Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. To read the last entry, check out Firecracker Just Replaced Homelander as The Boys’ Biggest Villain… For Now.
This article contains spoilers for Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire on AMC, and gives a high-level look at spoilers to come in the Vampire Chronicles novels.
I’m usually not one to devote a column to what folks are discussing on Twitter for all of the reasons that one would imagine. However, when the internet learned that Interview with the Vampire had been renewed for a third season and it would feature Lestat de Lioncourt as a rock star, the reactions ranged from hilarious to pure and I simply couldn’t resist.
The television series is almost universally loved by those who watch, so the harshest reactions were akin to calling the idea “hokey” or “too far.” Meanwhile, the cutest were some varying form of incredulity that such a thing could ever happen. Thankfully, the IWTV fandom isn’t too gatekeepy and most of it just culminated in book fans telling series viewers that they couldn’t wait to learn their reaction after reading The Vampire Lestat. It’s a sentiment that I share, because the book rules! But I also just have to flag that becoming a rock star is absolutely the tamest thing that Lestat has ever done, and most certainly the least weird thing in the Vampire Chronicles as a whole.
Anne Rice’s book series features vampires, witches, gods, ghosts, angels, aliens, and probably more species that I am most certainly forgetting. This show is going to get infinitely weirder in a way that feels important to flag before the inevitable “I can’t believe Interview with the Vampire went full Riverdale” posts. (Anne Rice had Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa out-freaked since day one, but how delightfully unhinged would that partnership have been?)
Focusing back in on Lestat, if you think him rocking out in public is odd, you should probably be prepared for the Freaky Friday moment to come should the series go on long enough. Oh, and even though he can't procreate, Lestat — king of defying all convention — eventually has a son. Thought his ability to fly was a lot? Well, it’s known as the “cloud gift” and, after a time, Lestat also develops the fire gift. Which extends beyond a vampire’s ability to control fire in their palms and culminates in the creature’s ability to create fire with their minds to completely engulf others.
This series eventually goes to Atlantis, y’all. The Devil is a key player in one of the books and wants Lestat to join him as his right hand man in a book that argues that God and Memnoch (that’s the Devil) are mostly on the same side and Christians are making up their rivalry..
What is a welcome change is that it seems like Interview with the Vampire on AMC will be keeping Louis in the picture much more than the books did. After acting as the first novel’s unreliable narrator, most of the focus shifts to Lestat in the books. Louis does pop in from time to time, as does Armand, but beyond that it’s all about the future Prince of the Vampires (oh yeah, Lestat also becomes a prince). In the AMC series, though, it feels incredibly unlikely that the show will shift away from including Jacob Anderson’s incredible iteration of Louis de Point du Lac. The first two seasons — which adapted its namesake novel — took plenty of creative liberties from the source material, so including Louis more heavily in Lestat’s story will be easy enough. Hell, the writers might even get weirder with it!
In a previous column entry, I said that it was time for you to start watching Interview with the Vampire. The sentiment remains true! Though, thankfully, many more folks have caught on since the originally underseen first season. Still, for those of you who like your shows weird, wacky and blood-filled, you should know that Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is only going to become more and more your thing. AMC+ still has that free trial going. If you don’t want to deal with the app natively — I hear it’s pretty rough but I don’t have hands-on experience with it — then you can also opt to use the add-on feature on Prime Video. You still qualify for the free trial and have a vaguely more functional user interface to play with.
Either way, whether you’ve been here from the beginning, just started, or have no intention of checking it out at all, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is only going to get weirder from here. See you at the tour.
Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She's also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia
