When “Interview With the Vampire” debuted on AMC in 2022, horror-romance stans tuned in expecting a garden-variety sexy melodrama. But the series adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved “The Vampire Chronicles” novels proved to be so much more. Creator Rolin Jones took a radical approach to the source material—particularly when it comes to tortured protagonist Louis de Pointe du Lac.
In the book, he’s a white 18th century plantation owner who’s ostensibly straight; in Jones’ version, we meet him as a Black gay man (Jacob Anderson, in a complex, shaded performance) in 1910s New Orleans. This change transforms “Interview” into the tale of a man who’s othered not only due to his immortal bloodlust, but also his race and sexuality.
It’s even more impressive that the show tackles this complex subject matter while still being fun (and sexy) as hell. Much of that is thanks to Sam Reid’s magnetic performance as Louis’ sire and on-and-off lover, Lestat de Lioncourt.
The second season, which dropped last year, moves the action up to postwar Paris, where Louis and his vampiric sister, Claudia (Delainey Hayles), are attempting to move forward in the wake of their—spoiler alert!—brutal murder of Lestat. There, Louis finds new love with the vampire Armand (Assad Zaman), who becomes a second interview subject for journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) in modern-day Dubai.
But that doesn’t mean everyone’s favorite bloodsucker isn’t still hanging around; Lestat appears in various guises throughout the season, most notably as a figment of Louis’ imagination whom fans have lovingly dubbed “Dream-stat.”
Here, Anderson and Reid discuss how they bring their characters to (undead) life, why Dream-stat acts as Louis’ “comfort blanket,” and what it was like to film that charged reunion on the season finale.
“Interview” calls on you to play your characters across multiple decades and time periods. What acting challenges come with that?
Jacob Anderson: For me, one of the biggest acting challenges was trying to make sure that none of [what I did with my voice] felt like a mistake. For instance, I always thought that Louis slightly cribbed James Baldwin’s speech patterns, and that’s what he took with him to Dubai. It’s an affectation. But then as he comes back to himself, his real, true New Orleans accent creeps back in. I was trying to make it feel intentional, rather than like I’m slipping in and out of accents. But the things you do intentionally often look like mistakes, and the mistakes often look intentional.
Sam Reid: Playing these characters is all about the accumulation of previous experience, because you’re going back to different time periods. You have to keep a timeline of their journeys so that you can go, Well, by the time we shoot this, they’ve experienced this and this and this. You want to have that little flicker behind their eyes so they look like they’re referencing something from their memories.
One of the most extraordinary things about this show is its portrayal of a complicated queer relationship. How do you navigate that as actors?
JA: You have to take it scene by scene and hope that whatever behavior is happening contains the fullness of Louis and Lestat’s relationship. In any given scene, you might do something where you’re like, Oh, my God, this is really intense! But you just have to hope that people can read this other side of it that contains the entirety of their relationship thus far.
SR: Also, like, they’re monsters who live forever, and that can get quite dull. In early rehearsals, we talked about how vampires are all drug addicts; they’re forced to live this kind of junkie life, always looking for their next hit. So you want to have somebody who can really fucking get under your skin and who you can really feel something with.
Obviously, Lestat and Louis have very loving moments, but they also have really intense, hate-ridden moments. And that is the perfect cocktail for an enduring immortal relationship: The person that you love the most is also the person who can hurt you and hate you the most.
JA: The nature of living forever is that you’re going to be on this constant dopamine hunt. It’s so laborious, and it is just eternal. For Louis, so much of Season 2 is like: I’m with [my sister] Claudia. I want Lestat, and I get a version of Lestat, and then I want Claudia back. Then I want Armand; I get Armand, and then I want Claudia back. The grass is always greener, because he’s living in this continuum where he’s constantly [steeped in] drama.
Sam, you clearly had a lot of fun as Dream-stat. What was it like to play that version of the character?
SR: I thought it would be really fun to see this very intense character who we’ve always seen be quite sharp and conniving be sort of sweet and dopey. That was quite joyful to do, because I got to lean into the more ridiculous elements of the character. I always had some ridiculous thing to do as Dream-stat, whether it was screaming or eating paper.
JA: I felt like part of what you were doing with him was, like, using the voice that people give their dogs.
SR: [Laughs] Yeah. I wanted it to be the softest version of the character, which felt like confronting that that’s the thing that’s haunting Louis, rather than the scary version of Lestat. It starts off as Louis’ guilt about killing him, but it develops into something where he keeps wanting Dream-stat to come back. He becomes this sort of comfort blanket—this cuddly toy that Louis is carrying around with him.
Jacob, the central relationship of Season 1 was obviously between Louis and Lestat, but the second season is all about Louis and Armand, who have such a different dynamic.
JA: I have to add that it’s also about Louis and Claudia. I think their relationship is sometimes underrated in how important it is to Season 2. It’s the push and pull of: What are we to each other? Am I your dad? Am I your brother? Are we friends? Do we like each other? Do we love each other? They’re sort of ripping each other apart in the questioning of their relationship. And it is a confusing dynamic. I would often feel really paternal towards Delainey; and then other times, we’d have this sibling dynamic. I think that trying to figure out who they are to each other is really confronting for Louis.
Louis and Armand’s story really comes to a head on the fifth episode, which flashes back to the first time Daniel interviewed Louis in the 1970s.
JA: Yeah, Episode 5 is when you see what their relationship actually is. They both explode, and you see this false memory that both of them are reinforcing in the interview with Daniel. That’s sort of the romance of it, I think.
It’s almost like they’re mutually gaslighting each other.
JA: One of the posters for Season 2 was an homage to the poster of the 1944 movie “Gaslight,” which I love. It’s such a great little nod to Louis and Armand’s dynamic.
Season 2 ends with Louis and Lestat reuniting in New Orleans in the middle of a hurricane. One of the most fascinating things about that scene is that we can’t hear their conversation over the sound of the storm. What was it like to film that moment?
SR: There was a lot of pressure leading up to it, because Jacob and I had to come up with something to say to each other. But it ended up being really lovely, because we now have something over the writing team, which is knowledge of the characters that they do not. [Laughs] There’s something really interesting about that, because as we go forward and develop these characters, there’s a context that only Jacob and I will know.
But other than that, I mean, we had leaf blowers; we had dudes shaking the set; there was a big stunt where an actor got lit on fire. That all took up a lot of time, so we really only had two takes. But Jacob and I have been working together for a very long time now, so we had the capacity to just shut out all the chaos.
JA: It could not have been a worse day. There was a blizzard outside, and the fire stuff was not quite working.
SR: We actually didn’t trust that they were going to fully give us this private moment, because we still had microphones on. So when the scene happened, we did the hug, then we both ripped off our microphones and threw them out of the shot. So we can guarantee that nobody, nobody knows what Louis and Lestat say to each other in that moment.
JA: Just before we went on, we were like, “Let’s just do it. We’ll be fine, because we always are.” It felt like the accumulation of three years of trust that Sam and I had built. We just trusted each other and trusted ourselves, and we knew that we’d be OK. And we were.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
This story originally appeared in the June 12 issue of Backstage Magazine.
