LOST IN THE SHADOWS

THE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS OF INTERDIEW WITH THE DAMPIRE DISCUSS THE FUTURE OF LESTAT, LOUIS, CLAUDIA AND WHERE THE ANNE RICE UNIVERSE IS HEADING

- TARA BENNETT

IS THERE A BETTER EXAMPLE OF the agony and the ecstasy of dysfunctional relationships than the vampiric love/hate story of Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt? Gothic novelist Anne Rice introduced the poster boys of homoerotic hotness in her 1976 novel Interview With The Vampire, and vampire storytelling took off in new directions.

Yet despite the characters’ incredible popularity, Rice’s creations have sputtered in live-action films, with Hollywood clearly too chicken to go as far as her books do. Lestat was disappointingly watered down in interpretations played by Tom Cruise in Interview With The Vampire (1994) and Stuart Townsend in Queen Of The Damned (2002).

It wasn’t until AMC’s 2022 television adaptation of Interview With The Vampire that series executive producer and showrunner Rolin Jones and his team cracked Rice’s sexy/ scary/tragic alchemy via the smouldering chemistry of Jacob Anderson’s Louis and Sam Reid’s Lestat.

FATTER HEARTS

In keeping with the first half of Rice’s original novel, season one closed with Louis revealing to his human interviewer, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), how he and their sired “daughter” Claudia (Bailey Bass) orchestrated Lestat’s brutal murder. Two years later, the series returns picking right up with the repercussions of that betrayal, as Louis and Claudia scour the far reaches of Europe seeking others of their vampiric kind.