Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches Review: The Best Adaptation of Rice's Work Yet
Throughout human history, magic has long been a fascinating subject, but one aspect of that mysterious and supernatural world — witches — has always held its own particular fascination. Simultaneously respected and reviled, esteemed and feared, witches are both the stuff of our most curious nightmares and our most fantastic dreams, which is why for many fans of the late author Anne Rice, it's her books about witches that are more precious than her more well-known novel, Interview With the Vampire. Spread over three volumes, The Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy traces the story of the complicated Mayfair family, a family of witches who have passed their power matrilineally over centuries through their dysfunctional and haunted line. The first — and most complex — novel in the series, The Witching Hour, gets a live-action series adaptation by AMC, the second series based on Rice's overall body of work after her vampires got a reimagining. Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches delivers to fans a largely faithful adaptation of the beloved source material that is nothing short of magical.
Mayfair Witches, arguably, has the harder job when it comes to adapting Rice's work for screen in that The Witching Hour is a huge novel, one with a complicated story that spans centuries as it not only traces the history of the women of the Mayfair family and their relationship with the supernatural entity known as Lasher (Jack Huston), but also coalesces that history around one extremely powerful witch, Rowan Mayfair (Alexandra Daddario). Almost immediately, the series makes the wise decision to center their focus on introducing us to Rowan in a way that sets up the humanity of her story while also introducing us to her history — or rather the history of her own mother, Deirdre (Annabeth Gish), that in turn begins to sow the seeds of Lasher. Just in the first two episodes of the series, we cover a lot of ground in terms of story that lets the viewer — even those who are perhaps not acquainted with the story from the novels — get fully invested. It's excellent storytelling, both on the part of the source material the series draws from, but also series co-creators Esta Spalding and Michelle Ashford who find a way to take literally hundreds of pages of story and bring them to life in just a couple of hours of screen time, all while visually bringing to life the lush and vibrant world Rice put on the page.
Yet, while Spalding and Ashford do give us (even beyond those first episodes) a story that is faithful to the books, there are certainly some changes. Going into the series, fans of Rice's novels are aware that Michael Curry, a major character in the novels, does not appear in the series with Ciprien Grieve (portrayed by Tongayi Chirisa), a character who is something of a combination of Michael and another character from the novels, instead taking his place. Rowan's story is also altered a little bit, though just some fine details about her life before stepping into her role within the Mayfair family. The biggest shift — at least in the episodes provided to critics for review — might be that of Deirdre Mayfair, whose story is significantly altered, but all the changes made don't fundamentally shift anything in the story. Instead, the little bit of "creative wiggle room" these changes provide opens the series to further explore the themes of women, feminism, and power and how the world — especially a male-dominated one — responds to it. As someone who, personally, adheres to the idea that Rice wouldn't want changes made to her stories as the author was intensely protective of them in life, even I can concede that the changes Mayfair Witches made enrich the experience. This is a case of enhancement, of simply making a beautiful item fit just a bit more beautifully without creating something new.
Working from the beautifully constructed story, the performances in Mayfair Witches are top-notch as well. Chirisa's Ciprien may not be Michael Curry or Aaron Lightner from the novel and doesn't exactly have traits of either, but his performance in this somewhat original and familiar space is compelling. He's quickly a character you want to know more about. Gish's Deirdre may be one of the strongest performances in the series, while Harry Hamlin's Cortland Mayfair is charming, but Hamlin also makes the viewer feel unsettled in a way that almost makes you feel guilty for feeling unsettled. It's a fantastic performance. The real standout, however, is Huston's Lasher. One of the great questions going into the series for fans was how they would translate a supernatural being like Lasher to screen in a way that captures his simultaneously terrifying and seductive power and Huston nails it at every turn. The only real weak point in the acting — and it's almost a stretch to even call it a weakness — is Daddario's Rowan, who comes across as too uncomfortable in her own skin early in the series, though there is certainly room for the character and Daddario's performance to be more self-possessed and one gets the sense in the first five (out of eight) episodes that that is exactly where things are going.
Adaptations can be difficult to get right, and it can be especially daunting when the thing being adapted is deeply loved and the most recent adaptation from the same general universe was so wildly well-regarded, as has been the case with AMC's Interview With the Vampire, but Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches surpasses expectation. The series makes a few careful changes to bring the story from page to screen, but never loses sight of the prose or the message that made the story beautiful, haunting, and beloved. Bolstered by nuanced and complex performances all against a gorgeous backdrop of New Orleans, this series is easily the best Anne Rice adaptation yet — and may be one of the best television adaptations ever.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches premieres on AMC and AMC+ on January 8th.