Bat's entertainment...Sam Ried, Jacob Anderson and Bailey Bass in AMC's 'Interview With The Vampire'.
Review: Interview With The Vampire 2022
by Leon Blanda
by Leon Blanda
[THIS FEATURE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE 2022 TV SHOW 'INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE']
Like Louis de Pointe du Lac, I too was seduced into the Cult de Vampyr by a much older man, whose intention for loaning me his copy of Interview with the Vampire came with dark consequences. A sordid tale for another time, but it got me hooked. I became a fan, devouring The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned in short order, but losing interest somewhere in the middle of Memnoch the Devil, and now there are thirteen books composing The Vampire Chronicles. Regardless of my waning interest in the books, I was excited when AMC announced a reboot.
It’s funny to me now, remembering how vocally disgusted people were regarding 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, starring Thomas “Maverick” Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt, and Bradley “Tyler Durden” Pitt as Louis. Wild, apocryphal stories about early screenings flooded Entertainment Tonight and the local news (our only sources of celebrity gossip in the nineties). Blurry images of Cruise in his alabaster monster make-up adorned the covers of tabloid rags in grocery store checkout lines. Inside the pages were lurid , “first-hand” accounts of audience members fainting, and throwing up in the aisles, or leaving in a horrified huff before the credits rolled, due to the intense, bloody gore, and implied homosexuality.
Oprah Winfrey, the former reigning queen of the damned daytime talk shows, claimed to have left the theater in a tizzy during a particularly grotesque scene involving a rat. Every evangelical preacher, pastor, and Bible-thumping minister on either side of the mighty Mississip’, called Louis and Lestat’s mildly flirtatious, overly ambiguous onscreen squabbles an abomination to God.
Even Anne Rice, who wrote both the novel and the screenplay for the film, denounced it for the simple fact that Cruise is a short king, and not the statuesque, over-six-feet-tall, alpha-vamp Lestat she’d described in The Vampire Chronicles, though she eventually came around to Cruise’s portrayal of her most famous character.
Almost thirty years have passed since the release of the movie, and just as the vampire Lestat must adapt through the centuries, we find ourselves in a new time, a new world. A better world? That’s debatable, but there has not been the same outrage towards AMC’s take on Anne Rice’s most popular creation. Which makes me think, maybe we’ve progressed as a society. Or maybe all the angry evangelicals are too busy making TikToks that don’t jive with my finely cultivated algorithm.
Having seen both—the original film, and the first season of IWTV on AMC—it is the latter that gets it right. Everything. The characters, the sets, the drama of it all. Even with the obvious changes to the source material that would have made certain angry protesters in the nineties burn down their local theater, AMC nails it.
Sam Reid’s Lestat is playful, less of a powdered wig aristocrat than how Tom Cruise portrayed him, though that may be due to the shift in setting. In the Cruise IWTV, the year is 1791. In AMC’s latest iteration, it begins in 1910, and slides up to the roaring twenties. With that thirty-year time displacement comes a more modern, hipper sense of fashion, and a haughtier version of New Orleans. It’s more The Great Gatsby than Amadeus. Most importantly, it feels like New Orleans.
That’s another thing AMC nailed, staked right through the heart; they got New Orleans right. Something a lot of films set in the Big Easy get wrong is the city itself. Most tourists think New Orleans is all Mardi Gras beads and beignets, but New Orleans in Interview with the Vampire 2022 feels like New Orleans in real life. You can almost smell the persistent perfume of her streets; the humidity practically fogs up the TV screen as you binge another episode.
The lucky, silver bullet in the pistol for AMC, was the perfect casting of Jacob Anderson as Louis. His Louis is as layered and delicious as Sunday gumbo. The way he does moody and brooding, Anderson’s Louis retains all the sad loneliness of the character without it coming off as teen-angsty melodrama, the wheelhouse where Brad Pitt lived for a lot of the 90’s (Remember Legends of the Fall?). All fairness to Mr. Tyler Durden, teen-angsty melodrama was big business in the mid-nineties, but Anderson’s Louis captures a toughness, a shrewdness that Louis displays in the books.
This Louis is a Black man from money, living in the south, where it was never easy to be a Black man, money or not. He can’t allow himself to be a whiny fop, especially not in front of the prominent white men who frequent his brothel, and want nothing more than to take all that money and power away from him. This Louis, unlike Pretty Boy Pitt, has more than just looks to enthrall an immortal being. He’s strong in a way Lestat could never be.
It should be noted, Eric Bogosian as Daniel Molloy (the interviewer of the vampire), and what the writers of the AMC show have done with the age shift of his character, is an unexpected but delightful twist. Bogosian pulls off an aging man at the beginning of his journey to death in a way you’d want to see him play that character: cool, calm, but crumbling on the inside.
Lastly, we meet our dear, sweet Claudia in episode four. Aged up from the books from five-years-old to fourteen, Bailey Bass plays Claudia’s evolution from early-teen to early-thirty-something-year-old stuck in a child’s body with aplomb. Sadly, she is being replaced in season two by Delainey Hayles. While I look forward to seeing what Hayles will do with the role, I would have loved to seen the choices that Bass would have made for Claudia moving forward.
As always, AMC does a fine job classing up the old idiot box with their original productions, and Interview with the Vampire is no exception. It’s prestige TV, but gorier, gayer, and Blacker than the Cruise/Pitt take, making the story that much more poignant and potent to modern audiences, especially those in the modern audience who have crossed oceans of time to be here. You know who you are. AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is a must see for fans of Anne Rice and the city of New Orleans. There’s also more rat eating… if you’re into that sort of thing.
Leon Peter Blanda is a writer and stand-up comedian from New Orleans. His debut novel, High Moon, called a “John Carpenter film in prose,” is available on his website: LeonBlanda.com. Find him @LeonBlanda on all socials.
Like Louis de Pointe du Lac, I too was seduced into the Cult de Vampyr by a much older man, whose intention for loaning me his copy of Interview with the Vampire came with dark consequences. A sordid tale for another time, but it got me hooked. I became a fan, devouring The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned in short order, but losing interest somewhere in the middle of Memnoch the Devil, and now there are thirteen books composing The Vampire Chronicles. Regardless of my waning interest in the books, I was excited when AMC announced a reboot.
It’s funny to me now, remembering how vocally disgusted people were regarding 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, starring Thomas “Maverick” Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt, and Bradley “Tyler Durden” Pitt as Louis. Wild, apocryphal stories about early screenings flooded Entertainment Tonight and the local news (our only sources of celebrity gossip in the nineties). Blurry images of Cruise in his alabaster monster make-up adorned the covers of tabloid rags in grocery store checkout lines. Inside the pages were lurid , “first-hand” accounts of audience members fainting, and throwing up in the aisles, or leaving in a horrified huff before the credits rolled, due to the intense, bloody gore, and implied homosexuality.
Oprah Winfrey, the former reigning queen of the damned daytime talk shows, claimed to have left the theater in a tizzy during a particularly grotesque scene involving a rat. Every evangelical preacher, pastor, and Bible-thumping minister on either side of the mighty Mississip’, called Louis and Lestat’s mildly flirtatious, overly ambiguous onscreen squabbles an abomination to God.
Even Anne Rice, who wrote both the novel and the screenplay for the film, denounced it for the simple fact that Cruise is a short king, and not the statuesque, over-six-feet-tall, alpha-vamp Lestat she’d described in The Vampire Chronicles, though she eventually came around to Cruise’s portrayal of her most famous character.
Almost thirty years have passed since the release of the movie, and just as the vampire Lestat must adapt through the centuries, we find ourselves in a new time, a new world. A better world? That’s debatable, but there has not been the same outrage towards AMC’s take on Anne Rice’s most popular creation. Which makes me think, maybe we’ve progressed as a society. Or maybe all the angry evangelicals are too busy making TikToks that don’t jive with my finely cultivated algorithm.
Having seen both—the original film, and the first season of IWTV on AMC—it is the latter that gets it right. Everything. The characters, the sets, the drama of it all. Even with the obvious changes to the source material that would have made certain angry protesters in the nineties burn down their local theater, AMC nails it.
Sam Reid’s Lestat is playful, less of a powdered wig aristocrat than how Tom Cruise portrayed him, though that may be due to the shift in setting. In the Cruise IWTV, the year is 1791. In AMC’s latest iteration, it begins in 1910, and slides up to the roaring twenties. With that thirty-year time displacement comes a more modern, hipper sense of fashion, and a haughtier version of New Orleans. It’s more The Great Gatsby than Amadeus. Most importantly, it feels like New Orleans.
That’s another thing AMC nailed, staked right through the heart; they got New Orleans right. Something a lot of films set in the Big Easy get wrong is the city itself. Most tourists think New Orleans is all Mardi Gras beads and beignets, but New Orleans in Interview with the Vampire 2022 feels like New Orleans in real life. You can almost smell the persistent perfume of her streets; the humidity practically fogs up the TV screen as you binge another episode.
The lucky, silver bullet in the pistol for AMC, was the perfect casting of Jacob Anderson as Louis. His Louis is as layered and delicious as Sunday gumbo. The way he does moody and brooding, Anderson’s Louis retains all the sad loneliness of the character without it coming off as teen-angsty melodrama, the wheelhouse where Brad Pitt lived for a lot of the 90’s (Remember Legends of the Fall?). All fairness to Mr. Tyler Durden, teen-angsty melodrama was big business in the mid-nineties, but Anderson’s Louis captures a toughness, a shrewdness that Louis displays in the books.
This Louis is a Black man from money, living in the south, where it was never easy to be a Black man, money or not. He can’t allow himself to be a whiny fop, especially not in front of the prominent white men who frequent his brothel, and want nothing more than to take all that money and power away from him. This Louis, unlike Pretty Boy Pitt, has more than just looks to enthrall an immortal being. He’s strong in a way Lestat could never be.
It should be noted, Eric Bogosian as Daniel Molloy (the interviewer of the vampire), and what the writers of the AMC show have done with the age shift of his character, is an unexpected but delightful twist. Bogosian pulls off an aging man at the beginning of his journey to death in a way you’d want to see him play that character: cool, calm, but crumbling on the inside.
Lastly, we meet our dear, sweet Claudia in episode four. Aged up from the books from five-years-old to fourteen, Bailey Bass plays Claudia’s evolution from early-teen to early-thirty-something-year-old stuck in a child’s body with aplomb. Sadly, she is being replaced in season two by Delainey Hayles. While I look forward to seeing what Hayles will do with the role, I would have loved to seen the choices that Bass would have made for Claudia moving forward.
As always, AMC does a fine job classing up the old idiot box with their original productions, and Interview with the Vampire is no exception. It’s prestige TV, but gorier, gayer, and Blacker than the Cruise/Pitt take, making the story that much more poignant and potent to modern audiences, especially those in the modern audience who have crossed oceans of time to be here. You know who you are. AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is a must see for fans of Anne Rice and the city of New Orleans. There’s also more rat eating… if you’re into that sort of thing.
Leon Peter Blanda is a writer and stand-up comedian from New Orleans. His debut novel, High Moon, called a “John Carpenter film in prose,” is available on his website: LeonBlanda.com. Find him @LeonBlanda on all socials.
