[HEAR ME OUT] Season 2 of Interview With The Vampire Gets Everything Perfectly Wrong

Sometime in 2022, I told you all about how much I liked the first three episodes of the series reboot of the Anne Rice classic Interview With The Vampire. I told you how good the acting, the writing, and the thematic choices in the new show seemed to be, fangirled a bit over lead actors Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson, but reserved my final judgment for after I saw what the series did with child vampire Claudia, now envisioned as a middle-teens Black girl from a poor parish of New Orleans. Claudia was introduced properly in episode 4 of the show’s first season, which I dutifully watched and then…said nothing about. I told y’all to watch the show, enthused about it, mentioned that I might have a quibble here and there, and then never shared my thoughts on it again.

That is because I was busy watching the show. Not just once, mind you. I’ve watched the entire first season of Interview With The Vampire at least three times in all of its meticulous, enraptured entirety.

From what you may have gathered from my intermittent postings on this blog, I am a professional Busy Person. I have a regular day job, lots of freelance work, a fledgling writing career, this blog, and a remarkably neglected social life. I generally don’t have the time or the inclination to watch anything more than once, not even a TikTok.

But I sat and watched each episode of this show many times, without multitasking, riveted to the screen, turning over the dialogue and stylistic choices in my mind, entirely absorbed and mesmerized. The first season of Interview With the Vampire was good, y’all. And while I went into season 2 with a lot of trepidation about how Claudia’s inevitable storyline would play out on screen now that she’s a (literally)adultified Black girl, I finally finished it last week and y’all…

…it’s better.

I’ve only had time to watch it all the way through twice but trust me, more viewings are coming. This is one of the best shows streaming right now. The story, performances, and production are incredible. I haven’t been excited to sit and watch each new episode of a weekly show for a very long time.

The thing that intrigues me most isn’t what the show does right, although there’s plenty of brilliance on display here. It’s how it takes the negative aspects of the story, its history, and its universe and makes them work. There are so many things perfectly wrong with this reimagining of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and I’m going to jump right in, assuming you, too, are a fan and have some familiarity with the material. Beware of spoilers as we dive straight in…

Anne Rice’s Books Weren’t All That Good

Let’s get this one out of the way first. I tried my best to work through Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in high school. I read them back then because I read everything I could get my hands on, but I didn’t really get the hype. Even at 16, there was nothing cute to me about a whiny plantation vampire letting his narcissistic boyfriend move in and gleefully eat up the enslaved. I understand now that the book was a wonder of emotional exploration, homoeroticism, and Southern gothic horror fiction. I get that it said things about grief and masculinity and relationships that many people found enormously resonant. Anecdotally, every artsy bisexual man I’ve ever met seems to have a very special relationship with these books and I respect the vibe.

But I read them while being Black and female in 1997. L.A. Banks’ Vampire Huntress series was still a few years away, but I already knew there had to be something a little more authentic to my developing worldview than the eternally toxic mess that was Louis and Lestat. All Interview With the Vampire did was make me write terrible anti-fanfiction about Marie Laveau sealing Louis’ sniveling ass up in the Tomb of the Unknown Slave forever and ever, amen.

It didn’t help that when I finally got to The Vampire Lestat, it turned out to be essentially the same story retold from a point of view that I found very off-putting. While subsequent books do have different plots and characters, the themes seemed to be the same. By the time I got to Queen of the Damned, I’d also discovered the soap opera novels of gay Black writer E. Lynn Harris, which meant that a bunch of idealized gay white European vampires sitting around proclaiming how pale and erotically sexless they all were then throwing massive temper tantrums really weren’t that interesting anymore.

I realized and respected the cultural impact of the books, though. Just because I don’t love something doesn’t make it unimportant(take note, some of you), so I would still check in and read a few pages every time a new entry in the series was released, out of sheer zeitgeist curiosity. While it seemed to be going in a direction too campy to take seriously (Vampires fighting aliens in Atlantis? Girl, I guess so…), I definitely understood that Anne Rice scribbled so that monster romance could laser print. Years later, when I was eight books deep into Kelly Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, I remember thinking that the chick-lit supernatural romantic megaverses of the 90s and early 2000s owed a debt to Rice. The monster romance boom right now does, too. Quiet as it’s kept, so does the rash of gay male romances written by women and AFAB authors. She started a movement, and my stubborn dislike of the books makes no difference.

But then the show came along and made me genuinely wonder if I might have been wrong all along–not about the impact of the books, but my own good taste. Before watching 2022’s Louis swagger through a NOLA brothel with a sword cane, nothing could have convinced me to revisit Anne Rice’s books. While watching the show, I recognized a lot of material from the book that I had dismissed out of hand because the way it was presented in print annoyed me so much. But I found myself enjoying those things so much in the show that I’ve now picked up copies of Interview With The Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned. Heaven only knows when I’ll have time to read them, but I want to. Not because I think I’ll like them any better, but because I love the show and want to love it more. Despite all of the changes made for the sake of the series, there’s still a clear reverence for the source material that I don’t have but now want to understand.

If that’s not the definition of a show being better than the book I don’t know what is. But that said…

Everybody’s Supposed To Be White, Right?

Someday soon, I’m going to sit and write about the differences between colorblind casting and culturally corrective casting, and what that means when adapting stories with fraught racial and social histories. Until then, here’s the Cliffs Notes: colorblind casting is a nice idea, but it only works in certain stories and even then, you have to carefully consider optics, power dynamics within the story, and the fact that no matter how hard certain people want to pretend, there is no such thing as a culturally neutral property. Whether or not you like it, race is often linked with culture, even if it isn’t in stereotypical or even expected ways. (For an example of colorblind casting gone recently, horribly wrong, look no further than the new Alien: Romulus film.)

Culturally corrective casting, on the other hand, accepts that culture exists, that race connects to it, and that changing the race of a person in an established story often changes the way that they are expressed within the created world. It may not change what characters do, but it will add more shades of meaning to their interactions, their power dynamics, or their conversations. It may not change the motivations of the characters but it will impact how they move through the world of the story, and give the actors different freedoms in how they choose to portray them. Sometimes, culturally corrective casting doesn’t necessarily change the race or culture of characters–it simply gives characters who were marginalized in the first telling of the story more agency and cultural prominence in the retelling. (I first thought of this while watching Wes Anderson’s adaptation of the Roald Dahl short Poison, which is a great example of how shifting the lens of an old story can explain its former relevance to a world that has progressed past it.)

Anne Rice’s work, and frankly that of a lot of White American women, has an uncomfortable fascination with Confederate, slave-owning, and colonial vampires. This makes parts of modern vampire novels bizarre at best and unpalatable at worst. In the original Vampire Chronicles, nearly everybody is a European nobleman, a privileged prodigy, or in the case of Louis, a literal colonizer (born in France, raised on a wealthy Louisiana plantation). While there’s nothing really wrong with that–people like that existed–the audience willing to engage fully with that story is rightfully limited because of how flattened the context is. At best, vampire myths allow their creators to explore monstrosity, both perceived and innate. They help us explore the social tension between refinement and crudity. They help us navigate the spaces between what our desires demand we take and what our social obligations demand we give.

But the OG Vampire Chronicles do none of that, really, at least not in any substantive way that looks beyond narrow conceptions of the self. Nearly every vampire character in the Vampire Chronicle novels is a monster to someone else, and every one of them is tortured by an external social monster, if you look at them all in the context of the larger historical and cultural worlds they inhabit. However, Rice keeps all of her characters so small and self-absorbed that they never really seem to understand that the world outside of themselves exists for any reason outside of their own emotion. While this self-centeredness is arguably a part of vampire lore, it doesn’t make for particularly expansive stories in the long run.

Identity, for many of us, is not entirely an internal matter. It’s also a matter of external perception, legal rights and recognition, and social hierarchy. What’s missing from the written Vampire Chronicles is a real understanding of what it’s like to be other, despite how you may feel about yourself. Materially, Rice’s vampires stay or become unchallenged first-class citizens of their world. Their otherness is just lip service. Maybe this is why young me, and probably many others, could never really get into them.

The TV show faces this head-on by making Louis, who is not only our main character but the mouthpiece of the story and the audience’s viewpoint in the past, Black. It changes the story’s starting point from 1791 to 1910, giving the worldbuilding a 119-year facelift and shedding light on an underwritten bit of Black American NOLA history. (Everybody knows what Black folks were doing in 1865,1945, 1964, and 1993. But ask someone who isn’t Black what was going on in 1912 or really any other year and prepare to be blinded by the blankness of their face.)

Making Louis a Black Creole man turns the neat trick of making his family, friends, and most of his social circle Black as well. Not only is he Black, but he’s queer in a deeply homophobic period, partnered with men who are not Black in deeply racist contexts. The intersections of Louis’ identity change the power dynamics of his relationships, and make his vampire powers and limitations all the more poignant and terrifying. But they don’t change him. Louis is still moody, gloomy and impulsive, but those traits garner very different reactions in different bodies. A Black vampire’s personal revenge against racism may vindicate him, but destroy his community. A Black man can come to terms with his sexuality more fully when everyone who judges him for it eventually dies, while his partners endure. Becoming a real monster means something very different when you are already perceived as a monstrous human being. The depth of this alone was enough to lock me in to the first season.

Season 2 does us one better by moving our two Black vampires to Europe, where racial dynamics for Black Americans are less hostile, segregation is a distant worry, and any story they tell about their origins is accepted, if not believed. For most of the season, they revel in the relative freedom. (Imagine being an immortal blood-drinking being and still being tickled by the ability to just be.) But there are different nuances within the racial dynamics of postwar Europe, and staying true to the precedent set by season one, season 2 dives a bit deeper, giving us a Southeast Asian Armand played by the incredible Assad Zaman.

I’m not going to pretend I have the expertise or understanding to speak on the way he’s written from a cultural perspective, but I’ll say two things; I really loved his performance, and it’s about damn time somebody acknowledged that logically, in any cadre of immortal beings from ancient, cultured civilizations, some of them are going to be from places other than Western Europe. History did not begin in France, and there’s no reason for every other creature of the night to be from there either. I’m usually not a stickler for historical accuracy in the fantastic, but I always found it irritating when supernatural stories comply with the colonial lie that nobody on Earth was doing anything of artistic or cultural value worth preserving until the Renaissance began. Armand, as well as the mostly unsensational addition of a few Vietnamese vampires in supporting roles, is at least a nod to the fact that history is older than Europe and diversity and migration have always been a fact of human history, not partisan politics.

Speaking of sensationalism, though…

Claudia Doesn’t Work.

But she was never going to, and that’s part of the point.

Claudia, the child vampire turned by Louis and Lestat to try and save their struggling relationship, is portrayed by a Black actress in both seasons of the show. It doesn’t work. Nobody’s saying it, but Claudia’s storyline, while not terrible, is consistently the worst part of the show. This is because there’s no real empathy expressed anywhere for Claudia and before we go any farther here–as a defiantly happy Black lady, it was very hard to watch both Bailey Bass and Delainey Hayles in this role. Their performances are shrill, aggressive, cartoonish takes on the nuanced existence of Black American women, their NOLA accents were not good, and Hayles, in particular, is giving us short angry adult rather than teenaged vampire.

Claudia is the worst part of this show and a terrible portrayal of Black girlhood. Yet somehow, I didn’t slam my laptop shut the first time she yowls for “Unka Les and Dadday Lou”. I kept watching her even though I knew a terribly unfair and traumatic death was coming for her. I stuck with her even though I cringed at all the things the show gets wrong about her.

Here’s why: one of the things the series adaptation of Interview With the Vampire does well is highlight the inner lives, complex relationships, and social presence of queer men, laced around monstrous metaphor. Part of that presence is misogyny. Even more specifically, misogynoir.

Name one reason why Lestat is initially shitty to Claudia that has to do with her, not with his own frustrations elsewhere. Explain why the Theatre des Vampires feel so justified in making her role in their show a constant redux of her pain? Explain why Louis, so valiant in his memories of Claudia, sometimes also seems more than willing to throw her under the bus until he realizes he might go, too? It’s not that the men of the show aren’t nasty to each other, because they are. It’s that they’re toxic to each other for personal reasons. Claudia catches hell largely because nobody bothers getting to know her. She has the misfortune of being more than and different to the perceived roles she was made to fill. She’s not a doll, a toy, or a perfect daughter–she’s a full-fledged vampire with her own desires and goals. She refuses to stay secondary or disappear, and that makes her an inconvenience and a threat. Claudia is treated badly because she’s not living up to anyone’s idealization of her, not because of who she actually is.

The neglect of Claudia as a character is part of the point of her presence. Queer men are just as socialized into misogyny as straight ones, although it manifests in different ways and is often not reckoned with honestly. It’s not lost on me that in a show that explicitly explores the nature of viewpoint and memory, Claudia is retrospectively seen mostly as an emotional wild card. When you think about it, it’s clear that what she wants–a sense of her own history, a life partner, a little respect– isn’t actually unreasonable, but that’s not how she’s portrayed. Claudia’s needs are never met, her emotions are disregarded, and her thoughts aren’t taken seriously until she’s gone–and even then, the most painful truths shared in her diaries are ripped away and sanitized for the sake of Louis’ memories. Claudia, poorly presented as she is, is a textbook case of a woman seen only in terms of how well she stays under the control of men(no matter how well-intentioned). That she starts out as and always looks like a little girl is easily one of the creepiest things in a show full of literal blood and guts.

I’m not saying that Louis and Lestat don’t care for her–they clearly do. Louis’ revenge episode is a thrill, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that she deserves a fair few of the jabs her parents throw back at her when the family relationships start to sour. I’m not saying that I expect Black women to always be portrayed as perfect angels, powerful divas, or cosseted princesses–in fact, I don’t want that. I’m not even saying that Claudia isn’t a complex character. She very clearly is, although in a way that speaks more to the curious outsider observation of Black women than our actual lived experience. I’m just saying that Claudia is a character seen entirely through the lens of imperfect memory and self-serving perception, and the result is a pretty critical commentary on how our main (male) characters view women and girls.

I don’t have enough room here to talk about all of the things I felt while watching Claudia march towards her inevitable doom in season 2 of this show. I will say this, though–sometimes things can be gotten so wrong that they turn out right. I don’t love the choice to portray Claudia as a ball of endless snarling rage and pisstivity, all hair-trigger temper, obscure demands, and poor choices, but there’s something vindicating in seeing Delainey Hayles make that choice, knowing that in reality, this is not something a Black woman in that time could have gotten away with for so long. It’s harrowing to watch her almost get away with having a reasonable emotional response to her circumstances, again and again. It’s devastating to see her exist as fully as she dares, only to be ripped down from a painful, unwanted pedestal without even the luxury of truly being known or understood by those who claimed to love her best.

It doesn’t work. But at the same time, it makes a statement that I found cathartic, if not pleasant.

And to be fair, Claudia, in all her unfairly portrayed unlikability, leads us to our last point…

Who Would Want To Be This Kind of Vampire?

Well, we already are, and ultimately, that’s what makes this show great.

At my big age, I’ve been in relationships, situationships, hateships, and unrequited love. I’ve felt deep, learned a lot, and as a result, I can see myself a little bit in almost all of the major characters except Armand (what is his deal?). I understand being vivacious, intense, misunderstood, and self-centered like Lestat. I understand being alienated, self-loathing, victimized and self-centered like Louis. I understand being neglected, idealized, and discarded like Claudia. I definitely understand being smart, jaded, and regretful like Daniel. I can almost understand being an insanely jealous doormat like Armand(seriously, what is his deal?).

Deep down, this show is about relationships, and all of the things that make them difficult. People remember things differently, make difficult choices, and carry their trauma forward even when they’re trying to make new lives. People love, but imperfectly, and the resulting dissatisfaction can warp even the best of intentions. External factors, like race, class, and gender can also intrude, sometimes overshadowing personality and character. Ultimately, love–whether platonic, romantic, familial, or any of the other types– can sometimes wind up feeling like a tug of war between incredible luck and impossible odds. Sometimes, love just isn’t enough. And sometimes, love isn’t what you thought it was.

But even if the memories of family, friends, and lovers are so painful that you have to lie to yourself to make them bearable, they’re still worth remembering.

Come for the vampires, stay for the philosophy.

There’s much more I could say about this show, but instead of prattling on, I’m going to go re-watch a few bits. You should too, and then you should go and hug someone(preferably without biting their neck or saying something evisceratingly cruel and personal while you do it).

Peace, beautiful people. Go and watch something good.

(Aaaand before I go, I have to quickly tell you that this blog has an affiliate relationship with Bookshop and anything you buy from a link here means we get paid a commission. Thanks for reading!)