Eric Bogosian breathes a little life into AMC's Interview With The Vampire trailer

Typically, when talking about Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire, we don’t put a lot of focus on the interview (or interviewer) itself. But also typically (and with no disrespect meant to Christian Slater, who played the part in the 1994 film), said interlocutor isn’t being played by Eric Bogosian. Sardonic and impassive, Bogosian has become a major part of the texture of modern TV and film courtesy of turns in Succession, Billions, and Uncut Gems, among other projects. The producers of the new Interview series on AMC clearly know what an impact he’ll have, saving his reveal as the last big turn of the show’s first trailer, released today at SDCC.

Before that, we get an updated look at the life of Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), no longer a sad but wealthy slaveowner (as he was in Rice’s books), but still the target of the affections of the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid). As demonstrated in the new trailer, the show is cutting quite a few years off of Louis’ undead sojourn, starting him, instead of in the 1790s, in the early 1900s, as a man chafing under the limitations imposed on a Black man in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. But don’t worry, Louis fans: He’s still extremely sad to be immortal, a condition that will presumably only get worse once Bailey Bass’ undead kiddo Claudia is brought into the mix.

This new Interview offers up plenty of what fans of the source material are presumably hoping for, which is to say that it’s looking both pretty horny, and pretty bloody—although the inclusion of some racial commentary in the mix is a welcome expansion of the original’s frequently mopey theming. And, again, we’re not going to lie: Having Bogosian ask sarcastic questions about being dead and vampirism and whatnot is going to go a long way toward making the project’s built-in melodrama a bit more palatable.