Yahoo Lifestyle I Can't Watch "Interview With The Vampire" The Same Way After Learning These 21 Behind-The-Scenes Facts
Warning: spoilers ahead!
AMC's Interview with the Vampire is the best new (to me) show I've watched this year. After Season 1 dropped on Netflix, I finished it in like a day then immediately signed up for AMC+ to watch Season 2.
One of the things that makes the show so incredible is how much passion the cast and crew put into making it. So, here are 21 interesting behind-the-scenes facts about the show:
1.Jacob Anderson (who plays Louis de Pointe du Lac) told Vanity Fair that the key thing he and Sam Reid (who plays Lestat de Lioncourt) have as scene partners "is complete and utter trust."
He said, "We know that wherever the scene goes, it's going to be safe. Sam always does things with his chest, and that is also how I like to work. Say it with your chest; mean it."
2.The final scene of Season 2 — where Louis and Lestat reunite in New Orleans during a hurricane — was filmed in Prague during a blizzard. Since they were short on time, Jacob and Sam only had two takes each.
Jacob told Vanity Fair, " There were maybe four leaf blowers going, and there were people pulling ropes to make the shutters slam and we could hear each other, but you have to really tune in to each other. It was like being in a busy kitchen while having one of the most important conversations that you could have."
3.For Season 1, Episode 1, Jacob learned to tap dance. However, he got COVID, so he had to take his lessons remotely while self-isolating.
He told Xfinity Hangouts, "With respect to the doubles — they had two tap dancing doubles that they sent home before we shot the scene. So, all of the tapping you see in the show is me and Steven [G. Norfleet], and we learned most of it over Zoom."
4.To prepare for Season 1, Sam learned French. He also took singing and piano lessons.
He told the Syndey Morning Herald, "It’s the biggest show I’ve definitely ever worked on and I’ve never had the chance to play a role this complicated that has so much information to absorb – my character has an arc written out over thousands of pages to explore. It was daunting, and the level of preparation went down to learning French, learning piano, learning to sing."
For a scene on the train with Claudia in Season 1, Episode 6, he learned dog training too.
He told Vanity Fair, "This is a [showrunner] Rolin Jones special, he would give you this extraordinary monologue, or this extraordinary scene. But he'll also say, 'Here is this whole other bunch of stuff that you have to do in it.'
It did take me quite a long time to get to know that dog and to be able to do that whole speech, and get the dog to do what I needed it to do and get back into the cage without having to cut the scene up or anything like that. There were a lot of little things that we were always having to do to make the scenes flow.
There was a conversation about what kind of a dog it was going to be. Originally it was something much smaller, but the mastiff ended up being the one that everyone went with, and I was really, really, really happy about that. Lestat loves mastiffs. He's had a lot of them in his life. That was his first great loss, his mastiff."
5.Jacob took home the Amex card Louis used in the Season 1, Episode 6 scene where he met Daniel for the first time.
He told ComicBook.com, "I have the American Express card. I have that in my office. It was the only thing that Rolin wanted from the whole thing, and I have it."
6.Sam took home Lestat's blood-soaked shirt from the Season 1 finale.
He told Schön! Magazine, "It’s covered in a lot of mouth blood, and sometimes, if it’s really hot here — because it’s really hot in Sydney. Sometimes, the mouth blood liquefies again. It becomes wet and stuff. It’s a really weird thing to have, I’ve got nowhere to put it. I have to hide it when I’ve got people coming to the house."
7.SFX artist Howard Berger modeled the vampires' eye colors after Anne Rice's descriptions in the books.
He told Below the Line, "Once that was approved by Rolin, I had this idea to show their emotions, be it hunger or passion — or just ravenous killers. Their eyes would change — not the color, but the sizes, so their pupils dilate and their pupils constrict...With the help of Ted Rae, who was our VFX Supervisor, we were able to design everything so we could actually see the eyes dilate or constrict, and that just made it more animalistic, because animals obviously do that."
8.Howard also told Below the Line, "We ended up doing pretty average-size fangs. We had three different sizes. I would call it, like, the rest size, which was like their normal size. And then there was, like, their attack, which were bigger teeth."
"We also didn’t want them to be fanged the entire time. It’s only when they’re about to kill...Rolin agreed that we didn’t always have to have them fanged, only for specific emotions and activities," he said.
9.The vampires' nails were a challenge, so Tami Lane, Howard's co-department head, had the idea of sending the actors to get acyrlics. Having a manicurist come to the trailers ended up being "cost prohibitive," so they found a local nail salon to work with.
Howard told Below the Line, "Tami found a place that was Covid safe. They would have to go there while nobody was there, and they would go before the place opened. We paid a nail salon to just do them and no one was over there because we were doing something for the show.
Plus, we were concerned about the Covid situation in New Orleans. So I’m like, ‘We don’t want anybody near the actors ever.‘ So every week, we would send the actors in to get their nails done because we had a very specific design."
10.Assad Zaman initially thought he was auditioning to play Rashid, Louis's household employee. It wasn't until his third audition that Rolin threw him the "curveball" that Rashid was actually Armand.
Assad told Wonderland, "I had to do some rapid research to get an idea of this new entity. After I got the part, I was compelled to read The Vampire Armand first before picking up Interview. I wanted to have a sense of his history going into Season 1."
11.During scenes where "Rashid" was on his iPad in Season 1, Assad was often playing Minecraft.
He told Playbill, "The iPad is going to be iconic now, forever. And I love that! In Season 1, when I got the iPad for the first time as Rashid, the props master gave me a very basic old iPad with a few screens for Rashid to play with in the background. I jokingly asked if he had any games, and the next day the props master gave me three: Minecraft, solitaire, and pool.
A lot of the scenes that you see in Season 1, where I'm just in the background, I am playing Minecraft. And now, in Season 2, the iPad is bigger, and it's more advanced, but he’s still got his video games."
12.Bailey Bass was eager to tell a story through Claudia's hair. At first, the hair team struggled to find pictures of Black girls in the 1910s and '20s, much less examples of Bailey's curl pattern. However, advice from Jacob encouraged her to persevere.
She told BET, "One time, I said 'Sorry' because I wanted to have a deeper conversation about hair on screen. And Jacob goes, 'Bailey never apologize.' And even the person I was talking to at the time said, 'No, we need to figure this out. This is really important.' I thought that I was being an inconvenience when I was talking about something really important."
Bailey also helped make choices regarding Claudia's hair, such as how she wraps it instead of braiding it before going to sleep.
She said, "You know how long it would take me to braid my hair? So it's just trying to show that representation. And I think we did it very well."
13.For Eric Bogosian, playing Daniel Molloy, who's turned into a vampire at the end of Season 2, fulfilled a longtime dream.
He told Vulture, "I've always been a big fan of vamps. I lobbied Francis Ford Coppola to get a part in his Dracula in the '90s. I guess I wasn't a big star, so I couldn't get a part in it, but he was nice about it and invited me to set.
I've told this story in other interviews, but my wife was directing a play in Chicago, which, totally by coincidence, was written by one of our first-year writers. On the plane there, I was thinking about life, thinking, I've done so many things. What's left? And I thought, Man, I still really want to play a vampire. And when I landed, I got a phone call: 'Do you want to be on Interview With the Vampire?' At the time, it wasn't like, 'You're going to be a vampire,' but I figured vampire-adjacent was good enough.
And of course, it evolved, and as I got on set, Assad was explaining all of these things that were going to happen with my character. Sometimes, I didn't even want to hear about it because we never know what's going to happen. There have been slight detours off the main story, particularly with my character."
14.Assad has a secret Armand playlist to help him get into character. He told Vulture, "I told showrunner Rolin Jones about one of the songs in it. No, the rest of it is mine, I'm afraid. It's quite special to me."
He added, "There was an end point, or a cliff, I wanted to jump off, or a peak that I wanted to reach, and that was finding the truth in Armand's trauma. What that tastes like, feels like, sounds like in the voice. That was one of my biggest sort of challenges with this show, with this season, with this character, because he's extremely complex.
The actions that he takes — when I first read the scripts, it took a lot for me to understand how he gets to those places or why he does the things he does. I curated the music around trying to get to a place where I could understand and empathize with his decisions without condoning them because I think what's interesting about Armand is often he knows how awful his actions might be, yet he does them anyway."
15.After Season 1 wrapped, Bailey attended therapy to disconnect herself from Claudia.
She told BET, "When I was filming this show, I was Claudia more than I was Bailey...When people ask me questions about her, I'm thinking as her. I think you take something and learn something from every character you play."
16.The process of casting Delainey Hayles as Claudia (a role she took over in Season 2) moved extremely fast. When she first tried out, "the name of the character was completely different, so [she] didn't actually know who [she] was auditioning for." A few days after sending in her self-tape, she received an offer for an in-person audition the very next day. The day after that, she got the role, and the following day, she flew to Prague.
She told Entertainment Weekly, "Luckily, the first time I went there was to just get Claudia['s look] together, then I had the weekend to fly back home, pack everything I owned, and then start filming. It was crazy. Now looking at it, I'm like, 'Whoa.' But doing it, I was literally having the time of my life, so it went really quickly."
17.When they weren't filming, Jacob and Delainey spent a lot of time together. They went on long walks and to dinner.
She told Entertainment Weekly, "When I first got to Prague, he took me on a walk just to get grounded. He was like, 'At the end of the day, none of this really matters. You bring what you want to bring, and Claudia is yours.'"
18.There are a lot of significant differences between the show and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire novel, but there was never a version of the show where Claudia survived.
Rolin Jones told the Los Angeles Times, "Anne wrote that book out of the mourning of losing a child. The changes that we made for the plot were really thought out and battled out, and then aggressively pursued once we did it. We’re always trying to first and foremost, honor the spirit of what was going on in the novel. So, no, Claudia was never gonna live. It was mostly a battle about how to most beautifully, or most hauntingly, or most painfully — however you want to say — give a death worthy of the character. Claudia will probably be haunting the show for a little bit."
19.Some members of the Théâtre des Vampires were played by actors from the British theater company 1927. Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton, who play Celeste and Estelle respectively, co-founded the company with animator Paul Barritt, and composer Lillian Henley.
1927 produced the show's animation, choreography, and stage concepts.
Assad told Playbill, "I flew out to meet the theatre company in London, prior to shooting. We did a few days of workshops to really bring the theatre to life and find each other as a company off-screen.”
20.Since Season 3 is based on The Vampire Lestat, Lestat will become a rockstar. They're "going to try to beat Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Rocky Horror."
Rolin told the LA Times, "We’re about to try to make a little pop masterpiece."
21.And finally, showrunner Rolin Jones told Vulture, "If you go into every season like you're going to get canceled, you just say, 'Fuck it, go for it!'"
He also said, "You build the show with the mindset of If we're canceled, we did our best, but you always leave the forward-story tentacles out there. As wonderful as the books' world-building is, and the entrance of characters and the variety of vampires in her stories, forward action is not the strength of them, necessarily. And that's great! Because we can work with that."
What's your favorite thing about Interview with the Vampire? Let me know in the comments!
