Lestat and Louis actors talk bringing a toxic relatinship to life

This past Sunday, AMC debuted its Interview With The Vampire show, based on Anne Rice’s 1976 novel. Game of Thrones star Jacob Anderson plays Louis, a Louisiana native suffering from melancholy. Sam Reid is Lestat, the swaggering vampire who changes both of their lives forever.

“I’m a fan of the books, and when I read the pilot, I thought, ‘This is what I want to see,'” Reid told Entertainment Weekly. “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 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.”

Indeed, Louis and Lestat do have a pretty combustible chemistry. “When murder is your love language in a relationship, it’s quite a challenge, but it’s very deep,” Reid quipped.

Interview With The Vampire is no longer just queer-coded; it’s full-on gay

One of ways the new Interview show differs from the 1994 movie version — where Brad Pitt played Louis and Tom Cruise Lestat — is that the gay subtext is now text. Louis and Lestat don’t just have an intense relationship; they be f**king.

“In terms of the queerness of the relationship, that’s pretty straightforward — it’s definitely not queer-coded,” Reid said. “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.”

"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. Because we’re looking at the context of all of those books, particularly those first three books, there’s no question about it."

The actor who plays Lestat is an Anne Rice superfan

As you can tell, Reid is a big fan of Rice’s book, which could come in handy should AMC achieve their ambition and spin this show into an Anne Rice Cinematic Universe. “We’re looking more at all of these books as opposed to just the first book, which the movie focuses on,” he said. “And since it’s a different time period, we got to explore slightly different relationships to what they look at in the movie.”

"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."

For his part, Anderson appreciated Reid’s encyclopedic knowledge about Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, although there there were times when it became almost unhelpful. The whole show is about Louis telling his story years after the fact to a journalist, and he’s apt to phrase things in a way that make him look good. In short, he’s a bit of an unreliable narrator, but because Reid has read all the books, he knows both sides of the story and wasn’t shy about sharing:

"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."

Anderson described the new Interview show like this: “You’re getting one side of couple’s therapy, currently.” And indeed, the way the show plays with memory is part of its appeal.

“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,” Reid said. “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.”

New episodes of Interview With The Vampire air on AMCs on Sundays.

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