In the Flesh: Interview with the Vampire Season 2

“Another one burnt in the tray, like bread,” sighs the ravaged vampire Daciana (Diana Gheorghian), looking down at her failed fledgling. What is there to cling to when the wind of eternity has worn everything around you smooth as glass? This aching loneliness, and the fear of that loneliness, is the beating heart of Interview with the Vampire, the second season of which surpasses the shocking, effortless excellence of the first by a considerable margin. That same wind roars through the ruinous house where a much diminished Lestat (Sam Reid) hunches miserably over his practice piano, a rudely carved slab of wood, but even as the windows shatter and the roof comes down, he has Louis (Jacob Anderson) to hold onto. It’s a tremendously romantic scene, the closing of a circle of codependent misery, abuse, love, and mutual cruelty stretching back over a century, but there’s a squalor to it which extends beyond its setting. This is it. This is what’s left once time has taken its miser’s portion: the lukewarm dregs of a life already lived and lost. Shared heartbreak and crushing guilt.

Holding up the mountainous weight of this bleak emotional palette is a magnificently talented cast operating at the peak of their abilities, from the wry, vulnerable journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) to the repulsively duplicitous and self-effacing vampire Armand (Assad Zaman). Watching these people forget and remember again and again that the mundane bonds of human (or formerly human) connection are all they have, that no amount of arrogance or towering scorn can free them from their dependency on love, is uniquely affecting. There’s something so typical of decline in old age about the cyclical predictability of it, the resentment and neediness, the willful ignorance, the childish inability to accept responsibility. Their immortality is just an endless case of sundowning, screaming at the only people capable of alleviating their suffering and then bemoaning the consequences of their own temper tantrums. They’re haunted by each interpersonal failure, like Lestat unable to rid himself of Claudia’s (Delainey Hayles) last lingering look before her death, and capable only of lurching onward to the next inevitable collapse. 

Showrunner and creator Rolin Jones dances effortlessly between tonal registers. Outrageous naturalistic comedy, satirical cruelty, heart-rending romance and loss. It’s a feast for the heart and for the senses, aided by composer Daniel Hart’s much-improved score, which feels at once thoroughly modern and like something straight out of a Todd Browning feature. The addition of Ben Danielson as the vampire thespian Santiago is perhaps the season’s most effective secret weapon, as Danielson’s face seems to have been purpose-built in a manufacturing facility for glorying in petty savagery and smirking at the humiliation of his rivals, while Bogosian’s Molloy remains one of current television’s most fascinating and charismatic performances, ravaged and raw but honed to a bare-nerve point that cuts effortlessly through the self-indulgent emotional contrivances of Louis and Armand as they relitigate their relationship. The interview is our conceit, yes, but it’s also the superstructure of our story, and its contortions and recontextualization promise richer and more fascinating things still yet to come.