Interview with the Vampire recap: Louis embarks on a taste of New Orleans

Sara Netzley
·10 min read
5

How many live foxes would you watch being consumed for a chance to eat a meal like that?

Daniel's (Eric Bogosian) conversation with Louis (Jacob Anderson) continues over a multi-course dinner that looks unfairly delicious as Interview With the Vampire serves up a second episode seasoned with romance, humor, and cruelty. Let's dine.

Daniel's extravagant gustatory experience — served by masked waiters because Louis is a considerate host — is marred only by the plastic wrap on the empty end of the table. The staff are clearly preparing for whatever they're about to serve their boss, who joins Daniel after the seventh course to resume his post-transformation story.

As Louis struggles through his human body's death throes, an unconcerned Lestat (Sam Reid) briskly disposes of the dead priests and drops a Very Important Vampire Rule: never drink the blood of the dead, or you'll risk joining them.

Louis, flopping around like a fish, is in no condition to learn any lesson, but once the transformation's complete, Louis' new vampire eyes take in the glimmering new world around him.

"There's the spark," Lestat breathes, either referring to the vampirism taking hold or the parts of Louis that have always attracted him. Both, maybe.

Interview with the Vampire
Interview with the Vampire

Alfonso Bresciani/AMC

Lestat takes his boyfriend protege into town, where he instructs Louis to think of humans as food and pulls Louis' thirsty attention away from the boisterous sailor drinking with his buddies (the actor's character notes were clearly "Channing Tatum in Hail, Caesar!"), pointing him instead toward a chatty solo salesman, whose death will go unnoticed.

The salesman is slow to pick up on the "we noticed you across the bar and liked your vibe" vibe, even though Louis' answer to what they grow in Louisiana is "shuuuuuugah," delivered in the sexiest, hungriest way imaginable. I urge you to listen to Anderson's delivery of that word at least eighteen times and also to make it your new wake-up sound.

Lestat mind-talks that Louis' scaring the guy, then sits back and watches the incompetent baby vamp try to make his first kill once they lure the man back to his house.

"The neck," Lestat patiently instructs. "Bite the neck, Louis. No, you don't bite the blood. You suck it."

Alas, this murder leads to Louis' first vampiric mope session. He staggers out of Lestat's home and heads for his mother's house. But Lestat knows what's gonna happen: it's daylight, and Louis starts to burn.

The crispy vamp grabs a jug of milk from a passing delivery man, douses himself, and races back to Lestat, who calmly undresses and prepares for their daytime slumber, extolling the virtues of New Orleans as the perfect setting for his new vampire romance. When Louis eyes the single coffin in the bedroom, Lestat assures him, "It's okay. You can be on top."

In the present, Louis tells Daniel it was too many firsts: death, rebirth, coming out, homicide. When Daniel asks what sexuality has to do with killing a man, Louis explains that bedding down with Lestat was an overture to that side of his nature.

Daniel's unimpressed at Louis' assertion that he, the Black student, and Lestat, the white master, were equals in the quiet dark, and Louis in turn mocks what Daniel teaches in his online course. Then the servers bring in a platter with a bound, shrieking sand fox. (What does it say about me that this was more upsetting than the salesman?)

Louis tears into it, letting the blood pour down his chin as he points out that vampires may be killers, but Daniel's eating his cooked rabbit without a qualm. He argues that vampires are apex predators who see human life in its entirety, including bringing about the end of it. "I want our book to be a warning," he says, returning to his story.

Although Louis' preoccupied with how much he doesn't want to kill again, Lestat pivots to teaching his protege how to read minds. According to Lestat, every human thought boils down to three things: I want food, I want sex, I want to go home. That… checks out, actually. We also learn that vampires can't read other vampires' minds. (File that fact away, friends!)

Interview with the Vampire
Interview with the Vampire

Alfonso Bresciani/AMC

The pair next attend a party at Louis' family home, which he hasn't visited in ages. His mother (Rae Dawn Chong) is not pleased to see Lestat at her son's side, and Lestat's at his most French when he returns her icy greeting with, "I see you have a banjo band in your front yard." Honestly, sick burn.

Louis reads his mother's thoughts: she doesn't approve of him, his long fingernails, his sunglasses. So he heads inside to greet Grace (Kalyne Coleman) where, standing next to a portrait of the dearly departed Paul, his vampire hearing tells him she's pregnant with twins. Unlike their mother, Grace is pleased to see the changes in him and even accepts the bundle of cash he offers her growing family.

Also growing? Louis' business. He and a town alderman walk through Louis' plans for a new gaming house he's managing. The man's insultingly amused by Louis' business savvy,  calling him "boy" and talking down to him. Decades of repressed rage come boiling up, and Louis and his new powers lash out. "It was both random and unfortunate the man picked that night to dabble in f—ery," Louis tells Daniel.

So yeah, the new vampire does a tiny little murder, then calls his boyfriend to help with the cleanup. "You are a library of confusion," Lestat says in frustration when Louis explains that he killed the man for telling him he did a good job on the project.

The men have it out over their racial and sexual difference — for those keeping score, Lestat considers himself sexually nondiscriminating — and Louis bristles when Lestat calls him "fledgling," as it feels a little too close to "slave."

Their fight continues to the bedroom, where they bicker from inside their side-by-side coffins. Lestat flips his lid up to say he'd have killed the man himself for disrespecting Louis, and to make up for it, he agrees to buy Louis the Fair Play Saloon.

Louis immediately sets out to make it the best club in the district, upping employee pay and welcoming anyone with money through its doors. You know what that means, y'all? Brickhouse Williams (Dana Gourrier) gets a promotion! The newly-named Azalea Hall thrives from 1912 through 1917, earning Louis mountains of money and plenty of transient meals.

But his new lifestyle kept him away from his family for years, and when he eventually pays Grace a visit, she leaves him alone with his newborn nephew. And Louis starts… sniffing. OH MY GOD, LOUIS, DON'T CHOMP THAT INFANT. His fangs pop, and we cut back to the present, where Daniel has only one question: "Did you eat the baby?"

Louis replies that his last kill was in the year 2000. Daniel's unimpressed and repeats the question again and again, slipping another one in for good measure: is the pandemic the opening vampires have been waiting for?

Louis does answer that one, sort of, explaining that vampires can broadcast their thoughts for thousands of miles, and one brute in Madagascar in particular thinks the recent unraveling of geopolitical foundations as "the great conversion." Yeah, that sounds not fantastic for humans.

At this point, they've been joined by Louis' willing blood donor, who gives Daniel vacation tips while Louis dines on him, complete with little yummy noises. He's very tidy this time, making it clear that he was intentionally savage with the fox earlier to make a point.

As the woozy donor leaves the room, Louis reveals that he left his baby nephew on the floor, unharmed, and ran away. Lestat chides him for skipping meals and tells him to cut ties with his family to save them all pain. After all, he is Louis' family now.

Lestat then reveals his heart, calling Louis angry, stubborn, unaccommodating, dedicated, thoughtful, loving. He's imperfectly perfect, and he's what Lestat's been searching for over the centuries. Also, he bought them both tuxedos so they can attend the opera that night.

Interview with the Vampire
Interview with the Vampire

Michele K. Short/AMC Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson on 'Interview With the Vampire'

Unfortunately, that's a space where Louis has to pretend to be Lestat's valet until the lights are down, and only then does Lestat brush their pinkies together, confessing his decades of loneliness and his relief that he's found someone to be with him forever.

It's here that Louis gives in to his curiosity about others of their kind, and Lestat says there's maybe a hundred of them. Then he turns his attention to the performance, as the only real use he has for humans beyond their blood is the music they make. He follows along with the score, glorying in the talented soprano's voice but cringing as the tenor makes a hash of the melodies.

Lestat's so enraged that he lures the tenor back to their home, and Louis watches in horror as Lestat humiliates the tenor, highlighting every last insecurity the man's ever felt about his art, before draining him slowly.

In a mirror image of the pilot, when Lestat sat opposite Louis to watch him with poor doomed Lily, this time it's Louis watching as Lestat drinks from the tenor. Lestat orders Louis to embrace his killer nature and revel in death's beauty. Louis gives in and sees images of the tenor's past as the man's life drains away.

In the present, Louis insists that Lestat had a way about him. He was under Lestat's thrall, a botched vampire who only pretended to enjoy taking a human life. Yet he's also a thoughtful vampire. Dessert is a dish Daniel mentioned offhandedly in his memoir, and it prompts Daniel to share that it's what he ate after he proposed to his first wife in Paris.

Absorbed with thoughts of his own past, Daniel closes his laptop. The interview is done for the night.

Blood droplets:

  • Dare I say this episode was even better than the pilot? We get more layers of Lestat tonight, more of his humor and savagery, and Jacob Anderson's range continues to be extraordinary.

  • Nobody in a straw chapeau should be as devastatingly handsome as Lestat.

  • Book readers, am I forgetting an Anne Rice vampire who hailed from Madagascar, or is that a new-to-the-show detail? It doesn't ring a bell, and the internet was no help, but one of you may have better recall than I do.

  • Here's one thing I did recognize: the art in the dining room is by Marius de Romanus, a Venetian artist from the 16th century whom Daniel's never heard of. But readers have.

  • Please, lords of pop culture, make "You have a banjo band in your front yard" the new "You have a baby! In a bar!"

  • For real, I would kill a mediocre tenor for that dinner. I mean, the wine pairings alone!

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