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Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire had its first episode premiere on AMC, and so far, the response has been very positive. Episode one of the show captured the Gothic mood of Rice’s celebrated 1976 novel, while reinventing it for the 21st century. But while some changes worked, others didn’t land as much. Here’s how the first episode how the Interview With a Vampire series diverted from Rice’s prose the most, and how we feel they succeeded, and how it sometimes did not quite hit the mark.

Louis de Pointe du Lac’s Evolution

The biggest changes to the series revolved around our lead vampire Louis (Jacob Anderson). In the novel and film, Louis was a white plantation in owner in 1791 Louisiana. One with all the slaves that role implies. The series sets Louis’ origin story 120 years later, in 1910. Louis is now a wealthy African-American brothel owner in New Orleans’ red-light district. Both versions show Louis as a morally compromised person in life, even before becoming a vampire. The series also implies that Louis is a closeted gay man while alive. This was something not the case with the book or the film. In Rice’s novel, Louis had intense feelings for a plantation owner named Babette, who does not exist in the show.

Louis’ family, however, was much more like the novel, and an aspect of his life the 1994 film entirely skipped. He had a sister named Grace, and, more prominently, a brother named Paul. Paul was a deeply religious Catholic, who believed he heard voices from God. Louis constantly chastised him for these beliefs, and Paul ultimately killed himself by walking off the roof one day. The series portrayed this event, something the movie did not do. It more clearly explained Louis’ deep sense of guilt and grief before taking Lestat’s offer of immortality.

The changes made to Louis in the AMC Interview With the Vampire series are interesting, and they morph Rice’s story in compelling ways. Updating Louis away from his initial origin story allows his narrative to take on a new strength and avoids showing slavery in a casual or flippant light.. The time jump forward also makes sense in this context. Ultimately, these changes work and make for a fascinating take on the material. It’s good to see the adaptation taking its position seriously and not simply recreating the source material if they couldn’t do so with reverence to a terrible time in history. These changes unfold seamlessly into the frame of the story already written.

The Interview With the Vampire series also gives us a glimpse into Louis’ family the film brushed aside, giving his character greater depth and his emotional state, both before and after his transformation, more nuance.

The Vampire Lestat in the Interview With the Vampire Series

The characterization of the vampire Lestat in episode one of the series was very much like the novel. Only, that novel is not Interview with the Vampire, but The Vampire Lestat, its sequel. Lestat’s seduction of Louis in the series was thoughtful and slow, like two lovers in a dance. But in the original book, Lestat simply attacked Louis one night, out of the blue. The choice he gave him was simple “become a vampire, or become my victim.” Anne Rice portrayed Lestat in book one as far more petulant and cruel.

Sam Reid’s characterization of Lestat is far more in keeping with how Rice wrote him in later books. Also, Lestat alluded to two important characters in his backstory from The Vampire Lestat. These two characters his lover Nicolas, and his mother, Gabrielle. The suggestion here is that his backstory remains very much the same as in Rice’s later books. This softening up of his character was smart. Simply because Lestat will need to carry the rest of the series should it go past Interview. It’s not a wise move to make him completely unlikable if you want him to carry the leading man torch later on.

Once again, the Interview With the Vampire series moves to adapt rather than imitate, and the merging of the two worlds works well here.

The Interview (and the Interviewer)

The concept of episode one of Interview With the Vampire is that the interview between the reporter and the titular vampire happened once already, nearly fifty years ago. What we saw play out in the first episode was “take two.” Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) interviewed the undead Louis in 1973. At the end of that interview, Daniel begs Louis to make him a vampire. This enraged Louis, and he attacked him. But ultimately, Louis let him live. That is all consistent with Rice’s original text.

In the novels, Daniel (who Rice merely referred to as “the boy,” and never named until book three of the series) kept the audiotapes of the interview and published them as a book, which the world believed was fiction. In the TV series, he becomes an award-winning journalist, but he never publishes a book about his vampiric encounter. Louis kept the tapes, and he mails them to a much older Daniel decades after their disastrous first encounter.

While an interesting take, it also is one that ultimately makes little sense. When Daniel plays the tapes back for Louis, we hear verbatim lines of dialogue from the book. The suggestion is that the TV series sequalized the book in a way, an attempt at a rewrite. But the events of Louis’ life differed so much from the Interview With the Vampire book and movie, that the TV series can’t really be an “answer” to it. The show would have benefitted from rebooting the entire concept and having the interviewer be a young man doing it for the first time. The current format is just confusing and unneeded.

It will be interesting to see how the show both adheres to and deviates from the source material in the coming weeks. Especially as the child vampire Claudia will soon enter the story. With Interview with the Vampire, which was already renewed for season two, and soon, The Mayfair Witches, Rice’s world will flourish on-screen as never before. We are looking forward to seeing how it all connects.

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