Interview With the Vampire: Eric Bogosian Explains His Approach to Daniel Molloy (Exclusive)
While AMC's Interview With the Vampire is, as the name suggests, the story of a vampire — in this case, Louis de Pointe du Lac, played by Jacob Anderson — as told in an interview, the vampire's story isn't the only one viewers are being invited into. The interviewer himself, Daniel Molloy, is also an important and interesting figure whose life and experiences intersect with Louis's first in an interview in the 1970s and again in the present day with. This time around both man and vampire are a bit older, perhaps a bit wiser, and as Louis looks to set the record straight, Daniel is looking at his second crack at the interview of a lifetime. With the AMC series taking a bit of a different approach to Anne Rice's iconic novel for its adaptation, the series' take on Daniel is a bit different than what readers came to know when he was referred to simply as "the boy" and for Eric Bogosian, who plays Daniel in the series, he found his approach to this take on Daniel not just from the groundwork in Rice's book, but from the script he was given as well as his own life experiences, bringing it all together to create what he called a "complicated" character.
"I already knew the Anne Rice book because I read it when it first came out and I loved it. And then I had to reread it again. But I'm really here to serve Rolin Jones and the other writers and whatever their vision is and that's where I have to get all my cures about what's going on here," Bogosian told ComicBook.com. "The truth is it is complicated, very complicated. This character is not a simple guy, although I can use a lot of stuff from my own life in terms of telling me where he is at."
Bogosian explained that in crafting Daniel's response to his second experience with Louis, he borrowed on some of his own experiences as a person to build Daniel as a character who doesn't like to be threatened but one who will punch back pretty hard when he is. He also explained that while the series isn't exactly the same as Rice's book, it "vibrates very close" to what she was doing.
"[Rolin Jones] used this extreme creativity to fashion an alternative universe that vibrates very close to what she was doing and yet obviously is different. I mean, we're not exactly in the same time zone and there are storylines that are a bit different. But the soul of it is the same," Bogosian said. "And then here's Daniel. I think basically all you can do is extrapolate from the young guy and the young guy's ambition."
He continued, "There were a lot of parallels between the young Daniel and the young Eric. The young Daniel is up for anything, and I was up for anything … At 25 years old, I wanted to be everywhere and know everything. And that is the young Daniel. Then you get the older guy and you've got something that just comes with age. You've got to be careful. If nothing else, you've seen the roadkill along the way coming to this moment in your life. Half my friends are gone and it's because of the wild life that we had then. So, you're preserving yourself, but still so ambitious. I've got to get this story. What makes this really challenging is that this guy is not shooting straight. I can tell. I can vibe it. I'm a canny enough journalist at this point that I'm not going to let this guy get over on me. And that all makes for great stuff for me to do in terms of the work that I had to do with this role."
What is Interview With the Vampire About?
A sensuous, contemporary reinvention of Anne Rice's revolutionary gothic novel, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire follows Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), and Claudia's (Bailey Bass) epic story of love, blood, and the perils of immortality, as told to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). Chafing at the limitations of life as a Black man in 1900s New Orleans, Louis finds it impossible to resist the rakish Lestat de Lioncourt's offer of the ultimate escape: joining him as his vampire companion. But Louis's intoxicating new powers come with a violent price, and the introduction of Lestat's newest fledgling, the child vampire Claudia, soon sets them on a decades-long path of revenge and atonement.
Interview With the Vampire airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC. You can also stream new episodes on AMC+.