This article contains spoilers for Interview with the Vampire season 1.
AMC’s Interview with the Vampire has often been described over the course of its acclaimed two-season run as the best show on TV that nobody is watching. Its residence on a cable network without easy streaming access made it an underdog in the era of Too Much TV. Things, however, are changing, as the first season of the series is now available to watch on Netflix. A new coven of fans is flocking to the lavish adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved novel and they’re liking what they see.
The supernatural drama, headed by showrunner Rolin Jones, is remarkably faithful to the Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in spirit, but it has made some striking character and narrative changes. At the heart of the series is Louis de Pointe du Lac, the eponymous vampire telling his story to an intrepid reporter. Anyone who’s read the book (or seen the 1994 movie) knows the set-up, but the AMC version has a few more surprises up its sleeve, particularly in regards to Louis, played here by Jacob Anderson of Game of Thrones fame. Through Louis, the many changes reveal how Interview with the Vampire has revived itself for a new age, all while retaining the essence of the books that fans so love. Here are some of the biggest changes made to Louis and beyond.
The TV Louis Is Quite Different From Book Louis
The most obvious change is by having Louis be a Black man. The original Louis de Pointe du Lac in the novel is not only white but a slaveowner who runs an indigo plantation. That position offers him a level of financial and societal privilege that is not afforded to the TV show’s Louis, a man of color in Louisiana who is shut out of white circles (this doesn’t last long.) Rather than own a plantation, this Louis runs a brothel, one of the few areas of business open to him, but also one of moral ambiguity that adds layers to his character as he makes the shift from human to vampire. Louis’ depression and passivity in the novel are blended with a righteous fury here, as Louis rails against the racists who degrade him and his family while trying to hijack control over his brothel (it doesn’t end well for them.)
It’s safe to assume that any vampire in an Anne Rice novel isn’t straight, and Louis was certainly not heterosexual in the novel, but the TV series makes the savvy choice to have him be a closeted gay man dealing with his sexuality in private. Overall, the show is more overtly sexual than the novels, which deal more in sensuality than outright horniness, and Louis’ seduction by Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) plays into his desire to shift away from a racist, homophobic world.
There’s A Big Change in The Timeline
The book Louis is born in 1766 and he is 25 when Lestat turns him into a vampire in 1791. Having moved the timeline away from the era of slavery, the TV series introduces Louis to us in 1910, when he is 33. The timeline shift means he is not as old a vampire in the modern-day scenes as he is in the book (a matter that reveals its importance in later episodes when it comes to his powers, as vampires get more powerful as they age.) We also get to spend far more time with Louis’ family, including his siblings and his widowed mother Florence (played by Rae Dawn Chong). Louis’ devastation and resulting guilt following the death of his troubled brother Paul is part of his origin in the novel and is featured in the series’ first episode as part of his impetus for becoming a vampire.
The Show Has Two Interviews with the Vampire
As the title suggests, Interview with the Vampire is an interview between Louis and a human. In the novel, the interviewer isn’t even named. We don’t find out who he is until the third book, The Queen of the Damned, when he’s revealed to be Daniel Molloy, a young reporter who has become enthralled with vampires. The new Daniel is older, saltier, and utterly uninterested in undead nonsense. Played by Eric Bogosian, this Daniel had previously encountered Louis in the 1970s, where he initially interviewed him before things went awry. 50 years later, he’s been asked to redo the conversation to fully get the facts straight.
This major shake-up of the story’s set-up is one of the show’s most interesting changes. It reinforces how much Louis’ story (and indeed all of the vampires’ tales, which are written in Rice’s novels as autobiographical confessions) are rooted in unreliable recollections and outright lies. You, and Daniel, can never be entirely sure if what you’re hearing from Louis is real, a result of his fevered memories, or straight-up fabrications.
Claudia Is Aged Up
Aside from Louis, the most changed character from both the book and the film is Claudia (played in season one by Bailey Bass), the perennial child vampire who serves as the daughter-slash-relationship band-aid to Louis and Lestat. While fans may be more familiar with the version played by Kirsten Dunst in the film, even she was very different from the original character. In the novel, Claudia is only five when she is turned, and spends the next several decades stuck in a child’s body while yearning to be an adult woman. The TV Claudia is just on the cusp of adolescence but still a child, which proves to be tricky as she mentally ages but never achieves puberty.
The dynamic between Claudia and her adoptive fathers is also very different. As the years pass, she grows tired of being infantilized and demands that Louis be more like a brother than a parent, which he reluctantly agrees to. Like Louis, Claudia is now also Black and experiences the racism of the era alongside him. Their relationship is much more contentious than the book, where Claudia’s fury and arrested physical development are more contained. But like her novel counterpart, Claudia is still cunning and it’s she who pushes Louis to kill Lestat.
The Vampire Armand Sticks Around
In the season finale, it is revealed that Louis’ assistant Rashid is actually Armand (played by Assad Zaman), a 514-year-old vampire who Louis calls the love of his life. Book lovers immediately freaked out at the twist, as it not only showed yet another major character change but a huge deviation from the original. In the first book, Louis and Armand (who is a teenage redhead in the novels) have a relationship that ends sometime in the 1970s, but it is never described as a great love affair. Indeed, Armand’s most all-consuming romance in the Vampire Chronicles is with Daniel Molloy, who doesn’t remember anything about Armand at the end of the first season!
The reveal that Armand has been hiding in plain sight, and that he’s impervious to the sun, sets him up as a far more cunning power player than he was in the novel. It also sets up a whole load of questions for season two: why was he in disguise? Is he actually Louis’ great love? What happened between the pair between meeting Daniel in the ‘70s and now? All answers are given in the next season, so stay tuned for that arriving on Netflix!
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