Suddenly, Lestat was being advertised to me all the time. Suddenly, I started noticing people in my social media feeds saying good things about it. And now here I am watching it and talking about it.
The original story has a vampire meet with a journalist whom he tells his story to. This adaptation is set in modern times, but it does a neat little trick. The vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Andersen) meets with a journalist, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). But the twist is that they previously met decades ago and had the original interview. But it ended badly, and nothing was ever published (I believe in the book Louis winds up killing Molloy). Now Louis wants to try it again. Molloy now has Parkinson’s, is a cynic, but is much tougher than he was the first time. He’s no longer scared and, as such, can push past some of the vampires’ BS.
It is a bit of brilliant casting to put Andersen as Malloy. He brilliantly portrayed a shock jock in Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio. He brings some of that cocky energy here.
This first episode follows Louis from just before the time he meets Lestat (Sam Reid) until he is turned into a vampire. From the start, this series isn’t afraid to mess with the story. For starters, Jacob Andersen is black, and in the book, he is white. The book sets his origin story in 1791. The series moves that up to 1910, so that slavery is a thing of the past. Louis is now a successful brothel owner. He’s rich, and that brings him a certain amount of power, but he’s still a black man living in the very racist South. The white people he hobnobs with never let him forget he is lesser than they are. He never forgets to call them “sir.”
Race becomes a central theme of the episode. When he meets Lestat, the vampire is appalled by how the whites treat him. Part of the appeal of Lestat and his call to become a vampire is how he is treated with respect.
Vampire stories are often laced with eroticism. There is a natural sensuality in the way a vampire bites the neck of their victims and sucks. There is an innate homoeroticism in Anne Rice’s story that was only hinted at in the 1994 adaptation. This series leans hard into that.
I watched the extended cut, which runs about an hour and ten minutes. Honestly, that was a little long. I don’t need my TV episodes to be nearly as long as a movie. It packs an awful lot into those minutes, and it is very well done. Reid and Andersen are both very good. It digs into Louis’ family situation. How they pretend to not know what he does for a living, how they pray he’ll earn enough to get him out of that lifestyle, and how they enjoy the fruits of his labor. There is a religious brother, a sister who is about to get married, and a mother who sees all and knows all.
I loved how the relationship with Lestat builds. It begins with a bit of jealousy as Lestat has better luck with Louis’s girl than he does. But there is also a sense of awe and desire. Louis admits that he both wanted to kill Lestat and be him. Then they become friends, and Lestat shows him some of his power. Lestat can talk to a group of people yet still communicate with Louis telepathically. He moves so fast that time almost seems to stop. This is all really well done.
All of that being said, there is something about the show I didn’t love. Part of it is that this story is too familiar to me. I don’t know that I need another telling of it. I think it feels a little too drawn out as well. There are seven episodes in the first season, eight in the second, and I don’t know that the book has enough in it to make it worth all of that. Obviously, the series is going to add to the story. Hopefully, that will be in interesting ways. There is nothing in this first episode that doesn’t make me think they will be successful. I know I will watch more of it, but I don’t think I’ll be binging this one.
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Hi, and welcome to my Interview with the Vampire recap. I’ve been thinking a lot about doing some of these. I watch a lot of TV, and it always seems like a good idea to talk about it. At the same time, I don’t know that I have the skills to do it. Or the time. Or patience. Doing recaps takes a lot of time. There is a skill to detail the plots of individual episodes, and I’m not sure that I have that. My idea is to maybe just give the most basic plot summation and then add in a few thoughts on what I liked or didn’t like. I meant to do that with this episode. I thought I’d write a couple of paragraphs and be done with it. But I have a hard time just writing a couple of paragraphs about anything. Which winds up making it exhausting. Which means I have a hard time doing this sort of thing.
So, I have no idea if I’ll write about episode two or three or the entire series. I don’t even know when or if I’ll watch them. But for now, I enjoyed the first episode, and now you know why.
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