‘The Show Is Built to Make People Feel Insane’

Rolin Jones, not to be confused with Talamasca agent and body thief Raglan James, serves as showrunner and co-executive producer on one of television’s most gorgeous and bloody good fun revelations in recent years, Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. The AMC adaptation of the Vampire Chronicles series, made even more famous than they already were by a 1994 camp classic Pitt-Cruise double-header, subverts expectations at every turn and cuts through the digital fuzz of middling streaming bloat with its centuries-spanning, intertwining queer love stories of the vampires Louis, Lestat, and Armand (played by Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Assad Zaman, respectively) and the tween vampire Claudia (Delainey Hayles, taking over from season one’s Bailey Bass).

Season two is an adaptation of the second half of the first book, following Louis and Claudia to postwar Paris, where they fall in with a coven–slash–theater troupe (to disastrous ends). In the present day, Armand joins Louis on the interview couch, ultimately turning it into a very toxic case of couples therapy. Jones describes season two as “one of those really tough shoots” owing to two strikes, a compact timeframe, and a “series of weird production calamities.” You wouldn’t know it from watching the wildly creative, sexy, and devastating end result. Leading up to June 30’s season finale, which ends on a seismic Loustat reunion and newly made fledgling reveal, the show was renewed for a third season. Right before that news, I interviewed Interview’s showmaître himself, telling him how often I have to pause the show to scream at my laptop. “The show is built to make people feel insane,” he told me. “Feels first.”

Tell me about the writers’ room because the writing on this show is so uniquely stylish and impressive.
It’s a lot of broken Christmas toys that I’ve collected. I ask, What broken playwrights can I drag into this thing? There were a lot of great, individual voices in the room, but it’s Anne Rice that sets it up. The language is there. I don’t think we’re doing anything remarkably different than Anne did. If there’s one thing, we probably have a little bit more humor than that first book has. But the later books have it! That first book, especially toward the end, can get wildly nihilist, which is harder to sell to network executives. So you’re trying to figure out a way through, and a lot of the time that means humor, and having writers and actors that can turn on a dime and still keep these things threaded.

If you go into every season like you’re going to get canceled, you just say, “Fuck it, go for it!” The part that scared me the most was episode seven: It’s a play. It’s never gonna work. But we had to just go for it, and if we failed, we failed. Arguably, every individual consumer of this show is going to have one moment where they’re like, I don’t buy that. That’s the good messiness of the show. If we did our job right, you should like 88 percent of the show and 12 percent should drive you crazy. And that’s okay! I’m not even individually satisfied with everything.

What weren’t you satisfied with? 
I fucking hate that stupid punch in the head from the pilot! It’s funny now we embrace it. We even wrote to it. But I think at the time we were under the gun, and I was like, “Well, we’re going to redo that.” Then, of course, it tests better than anything else in the pilot.

The thing that makes it all really easy to embrace is that I love my actors. They’re incredible. And any time we have some weak writing, we have Daniel Hart there to save our ass, writing the best music not only for TV but for movies. I’m more satisfied with this than anything I’ve done in TV. It’s a weird fucking show! And AMC has backed it fully. Other networks probably have more money, but I don’t think they would have made this show.

What has been unique about the process of making this show that allows it to be so fucking weird compared to the rest of TV right now?
First is that you get to write language. Whether you grew up with Shakespeare, or Deadwood was your favorite show ever, the idea that you can finally have this freedom to write language is very exciting.

Another aspect is that we don’t necessarily have the money that everybody else has, but we do have a lot of money. So we problem-solve — like, “How do you do a giant fight when you don’t have enough time? Oh, let’s do it from Claudia’s point of view!” And we always try to keep the stakes a little bit more grounded. It’s TV, and it’s dramatic storytelling, so it always comes back to casting and to actors. No one’s watching it to hear our writing or to see our little special effects. It’s about characters, and it’s about actors. The basic building blocks of this show are great scenes for great actors. You’re always looking for the unique backdoor to the story.

It really shouldn’t work. It was not supposed to. It was rigged to fail. Let me praise the people who are line-producing on this show. We are writing 17- and 18-day scripts, and we’re shooting these in 12 to 14 days, very creatively. Sometimes we probably don’t have enough time to pull it off, but everybody’s really, really creative about how to jam in these very ambitious scenes. They’re vampires. They kill somebody every day. They’re just not going to have normal conversations or do normal things. You start there as a dramatist, and you just go forward. It’s always some weird-ass thing. I have no idea how we do it.

You’ve alluded to the production being challenging. What was the most difficult thing to pull off this season?
Scene-wise, the scene in the rain when Lestat disappears and the role reversals that happen between Louis and Armand. That, and the balcony scene from season one, where we had the worst sound imaginable, are some of the most heroic bits of postproduction you’ve ever seen.

We also made the idiotic mistake, out of enthusiasm for getting the show back on, of shooting in Prague with the least amount of night possible. We don’t have 12 hours; we have six hours of night. It’s a vampire show! The calendar is not friendly to us. So we had to shoot over two nights. If you saw the raw footage we had for the scene on the park bench, and how we had to shoot it … On a logistical level, that scene is a miracle.

Were you writing more to the actors this season, knowing their strengths and takes on the characters from season one?
All you have to work off of when you’re writing on a first season is auditions. On our crazy little show, we made this ridiculous pivot. Fifty days out, we were told to take the first four episodes and make them eight and then make them seven while we were prepping and shooting. It was crazy. We were really smart about the scenes that we had people do for auditions, and we did a lot of chemistry reads. So the actors already knew each other and started relationships prior to the show. Then in season two, there’s the challenge of: Suddenly you’re writing the 112th scene of Louis du Lac, and you don’t want to deliver stuff your actors have already done. You’re really trying to push them.

And then we had a big recast of Claudia for scheduling reasons, and our casting director lets us drop in Ben Daniels and Roxane Duran. There was a chance we weren’t going to get Ben Daniels as Santiago because of this Lord of the Rings thing, but I was like, “That’s our guy. We’ll figure out how to do it.” I definitely walked away from this season thinking, I’ll probably never have a cast like this for the rest of my life. I feel very grateful and very fortunate.

Ben and Roxane’s characters, Santiago and Madeline, are fairly minor in the book. In the show, they’re fleshed-out, major players. How did you approach building out these characters?
The movie had wonderful actors and a very terrific director, but they had two hours to jam it all in. The gift of TV is you have this extra time. There are a couple of challenges, though, especially when we split the book into two seasons. You’re gonna have two problems: There’s no plot in the second half of this book, and two of your major characters — Daniel and Lestat — disappear for 200 pages.

That’s frustrating to begin with, but it’s an opportunity. There’s not a lot of plot, so we structured it around dialogue: How can we creatively get to this point where Armand says this? It’s just a different way of writing. In other adaptations, you have a lot of action, so you have to figure out, What do they say in between? It’s just putting on a different thinking cap, but you’re still jackhammering the book to come up with these things. We just got lucky that we get more time to sit with characters.

I want to ask about how the Theatre des Vampires came to be. Did you have a Pinterest inspo board of references and aesthetics you were pulling from?
About 15 years ago, I saw the theater company 1927 in a 100-seat black box in Battersea Park. They did a show called The Animals & Children Took to the Streets, and I remembered it forever. When I was in my theater days, I was calling up artistic directors like, “You’ve gotta bring these fuckers over here! These guys, they’re incredible!” So I always knew I wanted them to do the Theatre.

And it worked out, timeline-wise. Two of our coven members, Estelle and Celeste, are the founding members of that company. So you get them, and you get [production designer] Mara LePere-Schloop, and you chart out the timeline. Each character in the coven gets a little moment in the stage show. You gotta sneak Sam in there, because Sam is very important for the plot. You have to hide that for a while. You set a pattern, you bring the artists together, and then you get the hell out of the way.

We would write the text for the plays within the plays with the promise that you’re barely going to see half of these things we have. Those are five-minute-long plays, and you see ten seconds of them onstage. We didn’t have enough time to actually shoot them, but I thought it would have been great to have as extras. My writers’ room is almost exclusively playwrights. We all come from the theater. Most of our actors are theater people. So we all dorked out and forced everybody to deal with this theater-kid fever dream and 9,000 stupid insider theater jokes. I apologize to anybody who didn’t go to theater school that they had to suffer through it.

Were you at all concerned about just how much of season two of this huge vampire epic was going to be about, essentially, drama-club politics — who’s hooking up with whom, and who’s fighting with whom backstage? 
That’s all good soap-opera shit. That’s fun and easy. If anything, I was concerned about holding ourselves back. You think there’s a lot of that in there? Trust me, there was way more on the board and in scripts.

I was worried about episode seven, which is all set onstage. But it was great. In order to pull these shows off, you’ve got to find about five or six sets that you want to revisit over and over again. We had a hell of a lot harder time going into the Dubai bedroom than we did the theater. The stage is beautiful, but that backstage is just incredible. When I walked into the backstage for the first time, I got choked up. Why do another anything without Mara LaPere-Schloop? I never want to work with anybody else.

What’s going on with Sam being vampire Samuel Beckett? 
If you read the plays, whether it’s Happy Days or Waiting for Godot, the easiest playwright in the world to imagine as a vampire is Samuel Beckett. We have a little fun with some stuff. We had a much longer version of what that really was all about that we might end up getting into in future seasons. We’re not going full Forrest Gump or anything, but we like to grab historical figures and weave them in.

A lot of fans called episode five of this season a vibe shift, an inflection point that drove existing viewers wild and made some non-viewers really sit up and start paying attention. Can we talk about the episode? 
It was the end of Act One of the two-hour play that was season two. We owed this episode since the ending of that one episode in season one. It also answers people asking, “Why is this a second interview? Why are they doing this?”

A dirty secret is when we started the writers’ room, it was an order of six, and then somewhere along the way, they were like, “Why are we just doing six? Go do eight!” So for two days you wanted to break everything and throw yourself out the window, but that gave us a full episode for what was originally meant to be 20 minutes. It was like, “Okay, playwrights, here we go. Let’s see if we can pull it off.” This was the first scene we shot this year. So that big fight in the beginning is Assad’s first scene as Armand.

There’s more from the books in this episode than you’d think. There’s this very interesting short story that Anne Rice wrote for Playboy that helped us shape Armand. A lot of people probably asked the question, “Why did Louis stick around with this guy?” But Louis is not always easy himself. He’s a sloppy vampire. And then you take these characters that you love and put ugly words in their mouths, and everybody in the room relives their worst fight with someone they shouldn’t have been in love with but wanted to be; that’s the episode you come up with. You come up with a real spicy stew.

It’s funny that you guys wrote this episode out of empathy for Armand. To me, he’s peak psycho in this episode. 
He was the most challenging for all of us because if you read the books, he’s almost like a marker of where Anne was at as a person. He radically changes book to book. But there was a very clear through-line to it all, and that gave him a lot of dimension and mystery. I thought Assad played it quite well, where you’re constantly leaning in and going, What is it with this guy? Why do I feel unsettled around him all the time? 

You introduce Justin Kirk this season as a Talamasca figure working with Daniel. How will the Talamasca spinoff affect the show going forward? 
Trying to find an actor that has to be as good as Jacob and Sam is really hard to do when you’re like, “You’re only gonna have two scenes.” So I called in a favor. Justin Kirk has been in a play of mine, and I’ve written for him on two different television shows. I think he’s a remarkable, soulful actor, and God bless him for working under his quote for us right now.

In order for Tale of the Body Thief to work for me, and not turn into Freaky Friday or whatever, we need to set up the idea of the soul. It’s something we’ll be looking at going forward. So right now, it seems like Raglan James is just there for plot, but we rarely do anything just for plot reasons, and we’ll have built a much richer Raglan James by the time we do that book than you would expect. He’s going to be a bigger deal in this show than maybe he was in the canon. And in terms of Talamasca, they’re in a room two doors down from me right now working on it. These shows will communicate with each other, and whatever they come up with, I will graft onto our show if we get lucky enough to have more seasons.

How did you create Claudia and Madeline’s death scene? It’s more fleshed out than the book, and it feels true and devastating to these characters.
For our show and the amount of time we spent with Claudia, the audience needed to experience it with her. We needed to make the audience angry at what was unquestionably an unfair, cruel death and show that everyone’s a bit complicit in it. In terms of framing, you’ve got to do a lot of work in episodes four and six to make their story work around the rock from outer space that dropped into our season that is episode five. And that’s a real credit to Roxane and to Delainey and to the great Hannah Moscovitch that those scenes paid off.

When it came to the actual death itself, we were constantly asking, “What is gratuitous and what is the line that’s just beyond what the audience can take?” That’s the sweet spot you’re looking for. The idea to not see the end but to throw it onto Lestat’s face is forward storytelling. It’s on him now. He has to deal with it for the rest of the seasons going forward. Even the fine work that the visual artists did, to the makeup that was there, and the CG stuff that’s put on top … We talked about the Bacon painting [in Louis and Armand’s penthouse], actually. The idea of grotesque beauty. By the time we had finished with the last shot of Claudia, I’d probably seen it 20 times and it had turned the corner from being really, really horrific to being beautiful. We were trying to attain that from this awful, awful image.

The season finale ends with a really fun reveal: Vampire Daniel! It felt like a gift to the fans. Why was now the time to make that turn?
You build the show with the mind-set 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. We know that in the books, Armand eventually turns Daniel Molloy. We changed the timeline, but this honors the books and still leaves the fans asking, What are they gonna do? How’s that gonna work? 

When we talked to Eric Bogosian about it, I was like, “We’ll probably have done as much as we can on the sassy old-guy curmudgeon. So what if we turn you into a vampire? Think about an 18-year-old Amish kid who goes on Rumspringa and just goes crazy.” And on a personal note, I just want to see vampire Barry Champlain. Let’s go back to his Talk Radio guy. Let’s see what the hell would happen if you stopped worrying about your two kids for a little bit. Your hands aren’t shaking anymore. Just seeing pure id. The idea going forward is it would be fun to write a vampire who gets turned as a 70-year-old. Eric running around, still figuring out how to do this, is going to be the fun of it.

How do you feel about the show’s current level of popularity? It’s so beloved by fans and critics, but vampires seem to be a harder fantasy subgenre for some audiences to swallow than, say, dragons. 
I’m confident that we made the best vampire show we could make. I’m proud of the adaptation. There’s the element of second windows, how these things are going to be disseminated going forward. There does seem to be a lot of legwork done by fans. I look at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and part of me is like, Ugh, that’s way too high. If the intention here is to make something that will haunt you and that will work 15, 20 years from now, did we piss off enough people? Even if somebody was hardwired to like these shows, there might be parts that are too funny, or too melodramatic, or Why do I have to look up 90,000 words to enjoy this thing? Who knows? But it’s building.

Especially this season. Like, you better be submitting episodes five and eight for Emmys. 
We can’t submit it; we’re in the in-between period. But that’s chasing hardware. I don’t care about any of that shit. I really don’t. It’s a weird show, and if it suddenly gets in the Zeitgeist, well then, great, we’re at a weird place as a nation! But yeah, AMC seems super-proud of it — at least in the emails they send me.