The first season of Interview with the Vampire hit Netflix today and now a whole new wave of people are about to experience the best show on television. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire premiered on AMC in 2022 to great critical acclaim if not wide-spread viewership. The show, adapted and updated from the original novel written by Rice, features two seasons of gothic dramatics and romance (but you’ll have to watch Season 2 on AMC+).
Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones) stars as Louis De Point Du Loc, the titular vampire, as he tells journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) the story of how he became a vampire and the love, turmoil, and grief that followed in the decades after.
Anderson marvels as Louis. He elevates and transcends the book version as well as Brad Pitt’s Louis from the 1994 film. Not only does he speak with a near-perfect New Orleans accent, he also slips into different versions of Louis flawlessly. From the neutral-voiced stoic Louis in 2022 to human Louis in 1910, Anderson breathes life into what was once a boring book character.
But it’s a scene near the end of the show’s first episode, “In Throes of Increasing Wonder,” that solidifies Anderson as one of the best actors working in television today, and one that should have cemented his first Emmy nomination and win.
Troubled by his sexual encounters with the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid) and grieving the death of his brother Paul (Steven G. Norfleet), Louis escapes to confession, begging at the church’s door for salvation. Inside the confessional, it’s dark. Streams of light poke through the door, illuminating his sins. Through trembling words and shaky hands, Louis confesses his transgressions: he steals, he drinks, he puts women out on the street for money. And he slept with a man. Not just a man, but the devil. A devil he can’t escape. He wants to die.
As the scene goes on, Anderson gives rise to Louis’ anger, shame, and grief. It lives in his body, slithering its way through his arms straight through to his fingertips until he’s shaking. Delivering exquisite dialogue written by showrunner Rolin Jones, set to a haunting and heart-thumping score from Daniel Hart, Anderson makes it feel like you’re as trapped in this cupboard, this life, this death, as he is.
And while Louis has done all the things he’s confessing to, this is the last of human Louis. A man at rock bottom, shunned by his mother, brotherless, weighed down by the unfair societal and familial pressures he faces as a gay Black man, unable to be who he really is. This Louis is about to die. But it’s in that confessional that Anderson gives Louis so much life. By pouring out all of the things Louis has bottled up we get to understand a fuller picture of who Louis was, right before he becomes who he’s going to be. The light streaming in then becomes a beacon of life, renewed.
Images courtesy of Michele K. Short/AMC
Katey is co-founder and tv editor for InBetweenDrafts. She hosts the “House of the Dragon After Show” and “Between TV” podcasts and can be read in various other places like Inverse and Screen Speck. She wishes desperately the binge model of tv watching would die, but still gets mad when she runs out of episodes of tv to watch.
