‘Interview with the Vampire’ Episode 3 Recap: Growing Pains

Louis du Pointe de Lac has a lot of questions. Questions like “Do you ever think our kind were put on Earth for a larger purpose?”, and “Could you not use the word [vampire] in my place of business?”, and other pressing concerns for the life of any self-respecting member of the undead. By the time we rejoin him and his mentor/lover/maker Lestat de Lioncourt in the third episode of Interview with the Vampire (titled, with customary extravangance, “Is My Very Nature That of a Devil”), he’s several years into his “life” as a bloodsucker, but further than ever from reconciling with that titular nature.

It’s a constant source of low-level stress between him and Lestat. Louis wants to kill only evildoers; Lestat says this goes against the instinctual nature of the hunt. Accepting this, Louis opts to devour animals instead of humans; Lestat compare sthis to “a fish that doesn’t swim, a bird refusing flight.” Louis heads out into the bayou for a late-night assignation with a gay doughboy of his acquaintance before the soldier ships out for the Great War; Lestat spies on the whole affair, even though he himself has been disporting with a glamorous — and female — singer in Louis’s employ. 

If anything, the story of this ep of Interview is one of shrinking horizons for Louis. His family begins to suspect that there’s something wrong with him, beyond the obvious fact that he’s in a same-sex relationship; only coming around at night doesn’t help his reputation with them, nor does the fact that he kicks the front door clean off its hinges when his mother and brother-in-law try to keep him out. 

Meanwhile, his white business partners begin to squeeze him out of his lucrative pandering and gambling businesses, relying on the fact that as both a Black man and a gay man, he has essentially no recourse against them. The fact that he’s an indestructible cannibal doesn’t enter their calculations until it’s far too late, for them anyway.

But Louis’s justified rage gets the best of him, when he butchers the alderman who’s been screwing him over and leaves his mutilated corpse hanging in the square with a “WHITES ONLY” sign dangling amid the entrails. This leads to a “race riot” — the acceptable historical phrase for “a bunch of white people went berserk and started burning a Black neighborhood down while murdering the fleeing survivors” — for which Louis cannot help but feel responsible. While Lestat hangs back, half-praising and half-razzing his protégé for the Hannibal-esque “public art piece” he made of the alderman’s body, Louis enters into the war zone and, in the episode’s closing moments, rescues a girl named Claudia. Fans of the original Interview with the Vampire will recognize that name, alright. 

The Daniel Molloy material in this episode is kept to a minimum. The interviewer first challenges Louis’s contention that, in the midst of an argument with the early jazz maestro Jelly Roll Morton, the Vampire Lestat actually wrote the classic “Wolverine Blues.” Molloy expands his critique to question Louis’s entire characterization of Lestat during their first interview nearly fifty years ago, in which the younger vampire claimed that his mentor was, basically, old and washed. 

Louis counters this by quoting a passage from Molloy’s own memoir, in which several details from a key event in his life are denied by the writer’s own loved ones, calling into question the very notion of memoir itself. Vampires may be immortal, but they’re not immune from the same tricks of memory and attempts at rewriting the past depending on the needs of the moment, Louis appears to argue. (Of course, he does telepathically light Molloy’s old tapes on fire at the same time that Molloy trashes the digital copies, so who knows exactly who or what he’s protecting.)

The best way I can sum up Interview with the Vampire so far is that, like House of the Dragon and Andor, it’s what I once imagined nerd cultural hegemony might be like: smart, sharp, horny, campy, and at least a little bit unpleasant and disgusting — everything you might have wanted before mighty corporate machines figured out how to produce the stuff like they produce breakfast cereal. 

Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid remain absolutely terrific as Louis and Lestat, the former rough around the edges but morally sensitive, the latter aesthetically refined but a brute at heart, using that refinement to justify that brutality. Showrunner/writer Rolin Jones and co-writer Hannah Moscovitch astutely utilize the tumult of the Jim Crow South, particularly its New Orleans variant, and the onslaught of World War I to paint a picture of a world in dangerous flux, where characters like Louis need to kill or be killed to survive. The sardonic commentary provided by Eric Bogosian’s Molloy is a perhaps necessary counterpoint to the modern-day Louis’s flowery monologuing about his life with Lestat; despite their shared intellectual affectations they seem as temperamentally different as two beings could be, even before you factor in their different races, different time periods, and, of course, different species.

Interview is already crackerjack genre television. And with the pending introduction of Claudia, the third point in a Lestat-Louis triangle in the making, my guess is things will only get more engaging, more interesting, more decadent, more violent, more darkly delightful. Bring it on.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.