It’s partially that Jones and early director Alan Taylor can just let Lestat and Louis embrace their queer identities. I’ve read the book and seen the movie more times than I can count, and this is the most clearly I’ve been able to understand the relationship between Lestat and Louis. Louis is Creole and, as such, able to navigate a certain level of success in the city, but he remains an outsider - a man still grieving his late father, trying to live up to the expectations of his mother (Rae Dawn Chong), protecting his disturbed and unstable brother (Steven Norfleet) and aware that accepting his sexuality might make him a permanent outcast.Įnter Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), charismatic and confident and utterly voracious in his appetites. Here, Louis’ story begins in 1910 in New Orleans, with Louis as a fairly successful brothel proprietor in the city’s Storyville district. Since Daniel is hardly “the boy” of Rice’s book, this series can almost be viewed as a sequel - or at least a critique of unreliable narrators, since the version of his life’s story that Louis is now prepared to tell has little in common with what he once recounted. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Daniel has gone professionally fallow, so he jumps when Louis summons him to Dubai - chosen, presumably, as an isolated place where money can make your past disappear - for another extended conversation and the chance to actually publish this one.

The framing device introduces us to Eric Bogosian’s Daniel Malloy, an aging gonzo journalist, who, 40+ years earlier, conducted an interview with a vampire (Jacob Anderson’s Louis). Unlike the Neil Jordan feature, which Rice scripted herself, Jones’ adaptation maintains the shape of the book but very few of the specifics. It isn’t quite scary, but it’s at least unsettling at times. But through five of the first season’s seven episodes, I appreciated the way this Interview solidified the source material’s central relationship, refined some of its more humorous aspects and plunged thoroughly into the campiness of others. It’s a worthy goal if not a perfect execution, and I think undead devotees preferring one extreme or the other - as if genre progenitors like Bram Stoker’s Dracula weren’t already half soapy melodrama and half horror - will be frustrated.

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Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice