Jacob Anderson is best known for playing the stoic Grey Worm on Game of Thrones, but he’s stepping up to leading man status in Interview With The Vampire, which aired its excellent series premiere on AMC this past weekend.
Watching Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac, it wasn’t hard for me to forget Grey Worm, in part because Louis is such a different character and in part because Anderson now has hair.
But mainly it’s the character. Louis is much more expressive than Grey Worm; he’s a Black gay man living during a time when being open about his identity was dangerous. He’s working with a lot of suppressed rage, which leaves him vulnerable to the machinations of the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid), who wants Louis to become his eternal companion.
Jacob Anderson is currently binging Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books
“I did about eight auditions: a lot of rounds, a screen test, and two chemistry reads with Sam,” Anderson told W Magazine. “When we got the script, I was like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever read.’ I wasn’t as familiar with Anne Rice’s books, so I didn’t really have a reference point at the time. ‘What is this? Where has it been my whole life?'”
"There are things about Louis I feel very connected to. There’s something about endurance and the path to acceptance. This is an amazing way to explore those things, the idea of if you had forever and finding yourself."
Anderson has since caught up on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. “I’m on Merrick at the moment,” he said, the seventh book in Rice’s series. That book, incidentally, crosses over with Rice’s Mayfair Witches series, which AMC is also adapting to TV. The network has plans to turn this into a whole cinematic universe.
But for now, we can just enjoy Interview With The Vampire in all its gothic glory. “It’s really weird, it’s hard to talk about a show that crosses genres,” Anderson said. “It sounds like a cop-out to say, but I feel like the show is just… a vibe. You can’t really say that, but the reason people should watch it is because it feels like a vibe!”
Interview With The Vampire drops new episodes on Sundays on AMC.
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