Interview With The Vampire recap: Time to pretend

It is fitting that a show like Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire would thrive once it settled into telling a story about thespian vampires. Performance, after all, seems to be the thematic thread that’s running through the show’s sophomore season, a key way of relating to the world in ways both romantic and vampiric. Vampires, the show keeps insisting, are excellent performers; they learn to hide in the shadows (and in front of stage lights) and so their every interaction (with wary coven members, with handsome American strangers, with keen-eyed interviewers) is tinged with the possibility that it’s all an act. Louis (Jacob Anderson), Armand (Assad Zaman), and Claudia (Delainey Hayles) know this very well—as does Daniel (Eric Bogosian) in the present-day.

If anything, the cynical journalist is intent on cutting through those performances to get at the real truth of what happened in Paris, but also the truth of what vampire life has been like, cutting through the ponderous stories the couple in front of him keep regaling him with.

“I Want You More Than Anything In The World,” the season’s fourth episode, rightly now focuses on Claudia. She’s the one most saddled with the need to play a part: Given that she looks like a teenager, she’s forever confined to pretending to be one when out in the world. And now that she’s become the star of the new hit show at the Theatre des Vampires where she’s called to be a Shirley Temple type who sings about hating closed windows all while wearing a ridiculous doll dress (and eventually falling to her death), she cannot escape the sense that pretending can take a toll on one. And that’s on top of needing to keep her journals (slightly breaking a Great Law) and her Lestat past (quite definitely a faux pas) to herself, constantly requiring her to keep track of a backstory she doles out with aplomb, knowing her life and security depend on it.

But being “Lulu” onstage starts to wear on Claudia. When she imagined herself going onstage and taking a page out of Santiago’s playbook, she never imagined she’d be consigned to playing a dotty of a doll. By the 500th performance, she’s very much fed up with it—even as the theater finds the audience increasingly obsessed. Folks cosplay as Lulu, wait for her autograph outside the theater, and even sing along to her ditty like true groupies. It’s all degrading to Claudia, a reminder of the limitations of her body. And so, while she’d at first been pliable and obedient, her tantrum onstage where she basically sleepwalks through that 500th performance makes Armand irate, and he demands she wear her Lulu dress at all times: “You live with Lulu offstage until she comes back to you onstage,” he tells her.

That’s enough of an opening for Santiago (Ben Daniels) to begin widening the wedges he’s been seeing in the coven. Why should Claudia be so berated when Louis, there sitting in the audience reading a book and flaunting his decision to remain independent from the coven, be allowed to live outside of their shared rules? It’s clear Armand may be slowly losing control of his coven—mostly because of the soft spot he has for Louis, even if the two cannot agree on what to call one another (“companion” felt right for Armand, less so for Louis, who seems unable to make their bond concrete in any one way).

What makes that hard, no doubt, is the constant presence of Lestat. Yes, even while lounging in bed with Armand, Louis cannot seem to push his memory of his former lover away—to the point where, as he confesses to Daniel in the present, there were times when he could almost feel the blond-haired vamp in the room. He was tangible even when he was so clearly immaterial. Three is hard, especially when the one has no idea he’s sharing a bed and a mind and a heart with another.

I mean, Armand knows about Louis’s past with Lestat, but not his present. But that past is enough to slightly keep him in check. He’s keeping his secret, after all, from Santiago and the rest, though who knows for how long.

It’s at this point in their shared story that Daniel throws a wrench into the proceedings. He wants to know if they were the only two vampires to have survived the fire at the theater. It’s an odd question for him to ask given that he’d not been given any information about said fire in his research. That newspaper clip he has on his laptop came from that mysterious man from the restaurant the other day. And while he does his best to avoid any pesky questions, we do see flashes of Armand yet again haunting Daniel’s mind. Are these San Francisco flashbacks, perhaps?

In any case, that’s enough to pivot us back to the past where Santiago lurks in the shadows and finds Claudia journaling. And rather than confront her, he ingratiates himself to her, makes her feel at ease, letting her know he’s been known to bend a Great Law or two.

If you were suspicious of such a gesture, know that it does seem Santiago is putting into motion something larger. Later at dinner at a restaurant with the entire coven, he openly mocks Louis (by impersonating him!) and confronts him about that accent of his which sounds more like a New Orleans drawl than a Chicago one. That’s what drives Louis to attack Santiago, holding his tongue while Armand freezes the restaurant and asks them both to behave. But those wedges between coven and the two budding lovebirds seems to be getting bigger and bigger; no amount of performing and pretending like it’s alright is going to help rectify it.

And, really, this episode sets up a number of rifts that show no sign of budging. As Louis gets ever more frustrated with his photography (it’s hard to control the light when you only shoot at night!), he turns to his vision of Lestat for comfort, which he knows is not great. Similarly, once he confesses to Claudia that Armand knows about Lestat, she wails against this new betrayal, “You picked another over me!” (And now she can’t even make a friend of her own, failing to have her friendship with the seamstress from the other week remain a secret; she’s never to see her again.)

It’s all getting much too messy. And so, when Armand opens up to him and regales the American with his own tragic backstory (which involved being sold as a child and later still being sold in a decidedly different way as an adult)—all through the Vecchio painting, “Adoration Of The Shepherds With A Donor” (said donor being Armand’s master)—we get to see the two truly bonding on a spiritual level.

So it’s not quite a surprise when, instead of Louis opting to end things with Armand once it’s obvious the status quo will not work for anyone involved, he vanishes instead his vision of Louis. And he commits himself to Armand and the coven—he even suggests they let Santiago lead (and crash and burn, more like). It’s fitting given that, as they plan this, that thesp of an actor has begun setting a plan in motion. He rummages in Louis and Claudia’s apartment (taking their written materials) and asks the coven to meet back at the theater.

But there’s tension in the present. A Stein photograph catches Daniel’s eye, and soon Louis is distraught. He’d never pretend to pass someone else’s work as his own. Did Armand do this? Why?

Daniel needs to push their fighting away from him as he peruses the files that now populate his laptop, including photos of him with Louis and an “enhanced” audio version of his 1973 San Francisco recording which…has fighting, features both Armand and Louis and the line “Things got heady with a boy”(!).

Who’s playing who? Who’s running the show? And what the hell happened back in 1973?

Stray observations

• Is it me or is 1973 Daniel a bit of a hottie?
• In case you’re wondering, that was a Gordon Parks photo Louis was schooled on, that of a young boy in D.C. taken in 1942.
• Gotta hand it to co-writers Colin Abert and A. Zell Williams, who have penned some of my favorite lines of dialogue in the show thus far: Santiago cooing “Tender can turn to tinder,” Lestat wallowing with the simple question, “What is vampire life but poor decisions stacked next to better ones?” and Armand growling “Too old to play Hamlet. Too young to play Polonius. Know your role, thesp, or join your maker in oblivion” were true highlights of the episode.
• Who do we think has been messing with the photos in the present, putting Fred Stein originals along with Louis’ own? And is that really what’ll bring the couple into full on bickering mode?