There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see. In the case of the riveting AMC+ series Interview with the Vampire, there are shrines for every wayward sinner to create. Anne Rice’s timeless story follows Louis de Pointe du Lac, a man in 1910s New Orleans who is turned into a vampire by the elusive and charming Lestat de Lioncourt. In the velvet depths of immortality, love becomes a sacred artifact that is choked to death and canonized — love being the only thing that remains in a world where time doesn’t stand a chance, where every memory is a blink when faced with the cruel reality of never enjoying the finite. AMC’s Rolin Jones-led iteration of Rice’s story shows us the dangers and fascination of the undead, and that there is one thing that remains when time becomes an accessory to life: the need for love.
Louis de Pointe du Lac, our unwitting protagonist, is the subject of the titular interview. Played with charming intensity by the incredible Jacob Anderson, he is a pressurized, intensely focused man who, in the second season, turns into a husk, desperately trying to find who he is while keeping his wit and love intact. He describes himself in season two as “an armored thing,” moments before falling in love with his second doomed paramour under a Parisian streetlamp while romantic piano music swells. There are so many shrines built for Louis by his lovers and those he loves. As a Black man with enterprise in the 1910s, he feels his core is splintered by the expectations placed on him. Even in his own recollection of himself and his actions, the details are fractured: Was it raining? Did Claudia dream? Who wanted to burn the body? The pressure of idolatry by others bleeds through into his functioning psyche so much so that he doesn’t know which version of the truth told to him to believe. He is a man in perpetual suffering, trying to decipher himself through the fragments of story that his mind allows him to tell.
Lestat de Lioncourt, the French vampire whose turning of Louis kickstarts the entire series’ events, takes on a haunting, borderline monstrous role in this series as a man who can suck the air out of any room and reflect it back to every person with blinding enchantment. Let me be clear: Sam Reid is doing some of the best character work of our generation with every laugh, swing of the wrist, and lifting of the finger as Lestat. His is an acting finesse I believed to have died decades ago, but I see a magnificent revival of it every time his blonde curls ravish the screen, whether in haunt, memory, or — in the rare case — actuality.
Lestat prances around a scene with all the assumed self-confidence and gallant movements of the first man I ever loved — the same rote charm that allowed my first kiss and time to be stolen in the folds of a single night. In tandem with his lilting French compliments is a coldness, an underlying frozen statue of cruelty. The terrifyingly unpredictable rhythm of Lestat taking a companion is the same rhythm my psyche has remembered from all the men who’ve scarred me: every kind gesture of ‘rekindling romance’ with his dear Louis and every pity tantrum are all part of the same song that every person in the throes of mistreatment will recognize immediately as the work of an abuser. Lestat’s God is himself — blame it on his 250 years of unchecked power and easy trail of lovers. The same vampire we see in a flashback tossing around a wooden statue of Jesus in front of his believers is the same vampire who, at the end of the same scene, carries his mortal first love with a Christ-like side wound, and the same vampire who will seduce the most powerful vampire by the end of the episode’s runtime. For Lestat, love is a flagellation, a standard which he will somehow never meet, and he makes it everybody else’s problem. His shrine is littered with dust and half-meant poems, candles burned only halfway down before he changes his mind.
The show’s ensemble is equally as extraordinary: vampire Armand (the refreshing Assad Zaman) uses his haunting presence and centuries of life to extract vengeance quietly. He’s a sullen, satisfying puppetmaster whose existence in the shadows of the narrative is reframed by a deeply nuanced performance. A mystery unto himself, a sinister air bubbles very close to the surface at any given moment. His shrine feels ornate and terrifyingly single-focused; his love for Louis, extracted through questionable mediums, flows from his veins when he says he “wants him more than anything in the world.” That love is a candlelight he protects with his soul, but not so far as giving his life for it.
Our interviewer, Daniel Molloy (the inimitable Eric Bogosian), acts as a fantastic literary audience surrogate. His Molloy is a lived-in, curmudgeonly writer well past his prime who is chasing what he believes is his final shot at a jackpot of a story. His brilliance is woven throughout the titular interview with a Bourdain-esque cynicism, which any true reader of the late chef’s work could recognize was hiding a deeply budding tenderness. Molloy’s down-to-earth analysis pulls the viewer out of the supernatural and weighs in the true humane cost hidden in Louis’ oft-times romanticized and ever-changing recounting. He provides a necessary brutality, a finessed severity to the series that allows us to reconsider our (mine especially) ideas of journalism as a profession — what it means to study a subject, knowing that you’re being studied right back. His journalistic exchanges with his subjects blur fascination, a lingering haunting personal memory, and a very obvious financial goal.
Together, the two actors playing Claudia (Bailey Bass in season one, Delainey Hayles in season two) create a single lifeform, and are deeply worthy successors to 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst’s original performance. Through her diaries and through Louis’ eyes, what Claudia is to the narrative changes effortlessly between the two actresses. There’s the ray of levity she provides to the household; the innate, unnatural horror she represents in being stuck in a pre-teen body as her emotions turn too ginormous for her physical self to hold; and the weathered woman, older than she will ever look, fighting to find her place and taking Louis with her, desperate to make sure he will always be okay. Her never-ending tragedy, her eventual folly, and the inner shrine she keeps in secret are the single blazing, meticulously kept candle that she holds for her father to choose her over his abusers. It’s a flame that will always be lit under her severity; he is the only thing in this world she can consider her own.
The horror — besides blood lust, blood lost, and spit exchanged — is the idea that, when faced with the reality of a never-ending existence, humanity (or undeadness) will always find a way to love as messily and destructively as always. We build shrines over and over, destroy them, tend to them, sanctify them — just for the other person’s unpredictability to stunt us. The world will always belong to our own need for it, and no matter how long we live, we loop the same ache.
I guess I, too, keep shrines: I can’t smoke a Vogue Slim without thinking of the brilliant woman I fell in love with in Paris, her ghost pressing its weight on my thighs when I sit on the stool on my balcony. And I write this piece as an ode to a show that an almost-lover recommended to me, a “G” tattooed on my bicep as an ode to a time where a Scotsman marked my hours. Maybe this is the year, the month, the birthday where I learn to find the shrines that can be a sanctuary for me, not only because of me.
Interview with the Vampire is currently streaming. The latest iteration, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, is set for release in 2026.
