As a screen presence, Santiago needs that kind of ammo. He has to hold his own with the “big four” members of the show’s emotional quadrangle, Louis, Lestat [Sam Reid], Claudia and Armand [Assad Zaman], even though he’s not romantically or emotionally involved with any of them.

[Smiling] Is he not?

Well, well, well!

This was one of the first jobs I’ve ever done sight unseen, just because it meant working with Rolin. From the outset, Rolin called up and said, “Listen, are you OK if we don’t make Santiago queer?” I was like, “Yeah, I can sort of see it.”

But as the script started to come in, I thought the only way this level of vitriol that he has works is if he’s in love with Armand. There is this extraordinary psychological term called reaction formation, which is what Iago has for Othello. It’s a defense mechanism whereby your impulses are so unacceptable to your ego that they’re replaced by this opposite, exaggerated behavior.

Santiago finds Louis incredibly attractive. Because Armand killed Santiago’s maker — who I think he was in love with too — and also finds Louis attractive, the whole thing must be destroyed. It gave such a drive to his hatred. It was just something ruminating in myself that drove him forward in a very aggressive, mad, extreme way.

Here’s a gift link to my interview with the magnificent Ben Daniels about his delightful work as Santiago on this season of Interview with the Vampire. He was extremely gracious and generous with his time and emotion, as you’ll see. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done.

“We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think,” George R.R. Martin wrote in his short 1996 essay “On Fantasy.” “To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang.” By that standard, this week’s episode of “House of the Dragon,” a series based on Martin’s book “Fire and Blood,” is spicy fantasy indeed.

I don’t just mean the sex and nudity, though what there was of both blew my hair back on my head. For Martin, fantasy is about more than ribaldry. Describing it as a genre of “silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli,” he goes on to write of how its very largeness, the unbounded scope of its imagination, “speaks to something deep within us.” This episode certainly spoke to something deep within this critic.

I reviewed this week’s superb episode of House of the Dragon for the New York Times. Please note that I’m going to be using gift links from now on, which will enable you to read my NYT pieces even without a subscription

“House of the Dragon” is a civil war story, and civil wars are often described as wars of brother against brother. Your characters make that theme literal.

LUKE Our relationship and our death were very much a symbol — not just of what’s to come, but the theme of the whole piece, really, which is family against family.

Does taking on that symbolic weight add pressure?

ELLIOTT No, because that symbol is built within our relationship naturally, being identical twins. That’s a unique relationship — unique only to identical twins, who are split-embryo. Even a twin who’s not split-embryo … not to sound disrespectful, but they’re more like a brother and sister born at the same time. An identical twin is a beautiful phenomenon of nature.

But you’re playing identical twins in the act of killing each other.

LUKE I think it helps. You’re aware of what they’re up against because of all these years of being a twin. If that was a scene between me and Criston Cole, it would probably be a bit harder. Doing it with Elliott made it easier to get there and sit in that head space. It’s naturally grounded, something you can latch onto.

I interviewed twin actors Elliott and Luke Tittensor about playing twin Kingsguard knights Erryk and Arryk Cargyll on House of the Dragon for the New York Times.

This ability to shock — not in the gross-out sense, although this is often the case as well, but rather in the sense of a sudden, severe surprise — is the greatest strength “House of the Dragon” possesses. Civil wars are often said to be battles of brother against brother; fantasy can make the metaphorical literal. What better way to illustrate the senseless brutality of warfare than by having two men who look and sound exactly alike, who love each other, who say they are one soul in two bodies, perish in a brutal murder-suicide that achieves exactly nothing?

I reviewed tonight’s weirdly untitled episode of House of the Dragon for the New York Times.

Like “Game of Thrones” before it, “House of the Dragon” can be challenging to the prestige-TV palate. Its emphasis on criminal-political conspiracies, high-octane performances by a suite of talented character actors, and family drama in all its forms can be traced directly back to “The Sopranos.” But its use of high-fantasy spectacle and Grand-Guignol violence add notes that can ring as discordant in some viewers’ ears.

Listened to the right way, however, the sound is magical. Condal and company have constructed a drama of chamber rooms and bedrooms, roiling with sexual energy and gendered experience, occasionally marked by near-psychedelic explosions of high-fantasy supernatural spectacle. As women pray and sob and make love, dragons soar, blades are drawn, and eyes are taken for eyes. It’s Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” via the sword-and-sorcery artist Frank Frazetta. And if it’s what you’re into, it’s magnificent.

I’m covering House of the Dragon for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.

It has been nearly two years since the shadow of dragons’ wings last darkened our screens. When “House of the Dragon,” HBO’s hit “Game of Thrones” prequel based on the book “Fire and Blood” by George R.R. Martin, returns this weekend, its sprawling cast of characters will be prepping for war, the sides distinguished by the color of the banners they fly.

The Blacks are led by Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy). Named heir by her father, King Viserys, years earlier, she has seen her claim to the Iron Throne of Westeros usurped by her younger half brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney); he and his backers, including his mother, Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), are known as the Greens. Now these two women will determine the fate of what remains very much a patriarchal world.

Whether you want to pick a team or simply brush up ahead of the Season 2 premiere, airing Sunday on HBO, here is a primer on the major players from both sides of the great dragon divide.

Did I write a cheat sheet for this season of House of the Dragon? Does a Dornishman [REDACTED]?? I broke down Team Black and Team Green for the New York Times, where I will be covering the show all season long with both episodic reviews/recaps and interviews, and maybe more.

So in the end, it is the show’s opening credits, with the image of a frightening mask erupting from a mountainside, that have the right of it. “Shogun” is not the story of a hero charging his enemies. It’s the story of a mastermind slowly revealing himself, until a nation cowers before his countenance.

I reviewed the finale of Shōgun for the New York Times.

Finally, the lady gives up. Since she cannot obey her lord’s instructions to return to Edo with his family, she also cannot live with the offense of failing him. She will kill herself at sunset, she announces. Since Mariko is Christian, this is a mortal sin, unless she can find a second willing to deliver the death blow. It’s a grim honor — one that the Christian regent Lord Kiyama (Hiromoto Ida) refuses, despite his own beliefs. The lords are not yet ready to make a public break with Ishida and Ochiba, whose control of the Heir gives her incredible power.

But Mariko’s resolve gives her power of her own — a terrible sort of power. When Kiyama fails to show up at the ceremony to serve as her second, her ultimate reward for all this suffering seems to be the damnation of her immortal soul.

It’s all too much for Blackthorne to take. Grabbing a sword, he takes his place by her side, preparing the fatal stroke that will slice off her head after she thrusts a blade into her belly.

Ironically, this is one of the show’s most intensely romantic moments. Such is Blackthorne’s love for Mariko that he is willing to kill her in order to grant her death the honor she believes it will hold. Mariko believes she is damning herself to hell for eternity. Whether he also believes this is immaterial. He simply cannot allow her to experience that anguish in her last moments. He cannot let her die alone and afraid.

This fleeting but real emotional intimacy, profound beyond words, is conveyed by Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai with minimal speech and movement. It’s all shown with their eyes.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

What attracted Lady Mariko to Catholicism?

That was one thing I was really trying to understand. I didn’t know how you could be Catholic and a samurai, because they feel so opposite. But it’s not because Mariko believes in the power of the religion, or the money, or the politics. She wasn’t interested in any of that. It was more that the Catholic priest reached his hand out when she really needed something to hold onto. It could have been anything, but it happened to be that. She found light where she couldn’t see any.

I interviewed Anna Sawai, star of Shōgun (and Monarch and Pachinko), for the New York Times.

The ritual of seppuku has been described and threatened by multiple characters since episode 1, but it isn’t until this point that “Shogun” finally depicts the act in graphic, agonizing detail. Indeed, Hiromatsu’s death scene functions as a microcosm of the whole series: teasing us with the taboo thrill of violence, then really making it hurt when it sinks the knife in.

The good-hearted Hiromatsu is the canvas on which the sound and effects team paint a grotesque portrait of metal tearing through flesh and muscle and viscera, until the sword of his son Buntaro, who Hiromatsu has asked to “second” the act, severs his head. It rolls directly toward Toranaga, like a grotesque accusation.

Here’s your code of honor, the show seems to say. Choke on it.

I reviewed this week’s Shōgun for the New York Times.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Few cinematic genres have had as fruitful a conversation with one another as the samurai film and the western, so it’s only fitting to use an epigraph from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to sum up the central conflict in this week’s episode.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

But this excellent episode has more going on than crucial back stories and thrilling war councils. It also contains the show’s sexiest, most romantic material to date. The writer Maegan Houang realizes that the concept of the eightfold fence, retaining hidden spaces for your true emotions while erecting barriers to obscure them, as emphasized in feudal Japan, is a gigantic gift for developing romantic tension between two characters.

Blackthorne’s visit to the brothel known as the Willow World, with Mariko acting as his translator, is presaged by an earlier scene. Passing through his house, Blackthorne overhears Mariko praying in Latin. He kneels down on the other side of the thin wall and begins reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Each can hear the other. Each understands that the other is communing with God, an incredibly intimate act. They share intimacy without impropriety.

Things get even more achingly romantic at the brothel. The pair are there on the orders of Lord Toranaga, who wants to reward Blackthorne for saving his life, and to compensate him for having endured the uncivil behavior of Mariko’s husband, Buntaro. Toranaga is also wise to the fact that there’s something going on between the Anjin and the Lady. Commanding her to serve as Blackthorne’s translator in a brothel may simply be a way to give them license to get naked in a private location together — although “private” is a relative term when even the sex workers are spies.

The lucky lady at the Willow World is Kiku. Girlfriend of the ambitious, jealous young Lord Omi, nephew of Yabushige, who is none too thrilled she will ply her trade with a barbarian. Kiku is acclaimed as the best courtesan in the region, and turns out to be a hell of a wing woman, too. Her erotic words about the pleasure and escape she can provide with her body are relayed to Blackthorne in Mariko’s voice, and the desire in that voice, as well as Blackthorne’s desire in hearing it, is unmistakable.

Though Kiku all but invites the two of them to make love, they know their every word and gesture are being scrutinized. Blackthorne follows Kiku to their bedchamber while Mariko insists on staying behind — but not before he brushes her hand with his own. I’m surprised no one’s kimono caught fire from the sparks that flew with that touch.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun, a show I’m looking forward to watching more and more, for the New York Times.

“3 Body Problem” started out as the television equivalent of a Hans Zimmer composition: a steady crescendo, growing ever more menacing and spectacular. By the time of its bloody, brilliant fifth episode, with its repulsive boat massacre and staggering eye in the sky, it felt like a show capable of going anywhere, doing anything.

Then things simmered down. People spent their time reacting to the crisis. They worked or played hooky, they hid or revealed their feelings, they participated or declined to participate in the war to come. Will spent an episode dying, his friends grieving. (Also inserting his brain into a jar to be fired at an alien fleet, but definitely grieving.) Even so, given the relentless ante-raising of the show’s first five hours, the whole thing screamed “the calm before the storm.”

Well, the season finale has come and gone, and there’s no storm in sight. It wasn’t the calm before the storm. It was all just … calm.

I reviewed the season finale of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

The problem is that compared to a Cyclopean eye in the sky or a boat getting sliced to pieces by an invisible web out of Stephen King’s “The Mist,” none of this is all that interesting. From the very first episode, it was apparent that ideas and images, not compelling characters and a novel plot, were the strength of “3 Body Problem.” Leaning into the characters makes the whole thing lopsided.

I reviewed the seventh episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

It had to let up at some point. After five escalating episodes in which each ending was more spectacularly grim than the last, “3 Body Problem” took its foot off the gas for its sixth outing. It’s hard to begrudge an eight-episode literary adaptation a bit of breathing room.

I reviewed episode six of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

To Raj, it looks like the plan has failed. Using the experimental nanofibers developed by Auggie Salazar, finally free of that maddening alien countdown, now that the Shan-Ti have cut off contact with their faithful, they’ve constructed an invisible net that seems ready to catch the ship. Given how the team is talking about casualties, sinking seems the more likely outcome.

But to all appearances, the gigantic repurposed oil tanker is cruising right through the Panama Canal, passing by the support beams across which the nano-net has been stretched. Raj, who inherited his ends-justify-the-means attitude from his war-hero father, has long suspected Auggie’s heart isn’t in the project, since she’s pretty much told him so to his face. He suspects sabotage. He leans in toward her in the command center. “Why isn’t it working?” he asks her accusingly.

The camera shifts focus from his face to hers. “It is,” she says, never taking her eyes off the monitor showing her the ship.

It was at this point that I said, out loud, “Oh, this is going to be gnarly.”

I reviewed the fifth episode of 3 Body Problem, featuring one of the most admirably disgusting things ever aired on television, for the New York Times.

Yet for all their apparent screw-ups, the San-Ti’s servants still appear to be on the winning side of Earth’s future history. Thanks to the script by Madhuri Shekar and the ghoulish confidence projected by Rosalind Chao as Wenjie, the arrival and triumph of the aliens is once again made to feel like a foregone conclusion — about as stoppable as a zombie outbreak in the opening minutes of a movie with the word “Dead” in the title.

If anything, I wonder if that’s the kind of story we find ourselves in. (For the record: I enjoyed “Game of Thrones” having already read George R.R. Martin’s source novels, and I’m enjoying “3 Body Problem” without having done so with Liu Cixin’s.) Unlike earlier apocalyptic series like “The Walking Dead,” which dispensed with the story’s prologue — the “uh-oh, something really bad is about to happen, in fact it’s already started” segment — in the first few minutes, “3 Body Problem” is taking a nice, leisurely approach to watching the blade fall on humanity’s collective neck. The tension is delightfully excruciating.

I reviewed the fourth episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

More important, though, while the coming invasion feels unstoppable and fear-inducing, it is also a lot of fun. Invasion and apocalypse stories are just stories about slashers or vampires writ large, in which the monster is multiplicitous and the victim all of humanity instead of just a bunch of foolish teenagers or wan Englishwomen and their suitors. Much as we dread seeing people get what’s coming, there’s an undeniable allure to watching the worst-case scenario play out — as long as it’s happening safely onscreen.

I reviewed the third episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

Clearly, fans of spooky technology have much to enjoy in this episode. On one side you’ve got the unfathomable sophisticated video game of unknown origin, and on the other a good old-fashioned scary radio transmission. The video game stuff, however, feels airless and stale, despite the gorgeous CGI vistas and bizarre body-horror moments. In a story where so many things are happening in the real world, it’s tough to get that worked up about the goings-on of a virtual one.

The “Do not answer” broadcast, on the other hand, fits into a long lineage of paranormal communications both on and off screen. It’s explicitly linked to the so-called “Wow signal,” the aforementioned anomaly detected by OSU, and it’s reminiscent of eerie phenomena like numbers stations, or staticky calls from disappearing planes above the mythic Bermuda Triangle. In movie terms, I couldn’t shake a flattering comparison to the dream broadcast from “Year One-Nine-Nine-Nine” in John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness.” But the horror trope of the final warning before the plunge is a nearly universal one, embodied by all the old men in slasher franchises who warn groups of oblivious teens not to travel to a masked killer’s stalking grounds. Perhaps a slasher on galactic scale is firing up his chain saw with Earth as his destination even now.

I reviewed the very good second episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

We’re in the early going yet, but it would be a tough sell to say the plot and the characters are strong suits of “3 Body Problem.” The actors are entertaining, but so far they’re playing not much more than broad personality types engaged in a mildly interesting sci-fi mystery. Chao has the more dramatic backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, depicted here as a full-on “1984” meets “The Crucible” dystopian nightmare, to play against — not to mention the more dramatic setting of that satellite installation. But it’s a low bar to clear.

No, it’s the imagery that lingers more than anything else. The colossal transmitter, roosting at the cliff’s edge like an enormous bird of prey. The gradual way the countdown clock emerges into Auggie’s consciousness, from a blur on a karaoke video to a full-on superimposition over the face of anyone she tries to talk to. The uncanny sight of the stars flickering as one. Can the story and the characters rise to that level?

I’m covering 3 Body Problem for the New York Times, starting with my review of the premiere. This is the first time they’ve ever done episodic reviews for an all-at-once season launch.