Isobel Grieve
The following review contains spoilers for Interview with the Vampire S2E4, “I Want You More Than Anything In The World” (written by Coline Abert & A. Zell Williams and directed by Levan Akin)
We’re halfway through Interview with the Vampire Season 2. Theatre de Vampires has already lost its appeal for our main characters: Claudia (Delainey Hayes) hates her role on stage, Armand (Assad Zaman) is facing possible mutiny, and Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) is the nomadic instigator for it all.
It is in Episode 4, “I Want You More Than Anything In The World,” that shit starts to hit the fan for our beloved vampires. The honeymoon phase with Paris has ended.
I know that Louis being confronted by a striking lack in his photography skills is meant to signal a shift in his character’s purpose. By the end of the episode, we’re seeing him possibly take on a leadership role for Armand and leave the life of a desperate artist behind him. However, when Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) is in that studio apartment with Louis and reading those photographs to filth, pointing out every little detail wrong with them, it was… in a way… funny…?
Objectively, please try and convince me that a man having a midlife crisis who decides to pick up a camera, call himself an artist, and then proceed to fail isn’t funny. It’s a tale as old as time, and I’ll never get over how confident men can be in mediocrity. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to hate on the character or Louis’ development this season. I think the writers’ room is doing a marvellous job, and Jacob Anderson was very captivating when this bubble burst. I struggle to take this trope seriously—it reminds me of the kid who would bring a guitar to a house party; if you know what I mean, it just has that vibe.
And with Lestat’s presence in that scene and afterwards, while he and Louis sit on that bench in the rain, some elements of the dialogue seriously convince me that these illusions are more than meets the eye. I have a theory that, somehow, Lestat is projecting himself to Louis across the ocean from New Orleans. And if I’m honest, I don’t think it’s that far-fetched when these vampires are talking to each other in their heads across Paris like it’s no great feat either.
It’s also stimulating to think about how Armand can sense Lestat in Louis’ mind and how, in the present, he still seems irritated, at which moments Lestat is in the room with Louis. And my god, the present is getting messy for Armand and Louis! Running through old memories is emphatically trudging up old rows between them, re-opening long-forgotten wounds.
With Louis’s photography career’s destruction, his attention may direct to the Theatre de Vampires where Armand is losing control of his underlings: Santiago (Ben Daniels) stirs the pot, and Claudia’s new role on stage chafes against her mental capacity. Due to her stunted physicality, Claudia is constantly infantilized. She craves freedom, and Santiago craves control, two things Armand cannot grant. Tension increases—how ominous.
Ben Daniels oozes creep energy. No notes! Santiago is a villain who is 100% in the right, and Armand is a hypocrite for love; Assad Zaman’s puppy-dog eyes reiterate that. There’s no denying the dichotomy of Armand’s past actions with the present. Laws are laws that keep the coven alive because they work. However, emotionally, we choose to side with Armand because we want to see the humanity of these characters succeed. We want Armand and Louis to live happily ever after. We want Claudia to feel seen. By and by, these are well-structured characters with heartfelt motives that make for excellent TV.
Claudia seeks out Madelaine (Roxane Duran) for companionship as she’s isolated from the cliquey coven, damned by her nomadic father/brother Louis in their eyes and stealing the spotlight with the success of her skit. Delainey Hayes and Roxane Duran share anguish in their performances. The connection between their characters is well-written. Madelaine being orphaned and then taking a Nazi soldier as a lover gave a nuanced perspective to the Paris occupation during WWII. And I think the blurred lines of that affair connected well with Claudia’s origin story.
When Daniel Malloy (Eric Bogosian) is sitting in the living room looking through files on his laptop, we can hear Armand and Louis arguing, which feels like a hilarious joke like when you’re sleeping over at a friend’s house and sometime through the night their mom comes in to cuss them out in the hall while you wait. Yet, it simultaneously drags out the realism of the close-knit nature of the interview and foreshadows a possible shift in the power dynamic. In every episode, we seesaw back and forth with who is in control of the interview; this scene is a definitive declaration that Daniel has a wedge between Armand and Louis, a powerful position he has yet been able to hold and indeed is not carrying on from one episode to the next.
I can’t wait to hear what the newly “enhanced” audio of the first interview from 1976 will reveal in next week’s installment of Interview with the Vampire Season 2. The halfway mark can catch or lose an audience’s attention, but there’s no question about it. Everyone will be tuning in next Sunday to watch the tea spill in 1976.
