Why Jacob Anderson found the 1994 Interview With The Vampire movie "disappointing"

Anne Rice's classic horror novel Interview With The Vampire came out in 1976, and it's been delighting and horrifying fans ever since. It's also been making them swoon, because there's an achingly romantic, if very unhealthy, dimension to the story. Lead characters Louis and Lestat are lovers. Jacob Anderson, who plays Louis on AMC's Interview With The Vampire TV show, described them as more or less "married" during a visit to the Stirring it up with Andy and Miquita Oliver podcast.

"By the later novels, they’re fully married," Anderson said. "I think [Rice] reframed it that they kind of weren’t in the first book [Interview with The Vampire]. By the second book [The Vampire Lestat], she wrote as Lestat and she felt like she identified more with him, because Louis was like a stand-in for her grief. She lost a child, so she was writing this book in grief and Louis represented that grief. The second book, [The Vampire Lestat], she kind of rejected him a little bit because she’d come through it.”

"She basically decided that Louis was basically repressed and was in denial about their relationship and the nature of their relationship. So by the second book, they were lovers, and they always had been."

It's good to see that Anderson has done his homework. Anyway, Louis and Lestat reached a new level of popularity with the release of the 1994 movie Interview With The Vampire, where they were played by Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise respectivel. This movie, directed by Neil Jordan, had plenty of romantic coding, but it's never made explicit that Louis and Lestat are a couple like it is in the AMC show, something that Anderson found "really disappointing."

"When you see that film, you’re like, that would’ve been such a massive deal as well in the ‘90s."

The 1994 movie definitely underplayed the homoerotic elements of Rice's book, although I think Anderson's take has a bit of post-hoc bias baked in. There was no way that a studio like Warner Bros. could have released a major motion picture with an openly gay couple at its center in 1994. But a lot has changed in the past 30 years, and the new Interview With The Vampire show can be much more direct while still being moody and intoxicating. The upcoming second season will explore Louis' new relationship with the vampire Armand.

And considering how good the first season was, that second season can't get here soon enough. Expect it on AMC sometime this year.

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