Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 2 October 2022
S1E1 In Throes of Increasing Wonder...
THE MOMENT Louis and Lestat's first meeting in the French Quarter - the chemistry between Anderson and Reid is immediate and the episode's reimagining of their dynamic makes clear this is not the prior adaptation.
Interview with the Vampire's premiere arrives as one of the most confident reimaginings of literary source material in recent television: Anne Rice's novel is restructured as a queer Black love story set in 1910s New Orleans, with Jacob Anderson's Louis de Pointe du Lac as a Creole brothel owner and Sam Reid's Lestat de Lioncourt as his sire and complicated...
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
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The premiere of Interview with the Vampire earns its 98% Rotten Tomatoes score by announcing its reimagining with complete formal confidence. The decision to set Rice's story in 1910s New Orleans Storyville, reframe Louis as a Creole brothel owner, and centre the romance as explicitly queer is not a revision of the novel but a liberation of it: the elements that made the book a landmark (the moral vertigo of vampiric existence, the power imbalance in the Louis-Lestat dynamic) become more rather than less potent in this new frame. Jacob Anderson's performance as Louis is the episode's finest achievement - quiet, specific, and capable of holding grief and desire in the same expression. The premiere establishes a standard the series sustains across both seasons.