Interview with the Vampire Is Back for a Bloodsucking Gay Encore

Larry Horricks / AMC

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.

Hayles, who takes over the role this season from Bailey Bass, quickly establishes herself as this season’s breakout star. There’s a newfound maturity to her Claudia, whose hunger to transcend the confines of her child body is infectious, even as the coven’s machinations take a sinister turn. She enjoys her own Parisian meet-cute with dressmaker Madeleine — one of the season 2 threads I found myself wishing we got to see more of before arriving at the story’s wrenching climax.

Of course, it’s not so easy for Louis and Claudia to escape their vampire maker. Because wouldn’t you know it, but the Theatres de Vampires was co-founded by none other than Lestat! And yes, he had a brief situationship with Armand, the coven’s current leader. (Challengers wishes!) Indeed, Lestat’s shadow is the challenge facing this adaptation of Interview’s back half: How do you build upon Louis’ story satisfyingly when plenty of the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of season 1 came from his and Lestat’s disastrous yet endlessly watchable, now-absent relationship? To help bridge that gap, Lestat now exists as a figment of Louis’ guilt-ridden imagination. Reid is clearly having a blast in these moments, transforming from vindictive ex to bratty third-wheel to tender lover depending on Louis’ state of mind.

Finally, gay TV vampire sex that doesn’t suck.

Anderson continues to cement himself as the best leading man on TV right now. It’s no small task to carry a show across three wildly different timelines, but he makes it look easy, even as Louis’ distorted memories begin to bleed into one another; a flashback episode detailing what actually went down in 1973 casts a shattering light on the heavy toll that Louis’ modern-day search for the truth could take.

While season 1 bounded through decades of Louis’ early vampire life, the past timeline in season 2 is concentrated within just five or so years. With this considerably shortened window, the show’s interview framework takes on a new importance. What started out as a game of two-person chess between Daniel and Louis has now morphed into a 3-D match with shades of marital discord à la Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Zaman, previously a covert background player, relishes his role as an ancient vampire whose milder, decidedly un-Lestat-like demeanor might mask something equally insidious. It makes for a delicious three-hander, even if the sensuality of season 1 is somewhat lost in the process. (This is a show that went viral for levitating gay vampire sex in the first episode, damn it!).

The season tagline “memory is a monster” looms large over Louis in the past and the present. We might not know exactly why he welcomed Daniel back into his immortal life, but he feels a genuine desperation to excavate a true record of what happened all those years ago, beyond the hazy spotlight that his own distorted memories cast. It’s that dedication to character, just as fully realized as Interview with the Vampire’s seductive genre trappings, that makes this show so deserving of an encore.

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Originally Appeared on them.