New ‘Interview with a Vampire’ Expands Anne Rice’s Gay Sensibility
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AMC’s new Interview with a Vampire TV series, premiering tonight, is that rare thing in Hollywood, an adaptation that is infinitely better than the previous feature film and exceeds the source material by embracing author Anne Rice’s “gay sensibility” and pushing the material further than she was able to at the time she wrote it.
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According to Vanity Fair, “Adapted by Rolin Jones (HBO’s Perry Mason) from Anne Rice’s book series, the show revolves around titular vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson). In 1973, we are told, he met up with journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) to tell his story. Nearly 50 years later, Molloy—who’s entered the online-master-class phase of his writing career—receives a surprise delivery of the original cassette tapes: Louis still lives (or “lives”), and wants to revisit their collaboration. Molloy travels to Louis’s lavish Dubai apartment to interview him again, and learns that since the last time they spoke, Louis’s opinion of his sire, Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), have evolved.”
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Whereas the book (and the 1994 movie based on it) place Lestat and Louis’s first meeting in 1791, the show introduces us to still-human Louis in 1910. The setting remains New Orleans, though this Louis is no longer a widower whose wife and child did not survive labor (as in the movie, book Louis is mourning the death of his brother); nor is he a plantation owner with dozens of enslaved laborers; nor is he white. The Louis of the show is a Black Creole red-light proprietor who operates several “sporting houses” in Storyville, the city’s red-light district. One night, a recently arrived Lestat sees Louis capably (and violently) defending his business interests in the street and, as he later tells Louis, is moved to buy a town house in the French Quarter to remain near him. Louis gets competitive when Lestat outbids him for the sex worker Louis visits to repress his “latencies,” but soon understands that Lestat is most interested in seducing Louis. A threesome turns into a twosome. Lestat feeds on Louis, and soon, following a crisis in Louis’s family, Lestat makes the offer Louis can’t resist: “I can swap this life of shame—swap it out for a dark gift and a power you can’t begin to imagine.”
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Rice wrote Interview With the Vampire in 1976. At the time, she was mourning the loss of her 5-year-old daughter, Michele, one of her two children with poet Stan Rice.
While the book failed to impress critics, it became an immediate commercial success, in large part because of its popularity among gay readers. The novel centers on vampires Louis and Lestat. Louis tells a young reporter, whom he meets in a dark San Francisco bar, about immortal life alongside his sinister and seductive maker, Lestat. And he relates how the two took in a young child, Claudia, while living in New Orleans and proceeded to parent her over decades as she remained physically frozen in time.
Above: Anne Rice in her garden in Berkeley, Calif., in May 1976.Janet Fries / Getty Images file
The domestic plotline and erotic dialogue made the novel ripe for queer readings, which Rice would confirm over the years. In a 2012 interview, she called Louis and Lestat the “first vampire same-sex parents.” And she later said that Claudia was likely unconsciously inspired by her daughter, while she and Stan were the inspirations for her vampire fathers.
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In an interview with The Daily Beast in 2017, Rice said she was “very honored” that people thought “Interview With the Vampire” — which was adapted into a film in 1994 starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and is currently in development as a TV series — was a gay allegory. She then said, “I’ve always been very much a champion of gay rights, and art produced by gay people.”
“I think I have a gay sensibility and I feel like I’m gay, because I’ve always transcended gender, and I’ve always seen love as transcending gender,” she said in the 2017 interview, regarding the pervasiveness of queer characters in her writing. “In my books, I’ve always created bonds of love that have transcended gender.”
Rice’s ties to the LGBTQ community were deepened and made more personal when Christopher came out as gay after graduating from high school.
The Advocate ran a cover story about Christopher in 2000, in which he said he thought his mother took his coming out harder than his father did, because of what he perceived as her having a stronger desire, relative to his father’s, to have grandchildren someday.
For her part, Rice said that she was “shocked” by the revelation, because she “thought he was straight,” and that she worried about him having to face difficulties due to homophobia, but said his coming out didn’t diminish her love for him.
“People respond in very different ways to what being gay means. And there’s still an enormous amount of fear in America. There are still hate crimes. There is still a lot of consciousness-raising that has to be done — but not with us. I was worried, as anyone would be, that Chris would face obstacles and prejudices. But I did not love him one drop less,” she said.
Chris is executive producer.
When AMC announced in 2020 that it had acquired the rights to Interview, Rice called it “one of the most significant and thrilling deals of my long career.” She wasn’t creatively involved with the series, but what has emerged two years later — its full title is Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire — is loyal to her source material in many ways.
Rice died last December at the age of 80.
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By making “Lestat and Louis’s sex life an unambiguous part of this story disentangles Louis’s horror at his thirst’s collateral damage from the shame other versions of the character have evinced about sexual interests only (broadly) hinted at.
Between hunts, Louis and Lestat settle into domesticity and have the same disputes all couples do. How do you balance the demands of one’s family of origin with the needs of one’s chosen family?
How do you manage when one partner adopts a new diet (as when Louis decides he’s no longer going to take human life, and will survive by draining animals), and the other feels judged (jk, Lestat doesn’t care what Louis thinks of his murders)?
30 seconds ain’t long, but it’s long enough to get to know Claudia. #InterviewWithTheVampire pic.twitter.com/RpDuak433y
— Interview with the Vampire (@Immortal_AMC) September 11, 2022
When’s the right time to have a child, and how should you raise her? How often is too often to attend the opera?”
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Despite the series title, though, the interview scenes of Interview With the Vampire comprise comparatively little of its content; Sam Reid’s Lestat, feasting on every one of his scenes, is what makes the show unmissable.
What Interview with the Vampire hinted at in the ’70s was progressive for its time, Jones said, adding that by the “later books, it’s as if there was this great romance that was never really written, but we all kind of agree it happened.”
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Watch the trailer below.
Tonight, 10pm. In Throes of Increasing Wonder, written by Rolin Jones. #IWTV pic.twitter.com/bdflBfUrLu
— Interview with the Vampire (@Immortal_AMC) October 2, 2022
