Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt - Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat _ Episode 01 - Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC
The other day my sister commented that I have been a fan of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for as long as she can remember. When AMC, a network near and dear to my heart, bought the rights to her library of vampire and witch books, I was elated. What I wasn’t expecting was for Rolin Jones, Hannah Moscovitch and the entire team to do something with Interview with the Vampire and now The Vampire Lestat that I have been hoping to see for decades.
A friend took me to see Interview with the Vampire in December 1994 when we were but freshmen in high school. I’m not a horror fan and I was by all standards very naive, but into the theater I went. (They never checked our ages when we bought tickets for the R-rated movie, oddly enough) When Tom Cruise’s Lestat died, I wanted to leave. I was captivated by him and wasn’t sure a movie without him would be worth staying for. She quickly and quietly explained that he comes back, so I stayed and was glad that I did.
A few weeks later I found a mass market paperback copy of Interview with the Vampire on a spinning rack in a country store in the middle of the mountains on the way to a family vacation in a cabin. The story kept me company for the duration of the trip, and it wasn’t long afterwards that I inhaled The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned and The Tale of the Body Thief in very rapid succession. (I’d read The Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy a few months after that while sitting at school for the week that our teachers were on strike)
Like so many other fans, I was swept up in the magical mystery of Rice’s books and I constantly found myself thinking about the characters and what they must be like outside of the stories. It was the early days of fanfiction on the internet, usually found through search engines like Geocities. Rice declared fanfiction forbidden, but it still existed and I read it because I liked seeing how other people imagined the characters outside of the page.
Fast forward to the present day and I’m now an entertainment journalist covering a show that has been at the forefront of my imagination for decades. And while there are so many reasons to love the Anne Rice Immortal Universe, what I love most is that Jones and his team have fleshed out the vampires’ lives in the most interesting of ways. It’s like the fanfiction and my imagination have come to life to fill in the gaps between the events depicted in The Vampire Chronicles.
Lestat (Sam Reid) hands out Halloween candy. Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) is directing a documentary. Lestat and Louis (Jacob Anderson) talk via Facetime. Lestat can’t even pee in peace.
You see, it’s the little things in between the big moments that I love the most.
There’s so much more to these stories now because the characters’ lives have been fleshed out in the series. We know all the huge plot points that are on the way. And we know who these vampires are because Rice created beautifully dimensional, layered and complicated characters. But now there’s so much more to their lives.
Jones has taken the canon and breathed life into the vampires in ways that were probably never possible until this exact moment in the zeitgeist. And thanks to Mark Johnson and AMC, he has the space he needs to take risks with his scripts and he has a cast that rises to the occasion. I could watch Reid’s Lestat reading a phone book for an entire hour. I could watch Louis reading dating profiles and Armand reading movie critiques. My point here is that Jones and the cast have taken these characters to the next level, so much so that even the most mundane things imaginable would be oh-so-entertaining. This might be why I’m so excited to see how Jones tackles the Devil’s Minion story.
As much as I’m eager to see all of the big plot points from The Vampire Lestat come to life, I’m cheering for the in-between moments even more. They’re everything I’ve ever wanted in an adaptation of The Vampire Chronicles, and so much more.
The Vampire Lestat airs Sundays at 9pm ET/PT on AMC and streams the same day on AMC+.
