Interview with the Vampire TV series (2022)

Seven episodes of this! Who’s watching? I’m just catching up on it now.

Some absolutely lol lines in this which ofc is entirely in line with the source material

“I was a red-blooded son of the south, seeking ass before absolution.”

these vampires kinda gay fr

It’s funny because it’s true and it’s also funny how extremely gay the process of becoming a vampire in this continuity is - and always has been. The drinking, the gasping, the savouring- even in the books when her vampires couldn’t have sex this was basically the next thing to it.

I really like the film adaptation but it’s so self serious. This is and always has been a very silly series and I don’t even mean that as an insult.

Thought the casting was amazing. The guy who plays Lestat actually playing French and speaking it as well was a nice surprise. Jacob Anderson is a really good Louis - introspective, grave, irresistibly drawn to Lestat. Lestat in this - and admittedly I’m only one episode in - probably the closest adaptation on first inspection. He even looks quite similar to the drawing on the old book covers.
https://cdn.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/interview-with-the-vampire.jpg
https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/779886807.jpg

I liked the adaptational changes for Louis! Like, in the original book he’s a slave owner. It’s the least important part of his character. They do more to give him a background and family life in this first episode and that works for him too because he’s kind of depicted as being solitary and aloof even in his human life until the point he becomes a vampire. I saw an interview somewhere where the director was like “nobody wants to hear that story,” and honestly? Yes. They don’t make him a saint either, though. There’s still moral ambiguity.

I feel that you can’t really do this series without tons of DRAMA and DECADENCE and CATHOLICISM and everything and first episode delivered. Lestat veering from attached to fixated to obsessed to encouraging and back again is done really well, he’s a malign presence but one you like to see more of!

Also, modern day Louis living in Dubai is funny as fuck. Firstly, because if you’re going to buy an apartment where the sun is blocked out by specially made windows, then yeah, Dubai probably does that. Secondly, it’s a place where nobody is going to notice much if you never leave the house. Lastly, iirc from the one and only time I was in UAE, the sun sets early there. So all made sense but was also pretty funny. Maybe Louis got the money from being bought out by the techbros in San Francisco.

Also, the book references are great. When Lestat talks about the violinist!

I'm up to ep 3 on this, it's quite good fun and the Lestat guy is a huge improvement on Tom fk-ing Cruise in that crappy movie.

It is fun! That bit where there’s a quick cut from their fighting to the coffins and Lestat saying he doesn’t want to sleep angry is really funny.

Did you eat the baby
DID YOU EAT THE BABY

I vaguely remember they go to Europe in the movie, finished ep 5 and totally up for something similar happening in this. You sound like every Sorbonne student I've ever eaten.

Interview with Bailey Bass, who plays Claudia, here: https://decider.com/2022/10/23/interview-with-the-vampire-bailey-bass-claudia-interview/

I like this version of Claudia so far. Going with a 19 year old actress who could briefly play the character at age 14 works well.

Claudia’s age has always been controversial, I think she is 5(!) in the books, 10 in the film and so I have no objection to older. There’s a lot going on with the character that people found and find discomforting. I haven’t got to her yet.

I get how it'd kind of work in the books, the movie adaptation was creepy enough to hammer home the point that a kid never aging is fucked up, and the tv adaptation delivers a character that you're able to assign agency to and understand that this is an adult person. A ten year old is just never going to seem like an adult to us non-vampires, regardless of how great of a job Kirsten Dunst did

S1E6 has a TWIST

I wonder how much of this shit Louis has been lying about

I need to watch the last few episodes bc have been distracted this week! I really liked Claudia when she was introduced.

TICKETS PLEASE

How does lestat get cuntier every episode?? I always think he’s peaked but then he skips into a train holding a head saying “tickets please”

— k 🦇 iwtv spoilers (@burritochilles) October 30, 2022

he's really more of a child than the vampire that's stuck looking like a teenager

They used the same Haydn piece that was used in the film, love it

if it weren't for the the present day timeline where the retelling is taking place you'd think that Louis is going to spend a thousand uninterrupted years simping for Lestat

Rashid is apparently thousands of years old and imbued with ancient wisdom, but he still gets off on doing that "oooh, I could levitate over a doll's house" routine to startled mortals!

That season ending omg. I thought he was Armand since the end of 6, and also, another casting choice I like, like in the novels Armand is maybe 14 and looks like a child and also everyone fancies him and…yeah.

Also there totally is/was a Louis/Lestat/Armand triangle in the series.

The thing I’m thinking about though is that Daniel (the journalist) ends up with Armand?

I looked up Assad Zaman (the actor who plays him) to see how old he is and he’s 38! Also loled at this on one of his casting pages:

Geordie (Native), Pakistani, Middle Eastern General, General Scottish, RP, Cockney

Can’t believe we were robbed of Geordie Armand.

Rashid is apparently thousands of years old and imbued with ancient wisdom, but he still gets off on doing that "oooh, I could levitate over a doll's house" routine to startled mortals!

I thought he said thousands, must have heard it wrong.

ok i just started ep1 and I love it

you cant do this story without giving over to the OTT of it all and the movie did up to a point but i like that they have freedom here to push it to the full extent

it still feels inherently anne rice with all her kookiness but the new touches are welcome too, they struck a good balance. updating louis is such a great call bc he becomes interesting again & gives you a new way into a well trodden character

love how they lean into the violence & power of lestat & the goriness of the vampirism

lestat casting is A+

i did not expect to be this impressed right out of the gate, i’m SO in

"lestat casting is A+"

RIP tom cruise. I couldn't remember the details but this good casting choice does highlight how the author was correct about her misgivings over the movie at the time.

to be clear i do actually like Cruise as Lestat as well

Cruise as Lestat is good! But the film is way too serious for the source material.

yeah i agree

I can much more easily see this continuity’s Lestat with a short lived campy rock career than I could Tom Cruise.

It’s really funny to see people rereading the book and sharing “spoilers” like this. Also, has inspired me to reread. The books are so cheesy but compulsive?

dear followers, how does it feel like to know that these two kissed at least once at some point?#InterviewWithTheVampire pic.twitter.com/SbnZteaIfC

— no context lestat de lioncourt (@nocontextlestat) November 8, 2022

i am very fond of the books - the Mayfair Witches trilogy is fun too

one of my friends in high school got into her erotic fiction, all the nom de plume Rampling/Roquelare stuff, and she’d read racy bits to us while we ate lunch lol

but it helped contextualize the vampire novels when i read them, high drama high camp INTENSE EMOTIONS it’s very good fun

Incredibly otm. I’ve never read the witches books and I’m aware of the racy stuff by its reputation only - but I gather it was proper filth?

with frills on it

there's a Mayfair Witches show in January

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTjAn3dMT00

ooohhh

I'm not watching but ILX-adjacent https://genufa.tumblr.com/ has been good no this, and https://undecimber-of-joy.tumblr.com/post/701023804106964992/alright-then-i-need-to-say-my-piece-or-i-will indicates that fandom is as into it as you'd absolutely expect.

we’re progressing very slowly through the series but gosh I really do love it

we just finished ep5: the louis-lestat blowup over claudia was insanely epic… and the charles manson needledrop over the credits was ~chef’s kiss*

finished s1

goddamn, really impressed.

i said to mr veg, Louis is such a fucking balloon. he never really commits to a conviction. and Claudia, just true helldemon.

most of all i think they really captured Lestat so well, the lure of him, the massive ego, the violence. like he feels much more tangible and layered in this version. Cruise was good but it was a caricature. this version feels like everyone read the book & embraced it as a text, whereas the movie had a bit of ironic remove because of the time obv, like no one could really say with a straight face that they were making a vampire movie

anyway. 5 stars no notes. makes me want to reread the book again.

You should! You’re right about the ironic remove of the film as well.

I watched the first ep of Mayfair Witches

seems less artfully made than Interview, everything looks a little cheaper? idk. I’ll watch the whole thing regardless

Haven’t watched this yet but I will. Have you read that series? I know nothing about it.

(haven't watched any of this yet (interview i mean) despite yr strong and compelling recommendation, poster gyac, bcz i am currently trying to save money on everything except storage until i move house and sadly that includes streaming subs!)

(but once i move i will be back ITT no doubt)

Watched the first episode of Mayfair and agree with VG’s comment about the production quality - it seemed very Hallmark channel?

I’m actually reading the first book, The Witching Hour, and I’m about 10% in (it’s about 1000 pages long). The first twenty or so minutes of this show is confusing as fuck if you haven’t read this book, which is not great for an adaptation. It’s unfair to compare a bit but I watched both this and The Last of Us with my husband last night & he did not get the start of it at all. It’s not so much show don’t tell as just “idk here’s some stuff that happened”. Iirc this is the first time this series has been adapted, so unlike Interview with the Vampire which is already more of a known quantity, you kind of need to ease the audience in?

There’s also the kind of YA quality to the whole thing. Again, I’m not that far into the book? But the book is dark, and the tone is quite off?

I don’t know, I will probably keep watching while I read the book (I really like the book!) but it’s not as great as IWtV was from the start. Hopefully it gets better?!

Mayfair Witches is so bad. So bad!

I’m not sure I can manage a third episode, I might just continue reading the book (which is great!)

i still haven’t brought myself to watch the second ep

guys: season 2 starts soon :D

May 12, apparently!
Mark your calendars and dust the candelabras

first 2 eps have been great

oh shoot i totally forgot!!

Oh I didn’t realise this was back, excellent timing

I like black vampires wiping out ss waffen checkpoints in 40's Ukraine, that's what I call a good start to proceedings!

Where is this on?

those Bacon paintings were in Tate Britain last time i was there. one star, too far-fetched.

lol!

(i watched the art 101 Open University programmes about those paintings, and others, back in the 80s and it probably formed my tastes, so always a thrill to see them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Studies_for_Figures_at_the_Base_of_a_Crucifixion

)

Yes! I had them pinned on my wall in my flat in my early 20’s, I tore them out of an old art magazine I had found in an op shop.

Me: oh no, a dream sequence, I hate dream sequences.
Me 45 minutes later: The soul!

did anyone watch the Talamasca series? if it's more of a slog than the Mayfair Witches one, I probably won't make an effort. that show had a handful of useful episodes across two seasons

Nah, unless it turns out I really can’t follow the main story without them, I’m not that interested.

Yeah same. Mayfair was so meh I wasn’t willing to be bummed out by Talamasca as well

In other news the finale was good! Still can never quite get over how much stuff they pack into each episode!

Great Armand episode!

I was kind of fading in and out of this, but did they do the Evangelion ending?

You will have to explain to me, an old, what that means

one vampire ejaculates onto a sleeping vampire, then breaks the fourth wall and asks why you're watching this?

Sounds like What We Do in the Shadows

In the final episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a global disaster is unleashed, which sends the lead character spiraling into a nervous breakdown in which he has lengthy hallucinations about how he's failed everyone, until he eventually manages to reconcile his fragmented personality.

Well, that is a possibility for next season. Certainly these lads do love to spiral. I suppose what else is there to do when you live that long.

And just announced on Bluesky by the official account (with an all caps "SHE IS COMING")

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3etyxykykzqv4dblzcq7aoh2/bafkreibcgii4ok6kamlkrt2u64xq26df5om6kwhklkplkja57ophmkhjri

Plus!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3HjPwxFkF0

Yay!

Let's goooo

Great comment from Bluesky in turn:

QUEEN OF the DAMNED news is lit but can't wait until they get to MEMNOCH THE DEVIL and have to figure out how unhinged to make it

Yeah I secretly hope they do Memnoch

A new showrunner, as well. I wonder if there'll be another wild tonal switch-up.

Absolutely killing me how mad Lestat is over his Pitchfork review

xpost whoa Trishyb I missed the part about the new showrunner!

At least it’s Hannah moskovich taking over duties - she’s been a writer on the show since s1

But it’s hard to see how we won’t sorely miss Rollin Jones. Dang! Oh well. I guess we’ll see how s4 shakes out.

All episodes are up on iPlayer now, for the BBClanders amongst us.

All of them! Amazing

For fans of Lestat and Mindhunter, check out Sam Reid and Anna Torv as a hot 80s Australian news anchor couple on AMC's The Newsreader.

Finished watching episodes 3&4! Some thoughts:

- I found the interview of 3 very slow going which is a shame cos I love both Lestat and Daniel
- 4 was lots of fun, Louis and Regina, the song about Armand (lol), the cocaine encounter, “Phil X was a better guitarist than Richie Sambora, I’m just going to say what you’re thinking”.

A problem: I never cared much for Gabriella in the books, and Jennifer Ehle’s accent is so so bad lol. I could do with less of her tbh!

Watching more tonight, prob 5&6 at least and maybe more if I don’t fall asleep due to the heat again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk39-BD3_ho

“He asked me was it good, I said comme çi, comme ça” lmao

I never really cared that much about the concert scenes from the book but I think the show really leaning into the inherent campiness of the concept really works for it. It also works so well for the concept of Lestat infuriating half the vampire world.

I see rubbish TV reviewer Ed Power in the Telegraph has made himself a LOT of friends by claiming that Sam Reid is not as good as Tom Cruise. Sure, Ed. Sure.

I don’t know why you’d waste your time paying attention to that piece of shit

Oh, I wasn't. Someone I follow on Bluesky was giving out about him.

The irony is Reid’s performance has a lot in common with Cruise, who definitely enjoyed playing Lestat as tongue in cheek in an otherwise very self-serious adaptation. It’s like if you had a continuum, the two performances clearly fit on that and you can see where Reid draws from Cruise. Like Cruise Lestat dancing with the corpse of Claudia’s mother in the film is exactly something show Lestat would do!

5 & 6

It was fun to see villain Armand come back! And how!

Daniel’s bowling alley rant at Armand was great, Bogosian definitely loved that imo. Show Daniel is very different from Book Daniel just like Armand and Louis are, and I thought this really works for this adaptation.

The séance, my God, but if anyone deserved some home truths telling to them about their delusions it’s Louis. I thought Claudia’s rage was very true to the whole concept of her, being treated as a child when her mind was not that of one, and being miserable with Louis’s delusions.

And yeah, that ending huh? Obviously it won’t stick but they might need to wear cravats for a while. Feel like the blood of Akasha is very relevant. Not sure what I think about Marius but I really like Akasha.

And of course
https://i.postimg.cc/dQ9tYPP7/IMG-8520.png

I’m none too plussed about the reception this series is getting. I get people don’t like it as much as IWTV but TVL is kind of a stepping stone book in that it tells you all about Lestat and sets up QoTD. To me it’s ok to feel a bit in between?

I want to take the first book on holiday - would I be right in assuming it's an easy read?

Yes but her prose might annoy you, it’s very purple. Also, nobody fucks in the books (tragic)

Yeah it’s an easy enough read. it can be quite dense, background-wise, our Anne loves getting you up to speed & keeping you informed ALWAYS, but it’s never a slog.

I miss my emotional support vampires SO MUCH.

same!

I started this the other day and really liked it (though sounds like I should remove Witches of Mayfair from my queue), but my partner is already wavering after ep 2. Her objection seems to be Lestat, though I'm not sure if she doesn't get the character yet (I read a few of the books a long time ago plus remember the film well; she did neither) or if she thinks the actor is bad. Anything I can say to get her more on board? Do people generally like Sam Reid's performance?

Sam Reid is the best thing about this already great show — and he’s incredibly true to the tone & character of Lestat in the books

I think it’s a bit the Frenchy accent that throws people off at first

Tell her to hang in there - it’ll all pay off in s2 ;)

Yeah, he is widely regarded as not only a fine actor in the right part, but highly delicious to boot.

hmm yeah I should inquire if the problem is "he's too hot" lol

thank you both!

Sam Reid is electric as Lestat. I love Jacob Anderson too, and Louis is always the less fun role, but Lestat is Anne Rice’s favourite and the whole series hinges on him.

What I will say is that all this show is a little slow to get going initially each season cos they set the scene. I had to refresh myself on where episode 1.2 was and I would see if you can get her to stick it out to episode 4. If not, then it’s not for her.
https://media.tenor.com/tQo1oY5u1ycAAAAM/iwtv-vampbrina.gif

ah sweet an episode marker is useful. Anderson and Bogosian have been the main draws so far, but that gif is the exact energy I promised but we haven't encountered yet so I'm glad to get a preview!

just caught up - I don't get to watch it in real time as we don't get AMC so have to wait for it to end up on netflix here.

This season ruled so much, like there were so many ways the rock star arc could have gone wrong but they just nailed it. Finale episode was fab.

loved Lestat doomscrolling in his coffin - relatable!

Yeah it’s impressive how well they did the rockstar stuff - especially since it’s truly the cringeyest part of the Anne Rice novel! Rollin Jones is truly a real one for not shying away from it or watering it down like a lot of other showrunners might have

For fans of Lestat and Mindhunter, check out Sam Reid and Anna Torv as a hot 80s Australian news anchor couple on AMC's The Newsreader.

just wanna say thank you very much for this rec, this is extremely my shit (reporter who got their start in a Melbourne newsroom)

It’s really good. We had some chat about it over on the streaming thread.