Interview With The Vampire- TV Series

probably.. there's dearth of entertainment right now and I need another disappointment.

Blackula!

There are so many threads about this show, OP, obviously we're going to watch. Despite all the signs indicating it'll be a steaming turd.

I’m all burned out on vampires and the supernatural myself, but the old movie with Tom and Brad was not a classic and the IP deserves a reboot.

No, looks cheap and shitty. And race bending again just for the sack of it, lame.

They’re vampires. Does race matter? It played no significance in the book.

The characters are really off from the book from what it looks like. And Jacob Anderson looks old. Still will watch.

r6 It doesn't matter at all, some people just can't get over the fact that casting practices in Hollywood have changed and we're not going back to business as usual. They don't strike me as the type of people who are capable of learning and growing, so we'll just have to wait until they die out to stop hearing their inane complaints.

I think having Louis, who is the protagonist of the piece, be a white slave-owning plantation holder is just too much in our current climate. The producers just didn't want to go there.

"A modern, unforgettable retelling of Anne Rice's best-selling novel, Interview With The Vampire. Starring Jacob Anderson" Modern, UNFORGIVABLE retelling...more like.

Hell, I never even saw the movie -- why would I watch this?

I first found the book in 1977 when I was in an airport for the very first time on my way to Army Basic Training. I was looking for something to read on the plane and that's the book I bought. So I read it long before anyone else had even heard of it. And I refuse to let any of these treatments ruin it for me.

BTW, I feel the exact same way about The Handmaid's Tale.

Won't even hate-watch this. Anne Rice is rolling... Its acceptable for Louis to be a black bloodsucking, murderous fiend but being a white planter slaveholder is not?

R5 Exactly. The new show’s creators made Claudia—Rice’s favorite character—a teenager because they wanted to 1) avoid child labor laws and 2) give us some awful YA romance storylines. The issue of Claudia being a young child is essential to the story.

It looks good, and I like the casting of Gray Worm as Louis, but the actress playing Claudia is almost 20 and the character was 5! The whole point of her story was that she had the mind of a grown woman but was trapped in a 5 year olds body. And it was important that she was 5. Anne Rice lost a daughter to leukemia and wrote the novel in a very short period of time. It was her Frankenstein. Claudia represented the child she lost and her wish to keep her immortal.

It's gonna be weird if this goes on for five seasons and there's a 25 year old playing a character that's supposed to look like a 5 year old.

R14 Claudia isn’t 5 in this

R15, obviously. My point was there was a reason she was 5 in the book and it was an important one.

Not enough black characters. Everyone knows all vampires were originally black.

I mean it's New Orleans so half of the background characters would be black. A lot of free blacks walked around. But the main characters didn't need a race lift.

I can only image the clusterfuck they will make of The Witching Hour

Yes. NOLA always had a lot of black people.

r8

Anne Rice's books always had diversity and she's from New Orleans and incorporated it's history and culture into her lore. It's a more Afro-Caribbean Creole culture and her books got that aspect hands on. I think for her time, she definitely was progressive especially for a fantasy/speculative writer. Lestat was based on her blond haired husband Stan and she imagined Rutger Hauer as Lestat. Claudia was based on her baby girl who died young. Tarquin from Blackwood Farm was based on her effeminate gay son Chris. She did have nonwhite vampires of various backgrounds. She appreciated beauty in all races and cultures I find. It's weird to make an author who was woke especially for her time and occupation even more so. Give her a break

R17 well, only occasionally. In my experience.

As someone who dearly loved the early novels as a teen, I really hope it's good. I suspect it won't be, but I'll try watching anyway.

R22 I do not actually remember any black vampires in the books.

R25 There was a black skinned Indian vampire in Blackwood Farm. Two Arab ones too in that.

wake me when they bring Anita Blake's pansexual frau put all the cocks in me series to teleivsion.

R8 Uh no, Louie wasn't a black pimp in the books. Like the books have plenty of diversity cause anne was all about it, so why change the main character to something completely different? Lame.

Anne Rice's sexually explicit content involving S&M, minors and incest would get her cancelled today. They tried to cancel Stephen King too. I can't imagine adapting the Mayfair Witches without butchering it. I'd love an aesthetically beautiful adaptation of Sleeping Beauty Quartet with the sex scenes in tact. Artistic porn is needed more than ever.

No, I won't be watching. I'm completely burnt out on it.

For me, the failure to adapt 'The Vampire Lestat' as the film sequel to IWTV, using the same cast (not to mention the colossal 'fuck you' that 'The Queen of the Damned' film represented), completely and permanently pissed away any further interest I had in it.

r30 has stated her boundaries.

I'm 99% sure this is going to be a piece of shit, but I'll still watch the first couple episodes just in case.

Aaliyah was great in Queen of the Damned just simply because of the way she moved her body.

Aaliyah was the best part of that movie.

R33 100%. It’s a terrible movie that is also dated due to some of the visual and music choices a lot of other movies were also making in the early 00s (Ghosts of Mars and Thirteen Ghosts also did the weird shaky camera work with color filters etc. against metal music).

Aaliyah was great though, if for nothing else, because of the way she had full control over her body and knew how to move well. She also had great facial expressions. It’s a shame the movie is so bad though.

Aaliyah would have been amazing for action, scifi and fantasy movies. She was supposed to be in the Matrix sequels. I could see her having that Halle Berry and Zoe Saldana career trajectory.

Aaliyah definitely would've had a good acting career. She had the looks and the screen presence. A terrible shame what happened to her.

I remember critics all pretty much saying the same thing when the movie came out, the movie is bad but Aaliyah had such a massive presence and you feel like you watched a movie star be born after seeing her in it, despite her having like 15-20 minutes or screen time only despite being the main character.

She was used effectively in it though.

Most thought this movie would have opened a lot of film roles for her.

And yes, she as cast in the Matrix sequels before she died.

This looks good but I hate the vampire stuff if it is too graphic. I thought the Tom Cruise one was scary, and the two best Dracula movies were enought to give me nightmares: The Francis Coppola/ Gary Oldman one, and the one with Kate Nelligan and Frank Langella. (He was the best Dracula, IMO)

[quote]It looks magnificent

It looks boring.

Anne actually wrote Louis as a woman for the film adaptation, in order to accommodate Hollywood's homophobia. She'd be fine with a black Louis, tbqh.

R40 Anne loved black slavers?

r41 You're a slow-minded imbecile who can't leave his racial resentments aside for 2 minutes?

R42 In the book, Louis has slaves. Bitch to Rice.

r43 In the book Louis is a man, but Rice was OK changing him into a woman in order to get the film adaptation through. You're honestly so slow-minded you didn't see that's the point I was making?

The girl who is playing Claudia is problematic in real life (and there was no way they could make her look younger (I think they wanted her to be 15/16), so she won’t be in future series.

They’re planning to do 10 of Anne Rice’s books, the one they’re working on now is Mayfair Witches.

Let’s see… changing Louis from a white plantation owner to a black pimp. Changing Claudia, the most tragic character in the book, from a vampire trapped in the body of a 5-year-old blonde girl to a teenager of mixed ethnicity. Changing Daniel, the interviewer, from a twentysomething man to 69-year-old Eric Bogosian. Changing the time period from 1790s New Orleans to the 1910s. I’m sure there will be more changes.

If they didn’t like many of the major elements of the novel, why bother to adapt it? Write your own goddamn story instead of fundamentally altering an author’s work because you’re so worried about offending everybody. They’re probably like the showrunners of Game Of Thrones—hacks who can’t successfully write their own stuff. GOT sucked precisely at the point when there was no more of George R.R. Martin’s source material they could use and they had to make up the rest.

Hard pass on what looks to be a toothless adaptation.

R46 grow up. Most adaptations change A LOT. They’re ADAPTATIONS

[quote] I'd love an aesthetically beautiful adaptation of Sleeping Beauty Quartet with the sex scenes in tact.

Never got around to reading this, but always wanted to. Is it actually hot and interesting? Somnophilia is a fantasy kink of mine, so if it’s done well in fiction I’m definitely curious to check it out.

R48 You can find the books online. They are very erotic and have every virtual kink imaginable in a fairy tale setting. The story is so outlandish, Beauty is taken as a sex slave for depraved royals. Kingdoms keep getting conquered and pillaged and she and other royalty and nobility that were captured are transfered from master to master. There's a lot of S&M and a lot of male-on-male and female-on-female sex too. Some romance thrown in to.

I’m interested to see what they do with Armand in future seasons. Will he be played by a beautiful young actor or aged up again? Will they do a flashback of Marius sucking him off in Venice before while he’s still human? Will he be in a relationship with their new, elderly Daniel?

The production looks a little cheap.

r46- I believe there is a young version of Daniel in the series.

Any chance of nudity in it? That's the only reason to tune in. I assume not, since it's AMC. Chris Stack, from One Life To Live, is in it. Nice ass.

[quote]Most adaptations change A LOT. They’re ADAPTATIONS

NO SHIT, SHERLOCK.

Is your reading comprehension, like many on DL these days, impaired? Adaptation from books, in and of itself, is not the criticism. There have been plenty of adaptations that have worked: The Lord Of The Rings films, The Harry Potter films, The Color Purple, The Godfather, The Silence Of The Lambs, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Shawshank Redemption, No Country For Old Men, Fight Club, The Exorcist, American Psycho, The Bridge Over The River Kwai, The Wizard Of Oz, etc. Some adaptations made noticeable changes, but the ones mentioned here captured the spirit and tone of their source material. And they were made before our current political climate, which requires that things from the past be banned or rewritten because they're [italic]so[/italic]upsetting.

The criticism with IWTV pertains to sanitizing the story for fear of upsetting anyone. The hacks involved with this are pandering to the hypersensitive members of the social justice crowd by removing disturbing elements and ignoring the original historical setting. It's a horror story about vampires, FFS. Watch Twilight if you want an inoffensive vampire tale.

R47 is clearly the gushing fanboy on this thread. RME.

^ [italic]so[/italic] upsetting

[quote]The criticism with IWTV pertains to sanitizing the story for fear of upsetting anyone. The hacks involved with this are pandering to the hypersensitive members of the social justice crowd by removing disturbing elements and ignoring the original historical setting. It's a horror story about vampires, FFS. Watch Twilight if you want an inoffensive vampire tale.

Absolutely! Much of Interview With the Vampire takes place in the 18th and 19th Centuries and includes some very ugly realities of American history, which are essential to the story. Louis and Lestat are deeply flawed and contradictory characters, they're not heartthrobs or superheroes FFS. There are elements of both their personalities that are horrific. The original novel by Anne Rice is fantastic, great storytelling. There's no need to alter it so snowflakes don't get upset.

Thank you, R56, for getting my point. And you hit the nail on the head about Lestat and Louis. They are antiheroes. How could they not be, since they're predators that need to kill humans to live?

On a superficial note: couldn't they have cast a beautiful black man to play Louis? Louis' beauty is mentioned several times in the novels. Sorry, but Jacob Anderson is barely above average.

Yeah people seem dense. Not every protagonist is a role model and not supposed to be emulated. Perfect characters are extremely boring and unrelatable. Anne Rice wrote characters who despite being blessed with beauty, wealth and immortality but extremely flawed, selfish, violent, mentally ill and other things. It was meant to be subversive.

Looks pretty, but while I'm fine with diverse casts, I've found egregious race-bending tends to be a red flag. I give them credit for changing the time and occupation to make a POC Louis vaguely plausible, but throw in the changes of the Claudia character so that she's no longer an angry vampire trapped in the body of an angelic looking five-year-old child and you've gutted the story.

The problem with current adaptations is that there's this notion that the source material needs to be fixed and "updated" and while it should be possible to do that while conveying what's good and powerful about the original work, the showrunners and film makers seem to fail over and over. They get away from telling the story. You basically end up with fan fiction.

That said, there's an okay film version of IWTV--Tom Cruise was always a miscast Lestat, but it's the story and Kirsten Dunst was an effective Claudia (a bit old, but not teen-age old). The adaptation that bugs me the most is The Wheel of Time--it's terrible and there is no other adaptation. The books could have been the basis for something terrific--great world-building, lots of characters and plot and mediocre prose. One of those things where a good adaptation could have been better than the books, but it's a disaster.

[quote] I’m interested to see what they do with Armand in future seasons. Will he be played by a beautiful young actor or aged up again?

So many fans of the books raged about Armand’s age and image in the 90s movie, but I for one loved the Antonio Banderas take and stand by the casting choice. True that Banderas looked and sounded nothing like Armand on paper is meant to, and that the Armand he played seemed to be a composite of some small pieces of Armand’s character blended together with a few other minor characters from the books.

However, in the end, the presence and gravitas and sheer sexual energy Banderas brought to the movie role he was given absolutely sold the story for me, and in the final cut I can’t imagine anyone else replacing him or doing a better job for that particular movie. Antonio made Armand fascinating, somehow deeper, more alluring and mysterious than the angry spiteful young vamp in the books. He was a perfect fit, arguably the show-stealer. No offense meant to Brad Pitt, but I always finish the IWTV movie wanting less Louis content and more Armand (and more Claudia).

In fact, though I’m a fan of the books too, and would prefer that adaptations of books in general try somewhat to adhere to the original source material, I actually prefer the Armand created in the film, all thanks to Banderas’ portrayal. For me, the lynchpin line of dialogue in the film, and the standout line delivery, is Armand’s:

[quote] ARMAND: I know nothing of God!...or the Devil. I have never seen a vision, nor learned a secret, that would damn *or* save my soul.

R60 What I love about the first Rice Vampire book is that nihilism you see in that scene. Banderas is terrific. Rice backed away from that bleakness in her follow-ups and they become cheesier and cheesier as a result, but the first one has this deep-felt existential angst that works brilliantly.

I'd be really surprised if the series had anything in it with the power of that scene--the film is funny, while I find Tom Cruise as Lestat the most serious miscasting, I don't really love Pitt as Louis either--young Pitt always looks so damn dumb.

[quote]What I love about the first Rice Vampire book is that nihilism you see in that scene. Banderas is terrific. Rice backed away from that bleakness in her follow-ups and they become cheesier and cheesier as a result, but the first one has this deep-felt existential angst that works brilliantly.

When Anne Rice wrote Interview With the Vampire, she was still in deep mourning over her daughter (whose death was semi-recent) and was drinking nonstop. When she wrote the follow-up Vampire novels, she had some distance from her grief because some years had passed and she was totally sober.

Interview With the Vampire is her best book because she was a depressed, inconsolable alcoholic mess when she wrote it.

R61 Memnoch the Devil is very deep. Jesus, it destroys Christ very simply, and effectively.

R62, Yep, her grief was too deep for her to be anything, but authentic. The muse can be a real bitch sometimes.

I totally agree, R62. Anne Rice's best writing happened when she was unhappy. Her dark periods fueled her art and gave her stories and characters a strong feeling of authenticity. Her later novels, written when she was successful and more emotionally stable, have unconvincing characters and feel shallow overall. It didn't help that, later on, she told her publishers that editors could only correct her grammar and spelling mistakes. They were not allowed to edit or even make suggestions about the content. Editors are underrated and not credited enough. I'm sure that Anne's editors early in her career helped improve her storytelling.

Anne was very confused. Like many Catholics who are indoctrinated from birth, she had difficulty with her faith and rationalizing it. She was an atheist like her husband for decades but the influence of Catholicism kept creeping into her life and the trauma of losing her child which no parent will ever recover from. Made her gain an intense faith in God especially after getting sober. Many addicts replace drugs with religion. But I think her son being gay and coming out made her wake up and finally break free especially since it was clear the Church was still not going to accept gays as equals and the downplaying of sex abuse.

She went back and forth between being a Catholic and apologetic to being critical of organized religion and even the Christian theology. It's contradictory but very human. Religions simply don't make sense and she was very well read and did research historically. Servant of the Bones basically also reinforced the theory of Abrahamic religions being a plagiarism of Middle Eastern polytheism. She was a waking contradiction but she never strayed from her gut. Always supported gay rights.

I must admit those sunglasses make that black guy at OP look really cool.

I had depression when I was a child, and the description of Louis' suffering resonated deeply with me back then when I first read it. I still think that these few pages are Rice's finest writing. She understood human emotions and the existential horror of the soul. For all its flaws, the Cruise / Pitt movie got many things right about the dynamics between the two main characters. I don't think I need a cleaned-up version where all the characters are likeable and politically correct (Louis goes from slave owner to a black person and the outrageousness of turning a child into a vampire - which Louis has a huge problem with in the book - is changed for the viewers' comfort. I'm a big girl; I can endure characters who are not perfect and uncomfortable plot twists. To chop away at Rice's material in this way does her a disservice.

I never read Rice's Atlantis novels, are they good or terrible?

R69: I think they are crap. But then, I prefer the first 3 books in The Vampire Chronicles and ignore the rest. The Atlantis sequels are good examples of what I wrote at R65: full of unconvincing characters, lack of authenticity, apparent absence of an editor to clean up the story. She also had a habit of contradicting elements she had established in the earlier books.

Didn't her son help her write that book?

R70 Those Atlantis thing is an abomination. But disagree on Tale of the Body Thief and Memnoch. They are cool. Lestat entering The Mayfair Witches world was also, utter shit.

I understand your point, R72. However, I was tired of Lestat's stupidity in Body Thief and Memnoch. His shtick of behaving like a brat—getting into scrape after scrape because of his arrested development (a vampire with arrested development is a scary concept), and having wiser vampires save his ass—quickly lost its charm. Rice could have focused her attention on more interesting characters, especially the ancient vampires, as she did in Blood And Gold and Pandora. Lestat (presumably her alter ego ) was wearing thin.

I remember reading Prince Lestat in 2014. It was Christmas and I had a threesome in a London hotel. I was surprised I couldn’t get it in a paperback because I’d never bought a book close to release before lol. Good, simpler times.

Pandora was very good. It should be made into a limited series.

Of course they would probably fuck it all up and cast Laverne Cox.

R74 had a festive threesome and then went bookshopping in Cecil Court. She's an icon.

I think Anne and Christopher served as executive producers, but they might have had limited creative control. The casting to me is all wrong, regardless if this is an *adaptation* 🙄. Louis was supposed to have a preternatural type of beauty. Daniel is supposed to be young when he’s interviewing Louis because he later draws Lestat’s attention. As mentioned, Claudia is supposed to be a young girl who dies, and I’m guessing this Claudia will be around til the end of the series. It’s the wrong time period. I’ll give it a go, but I hope it’s not as dreadful as AMC made NOS4A2. I’m getting those kind of production vibes though.

In my dream casting for the first movie, I wanted Daniel Day-Lewis as Louis and Julian Sands as Lestat.

R73 Wasn't there a Nun he fell in love with around that time? I remember rolling my eyes many times.

The Mayfair Witches TV show is going to be fascinating. So much of the story is flashbacks, to the slave Caribbean stuff, to young Julian. I really have no idea how they will write it.

I'll be watching. Loved the books up to the Vampire Armand (yes, even the Body Thief). I like the movie but for Tom Cruise's brilliant performance - rewatched it recently and Brad Pitt irritated the hell out of me, hopefully Anderson can thread that needle a little better. They changed the era and time but I find turn of the century NOLA to be fascinating so I am intrigued by the change. And not wanting to deal with child labor laws is an unfortunate practicality adaptations of fiction have to deal with some way - it honestly makes more sense to age her up rather than have a child performance that probably would not live up to Dunst's. I just wonder why they made Daniel so much older in this one...

R81, the Claudia character is a 100-year-old woman trapped eternally in a child's body, unable to grow up or live independently. The situation fuels her rage and drives a large chunk of the narrative. Being an eternal teenager isn't the same kind of mismatched hell and eviscerates the essence of the book. Lestat creating a teen vampire is a so-what? His creating a child vampire is transgressive.

Well, I really like Sam Reid, so maybe.

But I deplore the lack of creative imagination in the entertainment industry.

Everything is dark, ominous, dystopian.

So you want a sunny, optimistic vampire series?

R84 hey, Mona!

Nope. Hate vampire shit almost as much as I hate zombie shit.

R83 eventually the tide will turn, and a cartoonish and funny and campy take on the supernatural and superheroic will be en vogue again, like it was in the Tim Burton & Jim Steinman era.

Duh, r84. I don't want a vampire show at all. Nor zombies, cannibals, werewolves, Lucifer, the Dark Knight, the Walking Dead, etc.

Feh.

When does it start?

WOKE WOKE WOKE

Louis just needs to be pretty and a self-hating whiner.

I really enjoyed the first episode. The preview of the rest of the season at the end looks good. I don’t mind the shift forward to 1910 or thereabouts at all.

It premieres tonight

Any booty in episode 2? Because we know there won't be any cock.

Cast is too fug.

[quote]WOKE WOKE WOKE

"Hollywood" only trends towards things if there is profit in it.

Colorblind casting has been in for years now and it's not going away. It has increased.

You could reason that there's money in it.

Either way, I have no problem with it most of the time. You either need to learn to accept it or you're going to be very pissed in about a decade.

As long as cock is shown I'm okay with woke. As soon as the trend dissipates, by the way, wokeness will go out the window.

The third episode was really good. Finally some hot gay sex. I'm glad they changed it from the books so that vampires can actually have sex. So much hotter that way!

R97 They needed some wokeness to carry the story along. I do agree that it was a bit heavy this episode, but the gay sex more than made up for it. I doubt the next episode will be as heavy. They introduce Claudia, so that's what the story will be about.

[quote]On a superficial note: couldn't they have cast a beautiful black man to play Louis? Louis' beauty is mentioned several times in the novels. Sorry, but Jacob Anderson is barely above average.[/quote]

Herchel Walker was busy, so they cast Jacob Anderson.

But I think Rome Flynn or Rege-Jean Page would have been better choices than Anderson.

R100 Not everyone wants to play an openly gay role. Sad but true. I doubt those two you mentioned would have. Jacob accepted and did the most out of the role. Honestly, is Jacob Anderson the hottest man in the world? No. But I think he is pretty. Besides, I don't really care. He is beautiful to Lestat, that's all that matters.

I don't think that Rege-Jean could do justice to the confessional scene though. He's trying to break into films anyway.

I've heard that the actress playing Claudia is abysmal-hopefully they can edit her well.

R102 I can't stand when they bring a third into a gay relationship, whether it's a woman or a child. Another guy is ok. I just don't like seeing them getting cockblocked. You know damn well these next few episodes will be low on the gay sex stuff. Can't exactly fuck in front of their "adopted daughter". And yes, I have only seen short clips of Claudia, of course, but her acting was abysmal from what I could see. Also, she seemed annoying af. I'm willing to give her a shot, I might change my mind, but right now I'm skeptical.

[quote] WOKE WOKE WOKE

It is 2022...

The writer who pitched a straight remake of the novel where two white male vampires spend decades feeding on African slaves -- on their plantation -- is now working on a pitch for "The Front Runner" between shifts at ShakeShack.

Are any of the guys in the main cast sexier than the 2 leads?

Finally watched the first episode - enjoyed it very much. Very well-written and very well acted.

Tim Reid is beautiful.

Sam Reid?

Sam Reid, sorry!

The other Louis was better... Leweee-h

R109 Sam Reid is a better Lestat though.

Am I the only one who can’t make out what Lestat is saying half the time? Everyone else is clear, but it’s like he’s swallowing his words or talking under his breath. I had 5 yrs of French & understand French accents just fine (normally). I’m going to have to put the CC on.

R111, I also have taken 5 years of French, and I can understand him.