What Lestat promises, as embodied with suitable grandiosity by Reid, is a world in which neither his Blackness nor his queerness pose a bodily threat. As much as he loves his sister (Kalyne Coleman), brother (Steven Norfleet), and mother (Rae Dawn Chong), Louis is tortured by the dueling conflicts of his dreams and his reality, in which his white investors will never see him as equal to them, and his homosexuality has no place out of the shadows. Louis’ sterile present-day life in a Dubai skyscraper - and his flatter affect, smoothed out of any Southern drawl - clashes harshly with the flashbacks he describes, which take us back to his life as a ruthless businessman in New Orleans. (What a shame that Rice, who died late last year, won’t be able to see this evolution of her world, which so clearly respects the one she created to make it possible.)
Given more time to tell this story in episodic installments, and with the captivating Anderson embodying Louis through his every wavering mood, the show forges a powerful story of identity that will be both familiar to any Rice fan and feel much different than versions that came before.
In reality, AMC’s “Interview With the Vampire” deliberately reframes Louis’ story from that of a restless plantation owner to one of an ambitious, closeted Black man who sees a whole new world of possibility in the undead life Lestat (Sam Reid) offers.
On paper, this setup suggests the show is directly related to the books and film. Now, amid a pandemic that’s ripped apart the world’s sense of social order, Louis ( Jacob Anderson) reaches back out in hopes that he and Molloy, older and ostensibly wiser, can find more truth and reconciliation in his story than they did the first time around. Set 50 years after the events of the film, interviewer Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, lately of “Succession”) has moved on from his youthful, drug-fueled San Francisco days to become a thoroughly jaded veteran reporter who could never quite crack the story of vampiric love and barbarism that the reclusive Louis de Pointe du Lac once tried to give him. The new series tackles this crucial question head-on in its very first scene.
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