Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Interview With The Vampire’ (2022) On AMC, Which Brings The Tale Of Lestat And Pointe Du Lac Into The 20th And 21st Centuries

It’s not an understatement to say that Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview With The Vampire and the 1994 film of the same name helped kickstart the modern obsession with vampires. Without Interview, we likely wouldn’t have had Buffy, or Twilight or Vampire Diaries, among the more popular films and series that featured the moody bloodsuckers. Now, the late author’s signature characters are being rethought for a series that AMC hopes will become the cornerstone of a new franchise.

ANNE RICE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A commercial for an online master class, taught by veteran award-winning journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian).

The Gist: Molloy, far removed from the heyday of his career, finds a mysterious package outside. It’s from someone he interviewed in 1973, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), with the tapes of their interview. With everything that’s gone on in the world, including the pandemic, and the advancing years, he wants to tell his story to Molloy again, in a place of his choosing.

Molloy, despite suffering from Parkinson’s, flies to Dubai, where the wealthy vampire lives in a dark, massive penthouse in a top building in the city. “Where’s your coffin?” Molloy asks. “You’re standing in it,” Louis says. When they sit down to talk, Molloy asks Louis, “So, how long have you been dead?”

Louis starts the story in 1910 New Orleans. He’s been put in charge of the various business his father left after he died five years prior. One of the businesses was a group of brothels in the city’s red light district, where he has to deal with drunk aldermen getting punched by one of his workers when the alderman helps himself to a part of the worker’s body that’s off-limits. There has also been an illness going around where its victims are found drained of blood.

That’s not when his pious brother Paul (Steven G. Norfleet) isn’t there trying to convert his workers. Paul is so insistent one night that Luis threatens him with a knife he keeps hidden in a cane. Luis has his own regular brothel, the massive Fairplay Saloon owned by the connected Tom Anderson (Chris Stack). One night, when visiting Lily (Najah Bradley), his favorite girl there, he meets a foreigner named Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), who is very interested in Louis. During a poker game with Anderson and the alderman, Lestat communicates with Louis telepathically and somehow freezes time.

Louis tells Molloy that he was drawn to Lestat as well, but couldn’t quite figure out why. Before the wedding of his sister Grace (Kalyne Coleman), Louis spends a night with Lily and Lestat. It’s there where Louis first feels Lestat’s bite as the two of them kiss during the threesome; it takes a family tragedy and Louis going to confessional to make him feel the full force of Lestat’s bite, and just how strong he is. Both are feelings he likes.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As the title indicates, Interview With The Vampire is based on Rice’s books, and the story essentially transfers her story, depicted in the 1994 film starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, from the 18th and 19th centuries to the 20th and 21st.

Our Take: The new version of Interview With The Vampire is produced by Rolin Jones (Weeds, Perry Mason), and it feels in a lot of ways like a series that didn’t need to be made. You would think that modernizing the story of Lestat and Louis would make it more accessible, but it’s not like Rice’s books or the 1994 film weren’t massive hits, and they were just fine taking place 250 years ago. In many ways, it’s still a costume drama, it’s just that the costumes are now from 110 years ago.

But we get what Jones and AMC, who already renewed the series for a second season and is planning on building it out as a franchise, is trying to do in this new version. Instead of implying the whole Lestat-Louis thing was a same-sex relationship, the two of them are shown openly making love (which actually is more about sucking blood for them than anything else). The casting is more diversified than the film was. And the idea that we’re going to see the two of them — and eventually their fledgling vampire charge, Claudia (Bailey Bass) — traversing a more modern landscape will eventually make the whole franchise more palatable to an audience on a long-term basis.

So the sexy aspect of a book series and film that were already considered sexy is more out there here. We just hope that, as the story is expanded into series form, we get a bit less of a slow, wonky pace like we got in the first episode. Also, will Bogosian’s scenes basically consist of him sitting and listening to Louis in 2022 Dubai or will he eventually publish the book that will come out of all of these interviews? We’d love to see episodes — or even a spinoff series! — where the ageless Louis deals with a twentysomething, black tar heroin-shooting Molly in the ’70s and why things went so wrong back then.

Do we love everything about this version of Interview With The Vampire? No; the pacing needs to be better, and sometimes we wonder if Reid’s stiffness is due to purposeful direction or his not getting a handle on Lestat. But there’s more than enough in the first episode to let us think that AMC might have a new, successful franchise on its hands.

Sex and Skin: There’s more than one sex scene in the first episode, and a fair amount of nudity. We’ll see all of that when it streams on AMC+, but what will we see when the episodes air on the linear AMC?

Parting Shot: After he describes the scene of him and Lestat in the church, Lestat’s full powers on display, Louis in 2022 tells Malloy it was “The end. The beginning.” Then sheds a tear of blood.

Sleeper Star: We knew that Louis’ mother Florence looked familiar, but we were blown away to find out that she’s played by Rae Dawn Chong. Jeez, where the heck does time go?

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m not your fucking boy,” Malloy tells Louis. “I’m an old man with all the triggers that come with it. And I’m ready.” Bogosian sells the line, but it’s still a weird way for him to assert that just because he’s more frail than he used to be doesn’t mean he isn’t ready to dive headlong into the project.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Interview With The Vampire is still a bit melodramatic in its manner and baroque in its language, despite the time shift from the novels and film. But it reestablishes its story so well that we can see it continuing for a number of seasons.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.