Interview with the Vampire has always been about performance: We don’t just watch a vampire’s immortal identity crisis unfold, we hear him waxing poetic about it to the first guileless reporter who will listen. The first season of AMC’s brilliant Anne Rice adaptation was a case study in elevating your source material, trading the meager homoerotic subtext of the 1994 film for unabashedly queer Gothic melodrama. Nearly two years later, Interview With the Vampire is finally back for its second act, further expanding the world of the undead as the cracks in our protagonists’ carefully curated personas begin to show.
Rather than cutting back and forth between the early 19th century and the 1970s as the film did, the AMC series opened in 2022 Dubai, where the titular vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) — now a gay Creole man from 1910 — invited journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) for a redo of the ill-fated interview they had back in ’70s San Francisco. As the interview wore on, it became clear that Louis had his own motivations for revisiting his volatile, all-encompassing love affair with his vampire companion Lestat (Sam Reid) and the house of horrors that their life with adolescent adopted daughter Claudia (Delainey Hayles) became.
Season 1 ended with Louis and Claudia setting off for Europe in the 1940s after murdering the increasingly controlling Lestat, their relationship broken by a devastated Louis’ refusal to burn his lover’s body and finish the job. To make Daniel’s job even more perilous, we left off with another bombshell: the reveal that Louis’ assistant was actually his new (but still ancient) long-term partner, the formidable vampire Armand (Assad Zaman), in disguise. Only on this show can you enjoy Untucked-level vampire drama on a prestige budget.
Whereas the first season unfolded like a chamber drama largely confined within the immediate vicinity of Louis, Lestat, and Claudia’s New Orleans townhouse, season 2 considerably widens the show’s scope. Still, the series maintains its commitment to moments of brooding theatricality, embracing the lush, existential pondering of Anne Rice’s prose. After all, the writers’ room is full of playwrights, and each episode opens with an orchestra tuning up, inviting curious passersby to take their seats as the curtain rises. The official title — Interview With the Vampire: Part II — suggests that the nearly two-year hiatus between seasons has been the intermission of a long, sprawling performance.
It’s abundantly fitting, then, that Louis and Claudia’s European travels eventually deliver them into the hands of the Theatres de Vampires, a coven of Parisian vampire actors who use their cult-favorite shows as cover to consume their victims in plain sight. Louis’ reluctance to leave humanity behind and fully embrace vampire life soon creates friction among the coven, who resent his budding romance with Armand. It’s Claudia who dives into the theater head-first, eager to prove herself after spending decades as Louis and Lestat’s unwilling third wheel.
