Review: Interview With the Vampire, Season 2
By 
I admit it, when AMC announced that it would be adapting Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire into a series a few years ago, I assumed that it would be aggressively not for me. Besides being a very blatant product of the streaming era—take a known IP, preferably one that has already received a movie adaptation for maximum cultural penetration, and tell the same story in 20 hours of television—there is the fact that I have never been a fan of either Interview or its many sequels. I tried reading the novel in my teens and bounced off hard. I caught bits of the 1994 movie and came away feeling, at best, bemused. It was hard to imagine that another take on this material would work for me.
But, as I mentioned a few months in a brief list of TV recommendations, Interview With the Vampire, whose second season concluded earlier this summer, has quickly become one of my favorite shows. And, most interestingly, it has done this not by “transcending” its source material, but by playing fascinating games with it, and with the very idea of faithfulness to its source material. (It is also, to be clear, just an incredibly well-written and -made show, which combines a twisty, salacious tale of dysfunctional relationships and murder with genuinely excellent performances that make you care about all these vampiric idiots and their doomed marriages.) Over at Strange Horizons, I try to puzzle out how this alchemy is achieved.
Published in 1976, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—spawning some dozen sequels, several related series of novels, and a myriad film and TV adaptations—it all but singlehandedly reshaped the popular perception of the vampire. Rice’s vampires are brooding, tormented beings, haunted both by the need to kill and the crushing loneliness of eternal life. They seek companionship—which is to say, thinly veiled homoerotic bonds—with fellow immortals, but these relationships often turn rancid due to the beloved’s similar tormentedness. It’s a portrait that slid into self-parody almost as soon as it made its appearance, and which later creators have found themselves pushing against (“People still fall for that Anne Rice routine,” a decidedly nontormented vampire quips in an early episode of Buffy). But the very fact that this pushback feels necessary speaks to the trope’s influence and reach.
AMC’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire—which premiered in 2022, and whose second season aired earlier this summer—wears that legacy lightly, and even playfully. It is, in some ways, an extremely faithful adaptation. Showrunner Rolin Jones and his team have spoken about the novel and its sequels with great fondness, and their version takes care to preserve whole stretches of dialogue, or to remember that a certain character went to her death wearing a yellow dress. The two seasons that have aired follow the novel’s plot almost to the letter. Yet, within the confines of that faithfulness, this version of Interview with the Vampire also plays elaborate games with its source material. Without changing the story in its essence, and without running away from its cheesiness, it produces something that is at once a retelling, an updating, and a sequel to the original.
…
What’s most interesting and unexpected about the way Interview with the Vampire chooses to adapt its story is that it starts from the premise that the interview described in the book has already happened. In 1973, a drug-addicted hustler and wannabe journalist named Daniel Molloy (Luke Brandon Field) interviewed a man claiming to be a vampire and barely escaped with his life. Forty-nine years later, in 2022, Molloy (Eric Bogosian), now at the tail end of a storied journalism career, receives a box containing the tapes of this long-ago interview, along with an invitation. In a luxuriously appointed penthouse in Dubai, he reunites with Louis to record what the other man claims is the full, true story.
The conceit of the second interview allows Interview with the Vampire to offer fascinating riffs on the notion of faithfulness to its source material. The very premise of the show is that the novel is a flawed version of the story it’s telling. Like Molloy, we in the audience seem to have been expected to already know the rough outlines of the story—details such as Claudia’s impending death, or the fact that Louis and Armand became a couple, are revealed long before they occur in Louis’s narrative. What we’re being offered instead—in what feels almost like a metafictional mission statement for the show—is a deeper, more complex, more truthful version of the story.
Or perhaps that should read emotionally truthful, because one of the first things Interview with the Vampire does is remind us of its own artificiality. This is, after all, a story about a person telling a story, which is a second version of a story they have already told. Early in the second interview, Molloy points out that Louis’s present-day descriptions of Lestat as an urbane, sensitive polymath clash with his statements from 1973, in which he described him—in what are often direct quotes from the novel—as a boor and a poseur (this is also consistent with the novel’s sequels, in which Lestat is made more magnetic and compelling). Louis merely shrugs: “the tapes are an admitted performance.” Louis, as we have seen by this point, is a gifted performer—as a young human in New Orleans, he is adept at wearing different faces to suit different people. So the question is obviously raised: can we trust this interview any more than we could the previous one?
Often, the answer is that we can’t. In the second season’s standout episode, Louis and Molloy realize that their memories of the first interview have been doctored, and try to puzzle out what actually happened; the season’s climax comes when Molloy finally wrangles from the myriad conflicting stories that have been told about it the truth of who bears responsibility for Claudia’s death. Much of the pleasure of watching Interview with the Vampire over time lies in untangling the various lies, half-truths, and misrepresentations that the interview keeps throwing up.
It’s a long review, but still there’s so much more to be said about the show. I only touch a little on the excellence of the performances, but there is so much more to say—Sam Reid is getting the lion’s share of attention for his magnetic, deranged turn as Lestat (check out the teaser the show has produced for the Lestat-focused third season), but Jacob Anderson does a brilliant job as a character who in the original novel and the 1994 movie was stultifyingly boring, and who here becomes ambitious, dynamic, and occasionally cruel without ever losing Louis’s fundamental sadness; and Eric Bogosian is a constant delight as a much-older version of the interviewer who is no longer as awed by the supernatural as he was in his youth, but who still finds himself drawn into his subjects’ decades-old soap opera. The show’s production design, too, is a marvel—on her tumblr, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has been doing excellent work analyzing the costume and production design. It’s truly one of the most excitingly excellent shows on TV, and you should give it a chance even if, like me, you’re a little put off by the source material.