Interview With the Vampire’s Jacob Anderson on Power Struggles and Ethical Feeding

Spoilers follow for episode three of Interview With the Vampire, “Is My Very Nature That of a Devil.�

In AMC’s sensual, meta revamp of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, Jacob Anderson’s Louis de Pointe du Lac is a creature defined by conflict. His transformation into a vampire is a fraught process physically and morally, and in the most recent episode, this tension boils over into a series of turning points for Louis. He realizes that he and Lestat (Sam Reid), despite their now-immortal bond, are incompatible; he is rejected by his family, who accuse him of being one with the devil; and his murder of a racist local alderman, though seemingly justified, sparks a violent backlash from white people, endangering the Black community Louis only wants to protect.

“It’s Louis trying to define what he is now. In episode two, he knows he’s not the same kind of vampire as Lestat; the humiliation of a human life in order to feed yourself is not something he enjoys,� Anderson says. “This episode is about him realizing that he’s never going to be human again. It’s about the responsibility of power, and where you’re powerless.�

Those power struggles follow Louis across the series’ dual timelines. In the early 1900s, he and Lestat vacillate between adoration and discontent, and in the present day, Louis butts heads with journalist Daniel Molloy over changes in his story since their last interview decades ago (nods to both Rice’s 1976 novel and the 1994 film adaptation). Through it all, Anderson gives Louis a thoughtful interiority molded by raw vulnerability, the subtle changes in his gaze and sudden bursts of violence emphasizing the character’s complicated inhumanity.

This episode tackles respectability politics; I’m thinking of Louis telling Lestat not to use the word “vampire� in his place of business. There’s a combativeness between Louis trying to keep his head down and Lestat being as brazen as possible. How did you and Sam find the rhythm of those conversations? 
Whoever starts the scene comes in with an energy, and we work similarly in that you want to know your objective going into it. A lot of it comes down to Sam and I listening to each other.

The scene that comes to mind is after Lestat and Antoinette have their night together. Louis’s gone for food and he’s in this vulnerable position, and he expects everything to go back to normal when he comes back. He’s deeply disappointed to find that Lestat could be getting bored of him. Lestat is so much of what Louis has left, and this episode is about the desolation of Louis’s human existence. He’s no longer able to be this deferential businessman to these white bureaucrats when his business is taken down. He’s no longer able to be the beloved, paternal brother in his family. He realizes, I don’t have anything left. If I can’t have all these different parts of me, that leaves whatever it is that I am now, and I don’t know what I am right now. 

I do think Louis is a monogamous creature. He wants a traditional family structure within this relationship with Lestat. Lestat being like, “Yeah, you can do what you want� — that spins him out.

Louis asks Lestat if he’s enough and Lestat laughs in his face. How did you play that moment?
I have to give props to Sam. That unhinged laughter is something Lestat says about himself in the books. It’s something he can’t control. When he feels vulnerable he bursts into these fits of laughter, but Louis doesn’t know that yet. Louis’s humiliated at that moment. At different points in this season, one of them is more powerful than the other, and this is a moment where Louis is not in his power. He feels like the ground is liquid.

You’ve said you might not have been able to play Louis if you hadn’t played Grey Worm on Game of Thrones first: “You have to learn how to be comfortable in silence, and do things with your eyes, and not rely on dialogue all the time.� Louis gives Daniel these little glares whenever the journalist questions his story. Did the Dubai scenes require more restraint? 
I incorporated it through all time periods. This episode is actually the beginning of Louis’s bookworm phrase; he buries himself in stories and that grounds him into his humanity. He goes into himself a lot more as we go on. I remember Rolin [Jones, series creator and episode co-writer] said to me before we received one of the episodes, “Just so you know, there’s slightly less for Louis,� because the episode was more of a Claudia-and-Lestat episode. I read it, and I was like, Oh, no, there’s so much going on with Louis, even in the witnessing of this. As the present-day interview starts to fall apart, that gives more license to have those little moments of, you can’t say something because that would give more away. It’s a look the audience catches. I love that stuff. I like to tell stories with my face probably more than with my voice.

Louis in the present day is so withdrawn and haughty that some of your line deliveries are really funny. “You’re lingering, Rashid,� made me burst into laughter. 
He’s reached a level of vampiric detachment, but how much of that is genuine is yet to be seen.

That detachment is contrasted earlier in the episode, when Louis tries to visit his family and is confronted by his mother. You’re wearing sunglasses in that scene so we’re not able to see your eyes; how did you incorporate them into your physical performance?
They help, probably in the same way they help Louis. He wears the sunglasses not just to hide his eyes or how they’ve changed, but also to protect himself from vulnerability. In that scene, there was a lot of body-language stuff. He comes in as if he’d only been there yesterday rather than in years. It falls apart as the scene goes on, and by the end, he puts the present down really gently. He’s like a wounded animal, the way he slinks off and then runs.

The sunglasses, if I’m being really literal about it — you can’t see anything. [Laughs.] I was wearing my lenses as well underneath the glasses, just in case Rae Dawn [Chong, who plays Louis’s mother Florence] wanted to take them off when she says, “There he is.� And she didn’t, which I thought was an interesting choice. It’s like, I see through you. It’s not just about the cosmetic changes. There’s something in your spirit that’s off to me. But as soon as you walk into an unlit area, it’s just blackness. Walking up the stairs in those glasses was a nightmare.

Louis finally embraces his vampirism when he attacks the alderman. On a thematic level, do you think he believes the ends justify the means? And on the practical side, can you talk about preparing for that scene and the anger that Louis gives into?
That scene is the first time you see an early echo of present-day Louis. If he’s the reluctant vampire — and that’s what he’s known as in the Vampire Chronicles community, or the human vampire — he’s just a vampire by the end of that. But it’s a very human moment when he says, “Maybe I am arrogant,� and he slices him. The irony of that moment is, the thing that makes him say “I’m a vampire� is a very human instinct. It’s about resentment and retribution. It’s not detached.

Whether he thinks violence justifies the ends, no, I don’t think he does. This is a big lesson. There are ramifications to this one action. No amount of magic can save him from a racist American, racist America, a racist society. He’s powerless in that way. He can’t operate with impunity just because he’s a vampire because he’s a Black vampire. And he doesn’t like violence, either. That’s part of the central conflict for him. He just needs the product of violence, he needs blood.

As much as Lestat mocks racism and tells Louis after the alderman’s murder, “I’m proud of you, good job,� he doesn’t seem to grasp the larger racial implications of why Louis did this and how people will react to Louis, a Black man, having done this.
I think some of Lestat’s behavior is racist, but he’s not racist, actually. He’s ignorant in a very particular way. He’s very, very old. Also, he doesn’t see the world through a human lens. He sees that Louis has acted on a vampiric impulse. He completely misdiagnoses that act and what it was about.

The episode ends with Louis saving Claudia, whom he calls his “redemption,� through the fire white people spread through town as retribution for the alderman’s murder. What did that scene entail for you? 
All of the fire was real. They enhanced it a bit, but they built a set you could set fire to. I want to say it was hard, and obviously it was dangerous, and you have to be responsible and you have to be safe, but it’s also my childhood fantasies come to life: running into a burning building and being whatever my strange version of Bruce Willis is. It was a lot of fun, and not only are you being paid to do that, but you’re getting to pretend to be a vampire jumping into a burning building. [Laughs.] I loved it.

Tied to Louis’s morality is his decision to stop eating humans and start eating animals. I’m curious how that was shot — the cat, the rats. 
I did hold real rats at various points, but Tami Lane and Howard Berger [of the makeup department] had these little rat dolls. They’re like dog toys, so that you could bite into them or squash them. They’ve got really intricately punched-in hairs. They’re like little beanbags, hacky sacks, hacky rats, hacky-sack rats. I’m biting into them whenever you see me biting into a rat. They’ve got really detailed faces and tails, but he VFX team has CGI-ed movement in the tail and in the face. I had something practical to bite into, but the hair gets stuck in your teeth. It gets stuck behind the fangs. You have blood as well in there. I was swilling water to get fake blood and rat hair out of my mouth for days afterwards.

The cat as well — it was a real cat that I grabbed. There are two cats: There’s a cat that’s full of beans, like the rat, but it’s a very realistic black cat that was modeled after the real cat they used. With the real cat, there’s a point where I’ve got the cat in my hands on its back with its tummy up, and they were shooting from behind, so it was meant to look like I was biting into the cat and then drinking from it. But I was just tickling its tummy with my face. [Laughs.] It was like with the baby. I smiled at the baby in a way that would look like I was about to eat the baby if the camera caught it. But the baby just saw me grinning at it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.