Fans of queer horny vampire melodrama unite! AMC is moving full speed ahead with their adaptations of the novels of Anne Rice. AMC acquired the rights to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and the Lives of The Mayfair Witches series last spring, and is already moving forward with pilots for both series. This is great news for both Anne Rice fans and for those of us still mourning the end of the HBO’s horned up supernatural soap True Blood in 2014.
Australian actor Sam Reid (Lambs of God) has been cast as Lestat in the Interview with the Vampire series, which has already received an eight-episode order. The series was created by Rolin Jones (Perry Mason), who will also serve as showrunner. Jones will be executive producing the series along with Anne Rice and her son Christopher Rice. Interview with the Vampire is set to be released in 2022 on AMC and AMC Plus. Lestat was previously played by Tom Cruise in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire adaptation, and by Stuart Townsend in 2002’s Queen of the Damned. The Vampire saga is the most prolific of Rice’s series, comprised of 18 novels.
AMC also announced that they have started the writers room for Lives Of The Mayfair Witches, which follows “an intuitive young neurosurgeon who discovers she is the unlikely heir to a family of witches. As she grapples with her newfound powers, she must contend with a sinister presence that has haunted her family for generations.” The Lives of The Mayfair Witches is based on Rice’s trilogy of books The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos. Esta Spaulding will be the showrunner, with Michelle Ashford writing and exec producing. The two previously worked together on Showtime’s Masters of Sex.
Rice’s works fall into a subgenre I like to call “Be gay, be undead, do crimes”, which spans everything from The Hunger to Carmilla to all that Twilight fan fiction you wrote in middle school. Vampires have always been an apt metaphor for queerness (and any sort of “otherness” really), and queer fans have long latched onto the works of Anne Rice.
However, Hollywood shied away from the homoerotic overtones in her work, especially in Neil Jordan’s 1994 cult classic adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, which starred Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt and Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe du Lac. But representation has evolved in the 27 years since the film’s release, especially with regard to LGBTQ+ characters.
Modern discourse is also unpacking the legacy of the “Confederate vampire”, which is examined in Stitch’s excellent Teen Vogue article “On Twilight and Fiction’s History of Confederate Vampires”, where they discuss Rice’s work as “part of a very long line of vampire media that gives us vampires who were some form of historical oppressor and those pasts are rarely something fans or the media we’re consuming deal with well.”
Will these series grapple with with more complex issues of morality regarding vampires, or will they just be sexed-up overwrought dramas starring a series of very pale, very handsome men? I guess we’ll find out in 2022.
What do you think of an Interview with the Vampire and a Lives of the Mayfair Witches series? Will we ever get over our love/lust for tortured emo vamps? Let us know in the comments!
(via Deadline, A.V. Club, image: Warner Bros.)
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