Interview With The Vampire Series Casts Game Of Thrones Star Jacob Anderson As Louis
AMC's "Interview With the Vampire" TV series has found its Louis. Jacob Anderson, who played Grey Worm on some obscure show called "Game of Thrones," has been cast as Louis de Pointe du Lac, the protagonist of the story played by Brad Pitt in the 1994 film adaptation of Anne Rice's novel. Anderson isn't the only "Game of Thrones" alumn to climb into the "Interview With the Vampire" coffin. Alan Taylor, who helmed several "Thrones" episodes, is on board to helm the first two episodes of this new series.
Say Hello To The New Louis
THR reports that Jacob Anderson, an actor with credits on "Doctor Who" and "Broadchurch," and perhaps best known for playing Grey Worm on "Game of Thrones," will play protagonist Louis in AMC's "Interview With the Vampire" TV series. Louis is "a young man who is seduced into the world of the undead by the amoral vampire Lestat (Sam Reid)." The character is the narrator of the "Interview With the Vampire" book, and was memorably played by Brad Pitt in the 1994 film adaptation directed by Neil Jordan. Louis appears in several of Rice's "Vampire Chronicles" books, but "Interview" is the book where he figures most prominently.
An "Vampire Chronicles" TV series has been a long time in the making. At one point, "Hannibal" creator Bryan Fuller was even attached to a show, but, in true Bryan Fuller fashion, he walked away from the project. That's a huge bummer, because Fuller genuinely seems perfect for this material. Oh well! Instead, Rolin Jones, who worked on such TV shows as "Perry Mason" and "The Exorcist," will serve as the "Interview With the Vampire" creator, showrunner, and executive producer. And AMC is just getting started when it comes to Anne Rice adaptations. The network is also developing a second series based on her "Lives of the Mayfair Witches" books.
I've read most of Rice's "Vampire Chronicles" books, and while I think the Neil Jordan movie is pretty damn great, I also think the books would work better adapted to TV, so I'm hopeful things will work out for the best here. I'm one of the few weirdos who never bothered to watch "Game of Thrones," so I'll confess I'm not very familiar with Jacob Anderson's work there, so I can't fully comment on how he'll do as Louis, but I wish him the best.
Interview With the Vampire
As for the "Interview With the Vampire" book, here's the synopsis in case you're completely unfamiliar with this material.
We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks–as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . .He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir–young, romantic, cultivated–to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . .