Canadian playwright Hanna Moscovitch is the writer and producer of AMC’s The Vampire Lestat and Interview with the Vampire.Sarah Hilton/Globe and Mail
According to Hanna Moscovich, how to bring Lestat de Lioncourt, the immortal and strange vampire played by Anne Rice into existence, is to give actor Sam Reid a sentence with enough space to accommodate lust, hilarity, deceit, and everything in between. Reed will find “elements of authenticity and performance,” she says, until the writers arrive at unexpected performances that they can’t predict.
“And he will serve,” she says.
For the Canadian playwright, who also wrote and produced AMC’s “The Vampire Lestat” and “Interview with the Vampire,” writing Lestat means writing toward excess. The line can be sincere and false, or wise and contradictory, all before this particular vampire completes his sentence.
Now that AMC’s Anne Rice universe has officially returned for Season 3 as Vampire Lestat, the newcomer’s first thoughts may be that everyone here seems too beautiful to be this miserable: beautiful vampires living in beautiful rooms, silk shirts, candlelight, blood at the mouth, Parisian velvet, and New Orleans heat. In Seasons 1 and 2 of Interview with the Vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac, played by Jacob Anderson, tells his story to journalist Daniel Molloy, centuries in the future. Even though the story continued to resist in his memory.
For Moscovici, that instability was the point. “This show was, and still is, about subjectivity,” she says. “In the first two seasons, we were chasing ‘Memory is a Monster.’ We were chasing the fact that Louis, like many of us, is an unreliable narrator.”
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When the show shifts to Lestat’s point of view, she says, “There’s nothing that can’t be fixed or shouldn’t be fixed.” Because “in a sense, it washes away everything.” This is how Reed’s Lestat enters the first two seasons: lover, maker, monster, and accusation.
In “Vampire Lestat,” a vampire manages to escape Louis’ damage and obtains the microphone himself. A 265-year-old vampire man is caught between becoming a rock star and reclaiming his story.
“His speech still has a certain style, it’s poetic, there’s a certain bravado, but it’s all underpinned by a very complex psychology,” she says. “He has a lot inside of him.” For Moskovich, Lestat’s monstrousness does not cancel out his “fragile heart,” which is why the change in his perspective is more than superficial.
To that end, Moscovici was never in it just for the blood, even though it helped. She and her team have always wanted to get inside Anne Rice’s subject matter, starting with the subjectivity that drives this series. “Everything changed,” she says of the transition from Louis’ memory to Lestat’s myth. “We have to respond to it radically because it changes the whole atmosphere of the world.”
She believes the show is a confession and quarrel between vampires who have loved, hurt, and misremembered each other for decades.
While the first two seasons lived primarily in Louis’ 20th-century flashbacks (the heat of New Orleans, the streets of Paris, and all the defeats Louis has memorized), season three opens the door with eyeliner and 1980s excess. According to Moskovich, alchemy is different now. Rock star vampires, jokes, and that hair. “I think this season is more interesting and more kaleidoscopic,” Moscovici says. “When you pass through Lestat, you feel like a hot hurricane. It’s like you’re writing in a hurricane.”
And that hurricane with that backbeat suits her. Moscovici, a Governor General’s Award-winning playwright, has long worked within the framework of power, intimacy, and the terrible: those who justify people who love each other terribly without always recognizing the damage they inflict on each other.
“Lorin and I are similar writers in a lot of ways,” she says of showrunner Lorin Jones. “We like the dark with humor, we like the dirty, the weird and the crazy, and we go to the extremes.”
This appetite, Moskovich says, followed her home. After two seasons of filming in New Orleans, Dubai, Paris and other locations, the Vampire Lestat production has arrived in Toronto with eyeliner, guitars and undying smut.
Moscovici lived in Toronto for 15 years. She knew theaters, actors, and people who could make the Gothic world feel alive and not just decorated. She could also call Crow’s Theater artistic director Chris Abraham about actor Damian Atkins’ schedule. She was able to think ahead about Canadian casting at the Canadian Screen Awards. She was able to look at the country’s entire theater and screen ecosystem and bring people in.
Bringing this show home was more than just sentimental at that point. That gave her access. “We were able to produce in a way that we couldn’t in Season 2 because we have so much access to our talent here,” she says.
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Moscovici isn’t shy about emptying Canada’s entire bench. “Vampire Lestat” stars more than a dozen Canadian performers, from Noah Reid and Ella Valentine to Christopher Heyerdahl, Atkins and Peter Outerbridge. “We brought in a lot of artists in Canada who we’ve been dying to work with for years,” Moscovici says. “And I think that talent should be known internationally.”
For Moscovici, Canada’s lineage runs deeper than labor and foundry. “We write the show with a Canadian sensibility, because we like the combination of darkness and humor,” she says. “I think we understand complexity. I think we like extremes. And I think we’re kind of vulgar in a way. It gets cold here, so we have to do something to keep warm.”
As important as Moskovich and his team’s ability to reinvent and bring out new talent is the balance they must strike to avoid completely alienating die-hard Anne Rice fans. A 40-year legacy of genre-defining books has created an extremely devoted and protective fan base. And from the beginning, AMC’s adaptation has never been shy about testing them out, with changes in timelines, full-on queerness, and conversations around race and identity.
For Moscovici, this new season is just another change: more hair and a northern heartbeat.
“Purists are never going to like us, and they shouldn’t, but we want to know what the fans think of it,” Moscovici says. “Will they throw up? Do they like it? I want to know how they feel about this dystopian existential world turning into a completely insane maelstrom.”
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