Interview With The Vampire recap: “Those Frenchies love being vampires”

Any reservations I may have had following Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire’s second-season premiere have dissipated with what is arguably the way you kick off a change of time and scenery following a season-break time jump. Long gone are those dreary, muddied moments in the woods facing a creepy vampire creature who was terrorizing World War II refugees. We are now in gay Paris, in any and all senses of the term.

Claudia (Delainey Hayles) and Louis (Jacob Anderson) have arrived at the French capital, which is trying to rebuild itself following the war. There’s poverty there, of course, but also a sense of possibility, a way of living life that makes room for artists eager to make a name for themselves—not all of them professionally. As it happens, Louis has decided to take up photography in order, perhaps, to connect more viscerally with those humans he remains so enthralled with. Claudia does little to hide her impatience around such a hobby. She’s clearly struggling to fit into this new city, which just makes her feel all the more isolated, especially as beholden as she remains to Louis.

There’s friction here, which seems obvious to Daniel (Eric Bogosian), in the present, who truly wants nothing else but to keep digging into Claudia’s writings and yet keeps being interrupted by the dual lovebirds routine Louis and Armand (Assad Zaman) are putting on for him. They keep finishing each other’s sentences, cooing at each other as they reminisce about the moments when they first met in Paris, and all around turning this interview into a kind of dinner-party gathering where their shared memories have the feel of a well-worn anecdote (“Keep selling it,” Daniel grumbles), polished and perfected over time.

Indeed the pair have clearly chosen a united front to further break Daniel, and our cantankerous journalist proves to be a fitting foe—even when both vampires begin using their powers to plumb the depths of some of his most painful memories (mostly to do with his wife). This tête-à-tête(-à-tête) may prove to be quite tiresome in the long run but for this episode, it’s good to see all three so alert, so attentive to the ways their dynamic will shape Daniel’s writing and his own understanding of what took place all those years ago in Paris.

Which was, as this episode shows, a time of awakening for the city and for Louis alike. Such an awakening began, of course, with the meeting between that “reticent vampire” from New Orleans and Armand…at a cruising spot, no less. As the two reminisce about this most fateful meeting (“He looked like a boy masquerading like a gentleman”; “He was awkward”) they arrive at the first Armand said to Louis: “I will not harm you.” Fitting words considering Armand’s vampiric coven of Paris didn’t look kindly on rogue vampires entering their city without first making themselves known. There’s instant chemistry here but the Parisian vampires leaves the American with only a card, an invitation of sorts to the Theatre des Vampires, the theater troupe he’s been overseeing for centuries.

What follows is arguably one of the most exhilarating set pieces Interview with the Vampire has staged—literally. As Claudia and Louis go visit this theater and seat themselves for what promises to be a shabby show for a scant audience mostly made up of occupying British soldiers, we’re treated to the reason why Armand’s troupe so relishes doing what they do: As its emcee Santiago (Ben Daniels) informs all in attendance, everything they’re about to see, is real! It feels like a feeble promise given that he’s done up in a most curious version of vampire drag (pale makeup, fake fangs, big cape, lush British accent). Yet what follows, which uses cinema projections to create curious playlets that seem to always end in violence, feels cheesy—even when Santiago hoists himself with help (it seems) from a rope that allows him to “fly” over the audience, a canny bit of misdirection since, as Claudia surmises, he’s actually flying and thus fooling the humans in their seats.

It’s all rather kitschy and fun…until a young woman storms the stage. She warns those gathered that the vampires are trying to kill her. “They’re true vampires!” she yells as the audience fidgets and wonders how much of this is part of the act. As Santiago toys with this screaming victim, who’s very much aware her real fear is being played for fun, you can see the audience turning, finding this violent, seductive encounter quite discomforting—especially once Santiago feasts on her with abandon and then has the rest of the troupe follow suit. It’s a murder that hides nothing about itself. And yet it’s all theater.

Claudia and Louis are enthralled. These are not like the kind of vampires they’ve met before. And so when they go to meet them all, they struggle with how much of themselves to divulge—especially once they see a portrait of Lestat (a former player in the troupe!) staring at them backstage.

“Are you kidding me?” is all Daniel can muster. This might as well be a telenovela, he bemoans, chiding his narrators for so skillfully blindsiding him. How preposterous. Also, that means Armand knew Lestat before he met Louis. They’d even fucked! Turns out this loving pair in front of him had shared a boyfriend; how ludicrous.

All that teasing only gets the vampires riled up and all too eager to cruelly torment Daniel with more painful memories he tries to weather, especially when he’s just as cruel when Louis shares how racked with guilt he was about reading a letter from Lestat that had anticipated his own demise and that now serves as a taunting reminder of how Louis had betrayed his love. In that scene, at the office of the man who handles Lestat’s estate (who hasn’t heard from him since, well, you know when), we see yet again that golden curled vampire but only in fantasy form. I’m eager to get to the point where he returns.

And he will return, especially since it’s clear to the troupe (to Armand and Santiago, at least) that Claudia and Louis are hiding something. They’re not honest when asked point blank who turned them and it’s only a matter of time until their shared history with a former player of the Theatre des Vampires unearths tensions between the Parisian coven and its two new American members.

For that sense of community is clearly what Claudia had been missing. She loves driving down the streets of Paris with a vampiric pack and later terrorizing a party on the outskirts of the city, hunting and feeding with abandon: “Those Frenchies love being vampires!” she beams.

Louis is much more wary, even if his attraction to Armand is clear. Armand is warned that he needs to improve his telepathy, if only to see further into Claudia’s thoughts. She’s so canny at shrouding them from others, but he senses how the two Americans bristled at the sight and mention of Lestat. There was trepidation there, and it’s only a matter of time until that all blows up for everyone involved.

And yet it’s also the start of this now seven decade romance—even if it nauseates Daniel, who is slowly losing patience with those two in Dubai. And still they all forge ahead.

Stray observations

• “Reticent vampire” (which is how Louis describes himself) is such an evocative expression, no? As is Santiago’s line about vampires being “conscious death.”
• How fascinating that there’s such a thing as a star chart for vampire births.
• I wish we’d gotten a better look at Claudia’s tailor-made dress, especially since I’m guessing that dressmaker may make another appearance.
• How do we feel about the show needing to tie up logistical loose ends with flippant lines of dialogue—be it about Louis’s experience of racism in mid-century Paris or about the Theatre des Vampires’ decision to produce English language shows in a French speaking city? At times they feel like winking acknowledgements of how they need the show to move forward. (We can’t get bogged down in the kind of racism someone like Louis may have experienced in Paris nor does the show seem interested in needing subtitles throughout, only sparingly.) But sometimes they’re a bit too on-the-nose.
• I really hope we stay with this theater troupe longer. Mostly because I’m eager to see more of their productions, which feel so of their time—mixing cinematic tropes and technologies with good old fashioned expressionist theater. More please!