Interview With the Vampire stars talk bringing Louis and Lestat's 'toxic' relationship to life
Interview With the Vampire's undead creatures of the night may not have a beating heart, but they still love (and hate) fiercely. And in AMC's new TV adaptation of Anne Rice's 1976 novel, the love story at the center of the gothic tale is even more heightened than it was in the 1994 movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
"I'm a fan of the books, and when I read the pilot, I thought, 'This is what I want to see,'" Sam Reid, who plays Lestat de Lioncourt, tells EW. "This is a really toxic relationship, but there's so much love and desire and tension. It's not a sexual tension because we get that out of the way quite quickly. The dynamic between Lestat and Louis [de Pointe du Lac, played by Jacob Anderson] is quite hard to coin and to define, and it was exciting to work out a way to play this relationship where they destroy each other in various ways each episode, and yet manage to come back to each other."
While filming the end of the seven-episode first season (premiering Oct. 2), Reid found himself wondering how Lestat and Louis could come back from the dark places their relationship goes. "When murder is your love language in a relationship, it's quite a challenge, but it's very deep," he adds with a laugh.
"It's an ever-changing relationship that seems to fall into these cycles," Anderson says. "It's like they change a little bit, but become more the same each time. They don't really seem to learn very much."
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt and Jacob Anderson as Louis De Point Du Lac in 'Interview With the Vampire'
Both actors were thrilled to see how showrunner Rolin Jones went even deeper into Louis and Lestat's complicated dynamic than the iconic, Oscar-nominated film did. "In terms of the queerness of the relationship, that's pretty straightforward — it's definitely not queer-coded," Reid says. "They're in a romantic relationship. Once we just throw out, put that on the screen, and move past that, you can really look at the complexities and the nuance of their relationship. It's much more fun to play a relationship as opposed to people [who] are working out how to be in a relationship."
Anderson quips that the series is "essentially about a married couple slamming doors on each other. The beauty of it is that nothing really goes unexplored."
That's why they both agree that this show is much truer than Rice's original novels than the movie was. "The way Louis speaks about the relationship, it's not entirely clear until pretty much the end that you start to understand that the situation was much more than just a maker and fledgling vampire situation, that it was very much rooted in deeper emotion," Reid says. "Because we're looking at the context of all of those books, particularly those first three books, there's no question about it."
Below, the actors talk with EW about bringing Louis and Lestat's relationship to life in a new way. And check out an exclusive sneak peek at the series premiere with the video and photo above.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you two first meet?
JACOB ANDERSON: The first time we met was virtually, like this. It was very late for me, I think maybe midnight which feels appropriate, and then very early for Sam.
SAM REID: We met virtually a couple of times actually — sometimes we met at six o'clock in the morning for me and something more civil, like 9 p.m. for you, and then we swapped it around so it was 1 a.m. for me and whatever time it was for you.
It must have been a relief to finally meet in person, then.
ANDERSON: Yeah, it was weird. It was a really strange way to do that process. We spoke to each other a bit, we'd text each other, and we had a FaceTime before that.
REID: We were talking about places we were going to live in New Orleans [during filming], because we were both moving from different countries to the States. Just talking about logistics and stuff like that. We didn't really talk much about the characters, but we'd send each other photographs of when they would send us these extraordinary vampire teeth, these temp teeth, and so we'd send each other [selfies] of us in the teeth. There was a bit of back and forth.
ANDERSON: I've still got quite a few pictures on my phone of Sam wearing his teeth before I met him in person. He was always making quite different faces.
REID: [Laughs] I also have photographs of Jacob too.
ANDERSON: The thing that I always found funny is that Sam had his photos set on "live," so there was always a bit of movement as well, which just added to the drama. I was like, "Oh, this guy's interesting."
REID: It's funny because I don't know how to take the live setting off the photos and it's always embarrassing to send live photos to people, which I think are the worst kind of things to send, particularly to somebody you haven't actually met in person.
ANDERSON: [Laughs] Exactly, but you made a very good first impression. I was like, "This guy's brave, he's sending me videos. This is how I'm seeing Lestat de Lioncourt for the first time."
How did your first in-person meeting go?
REID: We were in New Orleans quite early, almost a month before filming began. We first met in person in a rehearsal room.
ANDERSON: I'll tell you where we met — we met in a corridor. We both had our masks on and we went straight into rehearsal and then the next day we went for a walk. We spent the whole day walking around together.
REID: We went to Jackson Square. We went to the house that we'd be filming in a lot. We walked around Louis Armstrong Park. Then we went to a vampire boutique.
ANDERSON: Yeah, we did! We both bought vampire candles.
REID: It was so much fun. And then I lit mine and you didn't.
ANDERSON: I wanted to make it ceremonial. I wanted it to be like, "We're going to light our candles at the same time." I was like, "Should we light our candles tonight?" the night before we started shooting and you were like, "Oh, well, I lit mine a few weeks ago."
REID: They were pretty cool, because as they melted, they had a crucifix suspended in the wax. I thought they were very suitable to Anne Rice because Anne Rice's vampires quite like crucifixes and don't really give two craps about them in terms of the deterrent of vampires. I thought that was quite funny.
ANDERSON: [Laughs] Well, I wouldn't know. I still haven't lit mine.
When you got on set and started filming, how did you approach bringing Louis and Lestat's turbulent relationship to life, especially considering there's already an iconic version with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt?
REID: I'm a fan of the movie. I'd seen it quite a lot, but it wasn't hard to not think about it because the way that Rolin has cracked open this story is quite different. It wasn't that hard to look at it in a different context and in a different light to the way that the film approached the roles. Obviously they come from the same essence, they originate from the same book, but they're very different so we were never really referencing the film at all. We didn't really think about the film that much. We're looking more at all of these books as opposed to just the first book, which the movie focuses on. And since it's a different time period, we got to explore slightly different relationships to what they look at in the movie.
ANDERSON: I loved getting the scripts because Sam had read a lot of the books and I'd only read the first two when we were shooting it — I've read a lot more now — and we often got into great detail about these books. I loved hearing Sam talk about Anne Rice's world and these vampires that I was yet to meet and Lestat's rich history. Sam became my personal alphabettery, like the Anne Rice Alphabettery.
REID: They're amazing books. That's one thing that we got to do that the film doesn't do is that we have all of the books and they're all completed and AMC is talking about extending this story more. And whether or not we go that far, we have the opportunity to look at these roles and how we're going to start them and start this story, we have an ending, so when you are mapping out this relationship, when they meet for the first time, we also know where they end up. That was a big help.
ANDERSON: Whenever I talked about something that Louis had said or that was in the script, because this show is Louis' recollection of events, Sam would just be like, "Lie. Lie. That's a lie. Did that happen? Is it real? Didn't happen that way." Very unhelpful for my preparation. [Laughs] I got really icy about it a few times. "I don't want hear this. I have to believe something is true." It's nice be able to believe what you're saying.
REID: I love how this series plays with the way memory works. There are lots of different perspectives that come in which allows us to have that overarching question throughout the series about whose perspective is it and what is true and what isn't, which is a reflection on a lot of relationships. Two people experience the same thing, but it is remembered very differently by those two people, particularly when you're talking about love and heartbreak and breakups and fights and getting back together again and all that kind of stuff.
ANDERSON: You're getting one side of couple's therapy, currently.
Make sure to check out EW's Fall TV Preview cover story — as well as all of our 2022 Fall TV Preview content, releasing over 22 days through Sept. 29.
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