Almost thirty years after the Neil Jordan movie, “Interview with the Vampire”popular gothic ‘best seller’ mother ricewill return to our screens as a soap opera via the AMC+ service, starting tomorrow, the 12th, Thursday. Reaching a second adaptation was no easy task: there was a movie (or rather it didn’t) before. Josh Boone (‘Under the same star’) was announced in 2014, with a series developed four years later. Bryan Fuller (‘Hannibal’) shortly ahead.
In the spring of 2020, AMC announced that it had acquired not only the rights to “Interview with the Vampire” and the rest of “The Vampire Chronicles”, but also Rice’s second book series, “The Mayfair Witches.” with the intention of raising a television series: nicknamed Immortal Universe. Master screenwriter and producer Rolin Jones (‘Weeds’, ‘Friday Night Lights’) Rice was coming out of a meeting with AMC about another issue when her name was mentioned. “They told me they were getting these rights in passing,” Jones explains via video call. “They didn’t bring it up because they didn’t think it would interest me. But I was intrigued by that world, and I saw its full potential, especially after reading the first few books. There’s not much difference between making a TV show about American football like ‘Friday night Lights’ and making a TV show about vampires. It’s all about creating a world. Ok, these guys suck blood and sometimes someone flies [ríe]but you also have to think about their desires, their needs, how to do the interesting things you see in thousands of TV shows. Although it’s pretty unusual to do something about an old man talking to an older person.”
Unification after half a century
Investigative journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosyan; Christian Slater in the movie) accepts the invitation of vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson previously played by Brad Pitt) to repeat the interview he did almost half a century ago. As he said, he now wants to tell “the whole story”. Daniel aged and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Despite being “older”, Louis remains as radiant as ever.
Louis’ character, his undying suffering, sounds familiar, but we’re talking about a nearly new creation: he’s no longer a white plantation master in the prewar South (“I’m not interested in this character, and nobody wants to see him,” says Jones.), but a Black Creole, whose wealth comes from a chain of brothels in Storyville, New Orleans’ old red-light district. After meeting the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt (sam reid; Tom Cruise in the movie), releases the reins of repressed homosexual desire. Bailey Bass aka Triseya from ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ enters the scene to complete a familiar complex triangle.
Dinner with Anne Rice
If gay in the book reads “just between the lines” as Jones recalls, and less than subtext in the movie, here loving and sex drive is at the core of it all. The relationship between Louis and Lestat isn’t as toxic as in the book because “it’s hard to make the show from a cultivated lover’s perspective without disconnecting the audience,” says the “showrunner”. “No one wants to see someone smile on the hero’s face for a year”.
Jones didn’t recognize Rice, who died in December 2021, at the start of filming for the show, but she thinks she knew how to have a virtual dinner with him: “We’d be together for about four hours. Sure, he would detail how he screwed me up with his three hours, fifty minutes job, the remaining ten minutes.” And he’d say, ‘This is good, too,’ and it would be a very nice dinner.”
Cross Options
AMC has renewed ‘Interview with the Vampire’ for a second season, whether out of confidence in the show or a marketing strategy, and the first season hasn’t even aired yet. And ‘The Witches of Mayfair’ premiered in the US (it will arrive in Spain on February 23), Alexandra Daddario (“True Detective”, “The White Lotus”) as a neurosurgeon who discovers that he is the descendant of a unique family. When I ask him about the possible interbreeding of both series, Jones invites patience: “At one point Rowan [Daddario] He must be in a romantic relationship with Lestat. But… who knows if we’ll get there! I think we should hit at least four or five seasons before we merge with the witches.“.