Welcome to It’s a Hit! In this series, IndieWire speaks to creators and showrunners behind a few of our favorite television programs about the moment they realized their show was breaking big.
Amid the heated awards race facing “Interview with the Vampire” Season 2 — which yes, debuted over a year ago but just became Emmys eligible — creator and showrunner Rolin Jones said timing was never the show’s strong suit.
“Our timing is always awful and weird,” he told IndieWire, lightly. “We always shoot with the least number of nights every year. We just keep fucking ourselves left and right.”
The writer doesn’t follow the awards circuit very closely, but after Season 2 was met with critical acclaim, “Interview with the Vampire” was briefly misreported as a 2024 Emmys snub. Episodes 7 and 8 were particularly well-received with extensive praise for co-stars Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson, whose performances as electric paramours still fuel a steady stream of graphic art and fan-fiction online.
“No one’s acting like Jacob and no one’s acting like Sam,” Jones said. “If everybody had watched this as much as they had watched the other shows, I have no doubt those guys would win everything.”
The teaser for AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire” Season 3 unleashed a flood of questions when it debuted last July. A modern-glam rock portrait of Reid, the single-shot preview shows the magnetic actor draped in green feathers, speaking straight to camera for some kind of music video.
Here, the vampire Lestat is armed with a breathy monologue that oozes boredom (“There’s a goblet on the table…”), vaulting the TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s gothic world into an exciting but unfamiliar future.
“I won’t be dishonest,” said Jones. “It’s aggressively different. It’s Lestat’s show. It’s not two old guys sitting in a room trying to figure out stuff. It is a near-Messiah having a nervous breakdown. It’s going to feel really fucking impulsive and erratic and wild.”
Instantly infectious, the charismatic clip has drawn out plenty of fan theories. It’s also a strong reminder of the artistic sensibility that’s steered Jones since the opportunity to translate Rice’s words for prestige TV came to him in the summer of 2021. 80-year-old Rice passed away that same year, and the show’s first season fought an uphill battle winning over the late author’s most loyal readers. Stepping outside of the box served Jones well then, and he plans to go even further in Season 3.
“We haven’t shot a second of it yet,” he said. “I’m just talking about design right now, and I’m talking about the state of the scripts as they’re in right now, and the discussions I’ve had with the actors. But we would be foolish not to take risks every time. If you’re not risking, if you’re just sitting there going, ‘This is how Season 2 worked and this is how it feels,’ you’re fucked. So, we’re going for it, hard.”
Admitting there are “some cobwebs” surrounding his Season 2 memory, Jones was nevertheless eager to praise his cast and unpack his evolution as a playwright-turned-TV writer. His killer sophomore effort earned “Interview with the Vampire” a spot among IndieWire’s top ten best TV shows of 2024. Read on for more from this edition of IndieWire’s “It’s a Hit!” with Rolin Jones — including a special sound mixing moment that moved his cast and crew to tears during post-production for Season 2 in London.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. It also contains spoilers.
IndieWire: When did you first know Season 2 was connecting with people?
Rolin Jones: Well, first go, I’m a total Luddite, not even on Facebook. Never been on Instagram, none of it, but I do have people on staff. We have a wall of art, and I Google the show sometimes. For a couple of weeks, I looked at Tumblr, just because everyone does this great artwork.
But I’ll tell you, I was at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, and I was waiting because a person I was with was meeting the person that was on stage, and I was just sitting out there as the people were passing on by. I looked sad and pathetic. And then somebody, some woman, stopped. She was 25 feet away. She’s looking at me. I’m like, “What is this? Whatever.” And then she goes, “Are you Rolin Jones?” I’m like, “This is really weird.” Immediately, I’m trying to place her, like, “Do I know this person from high school? What am I doing?” And she goes, “Oh my God, you write ‘Interview with the Vampire.’”
[Laughter.] I was like, “What is happening? Why would you know my face? What is going on?” I won’t know the other critical permutations, like the big ones that are out there or how it’s going, but that somebody outside the Greek Theater knew my face? Just because we are not leading with my face. We’ve got Sam Reid, and we’ve got Jacob Anderson, and we’ve got all these attractive people. No one should know my face, but this person knew my face. I asked, “Are you a writer or something?” She said, “Nope, just love the show.”
While I was absolutely the plus one of somebody else who was going backstage, there was this weird permutation of like, “Oh, I’m on the show that someone does an extra type, type, type, ‘Who is the person who creates the show?’” I’d written on some other shows before. That’s just the moment where it was like, “I’m famous by association now, and that means the show must have an audience out there.” That was the first moment it happened, but I think it was after Season 1. Did it happen after Season 2 had come up? Maybe. I don’t remember. I’d have to see when that person was playing the Greek. Is that a terrible answer?
No, that’s fascinating.
Writers don’t get pulled aside and asked, ‘Are you this person?’ unless it’s a bunch of writers or something like that. I know that Sam gets that all the time and Jacob gets that all the time, and writer Hannah Moscovitch, who’s this fucking national treasure in Canada as a playwright, people have stopped her. But that was the first time anybody on a television thing knew who I was.
It strikes me that you say people don’t recognize writers like that, but before and even after Anne passed, she is this force for literary fandom. Talk to me about centering the writing in this show. Do you think you’ve been set up for that kind of recognition by the nature of the material?
Well, normally, you’d think if this was a hardcore Anne Rice fan they would want to come over and kick me or something.
[Laughter.] Well, I was going to say, it’s been sensitive.
Yeah. I think some more of the hostile approach of all that stuff happened early on before anybody had seen the show, and I think there was probably a handful after Season 1 that were probably still out there. Again, most of my information gets fed to me through other people on the staff or an assistant. But I think by Season 2, anybody who was still angry about what we were doing had moved on. I don’t know if they were outvoted or what it was, but eventually you go, “Oh, there’s something else to piss me off more. I am not giving any more of my energy to saying Rolin Jones is a total hack.”
I’ve probably said this before, but I didn’t start out as an Anne Rice fan when the books were first handed to me — but I understand it way better now, about what was missing out there, what she was doing, and why the books feel very, very personal for some people and they care a lot about it.
Watching our show, there’s a pivot that you have to make, but it’s a conscious effort on our part to realize there are people out there that love these books and you want to make this an original exciting experience for them too. They would be bored to death if all they were looking at was, “Who did they cast? Did they get that image right?” That’s not a particularly exciting thing.
Generally, my feedback comes from my actors. You know you’re doing good things when they’re happy and when they’re excited to do the scenes. I knew that Season 2 was good on my terms when we were sound mixing.
Really?
Yeah, we were all working very, very hard. We had perhaps, I mean, not quite as convoluted as “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” but we had a two-season complex weave to pull off. By the time Episodes 6, 7, and 8 were going, I had some grizzled old-time British guys who were posting in London, guys who’d been doing this stuff for 30 years, bawling their eyes out. Composer Daniel Hart’s music would come in and they’d be like, “This is the best music I’ve ever been given ever to do anything with.”
I remember finishing the last cue, the end credits for Episode 8, and I heard it in one of these theaters and I was just really, really tired. It had been a long time, it was a particularly tough shoot, and I just asked them to play it one more time for me. And that was probably almost no one else’s experience. I was listening to the extended cut and you get a little bit more time at the end for the credits that the music can fill, and I remember my walk back from Soho to where I was staying in Marylebone Bone in London and feeling like I was a bit of a helium balloon over this incredible piece of music that Daniel had written.
We had the same frame that we start with the first time you see Louis de Pointe Du Lac. It’s this closeup where he’s meeting Eric Bogosian as Malloy, and we matched it at the end. If you can see the difference between Jacob’s face in the first one and what it is in the second one, and you imagine that that interview took place over 11 days in Dubai, and you see how weathered his face looks in the second one or how much deeper it was, and he gets to say, “I own the night…” and that music came in? That was one of the five most satisfying moments.
It’s hard for me to accept praise and let the thing come in, right? It’s really hard because you want to be humble about it, but also I did the best queer vampire show Season 2 I could have made at the end of that — and that was very satisfying. It was a really nice walk that I got, and I think about all the artisans that it takes, even just to make that last frame, just the number of people that had to touch that last frame and the number of people that had to do that music. Not only how they mixed it, but the people who made it in the fucking orchestra. We have a 60-piece orchestra on our show. Most people don’t get that. That’s to the credit of AMC. That was super cool, super cool.
You said a measure of success is making your actors happy. Were you there when Jacob saw that?
I want my actors to come in while I’m editing and look at what I’m doing and sit down with me. Sam was very helpful for Episode 7. He came in and Sam has a hard time watching himself on screen. It’s probably very unpleasant for him, but he said a couple of things that really landed for me and my editor, and we started doing some work after that. Assad Zaman, who plays Armand, he came in for a couple of things and he was quite right. He had four requests on little moments, and he was dead-on with two of them. There was a better thing there.
With Jacob, when I finish a draft before I send it into AMC, I almost always send it into him and Sam first. Then conversely, when I was finished with the edit — not with a full mix, Jacob didn’t see it with a full mix yet — but when I had our outline, I said, “Come in and see it.” So, he had a reaction in the room. It was very lovely. Then, I walked him down because he had to go see his kids, and there was a second reaction down on the street.
I’m sure he won’t talk about this, but he had a very hard time in Prague for a number of reasons. Mostly just the sheer volume of work that he had to do, but two years being separated from your family, it’s just a lot, and just the places that he had to go to. To know that it was satisfying for him — for the work that he did and the big thing that we were doing? For two years you would be hard-pressed to find an actor who worked harder or had more volume, sheer volume. Forget about all the crazy things you have to do on this show. There isn’t an actor out there who had more screen time in two seasons and had to do more ridiculous things and was more truthful. It’s an astonishing two seasons of performing from him.
So, when he was as moved as he was, it was… I know this is for some award shit and all that stuff, and I don’t really chase it. I don’t understand it at all. How can you compare this fucking thing to this fucking thing? But those are the moments that are really satisfying and those are the things that I take away that make me glad this turned out to be my job and that this is what I’m doing.
I always find it very odd when it comes to adaptations that there’s this protectiveness of, “Oh, well, the literature is so personal.” But the story that you’re sharing with me now is also personal. Your work is personal to you. Do you ever find that clash sort of ironic with people being so hard on you? You speak with such sensitivity and care for the work.
Beware the piece of art that speaks to everyone because it’s probably a cliche, right? It’s probably some goddamn middle-of-the-road jar of mayonnaise. I respect everybody’s opinion on stuff like that. You don’t have to like it. Sometimes I think, “Would I watch this show if I had nothing to do with it? What would it be?” And that is part of the struggle of our show.
I think everyone thinks we’re making a “prestige show,” but whether it’s marketed as that or embraced as that or there are those expectations for it, there are a bunch of people in the world who would never, when they click on those tiles, go to this thing. Vampires, the genre bubble, there are a lot of obstacles to it. I’d rather people be really angry about what we’re doing than people being like, “Eh.” You’re getting a reaction somehow that has provoked some people and that’s OK. They could be totally right that the book is better than the TV show, or better than the movie. It doesn’t matter.
Here’s the goal. When I was trying to figure out what I was doing, there were a couple plays. There was both a John Weir play and a David Henry Hwang play that I attended. And I was like, “What is that? Maybe I want to do that.” This is what I was before and this was what I was afterwards. Something happened and you move that person. This TV show is the favorite show of all time for some people. I find that incredible. I find that totally cool. And that means for those people, for that audience, I’m doing a lot, right? I’m doing it really well if it’s their favorite show of all time.
So, at this point, you can’t really take it in. All you can do is try your best. The best sense I can say to all those people is that I tried really hard, I really gave it my all, and it might not be what you wanted, but it wasn’t out of a lack of thoroughness or passion. We went hard. It might not be what you wanted, but we went hard and it’s not safe. And every day, we’re in it today, we’re fighting for the best possible version of the show that we’re trying to make.
Let’s focus on the end of Season 2 and the critical conversations people were having around the time of the finale. Episodes 7 and 8 were acclaimed, particularly for the theatrical presentation of the trial. A few times you’ve said something like, “Anytime you can shove theater in the face of TV viewers is a good thing.” I’m curious how that’s translating into how you reflect on the work and your status as an artist. Very few playwrights get recognized.
Yeah! I mean, I’m in TV because there’s a lot of people out there who are way better playwrights than I was or am. I still have an intention to do a couple more plays before I’m done, but I’m a better TV writer than I am a playwright. I’m not Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and I’m not Lucas Neff. Theater for me was my way in and it was church for me for a long time.
If I was being perfectly honest right now, for some reason the symphony hall I go to a lot more and I see a lot more orchestral music than I do plays now. That’s just the thing that’s really moving me at 52 and as a new dad. That’s actually a thing that’s just helping me escape from it. What I think theater does, what it has to do because you don’t have all the bells and whistles, is address risks with language.
There are risks with emotion, and our show, what Anne set up, is this very raw naked thing that I equate to a John Cassavetes movie or a Fiona Apple song. There’s this open-wounded way in all the time and we’re unafraid. If you were to pluck some of the scenes out and you didn’t see the full two seasons, you’d go, “What the hell is that? What a weird ass melodramatic over the top operatic thing.”
And it is! Even if you’re doing the best version of that, it ain’t going to be for everybody. So, shoving that theater through the show, we hire a lot of theater actors because they have a facility for the language that we’re writing. They can make this thick, rich prose sound like everyday speech for them, which is good for these central characters that otherwise really seem like aliens.
That’s helpful, and you know, we’re not ashamed to feel and to really go for it. If you wanted to go into the footage, there’s another way to cut the last scene when they’re in the hurricane with the reunion between the two of them, Lestat and Louis. I know that because my director Levan Atkin showed me a version of what it would be if their hearts went like fucking just pounding on each other. And it was really beautiful and it was very interesting. But there was the size of the show, up to the 14 episodes that had led them to this collision of contrition, that demanded you went for the most naked takes.
Sam is famously always on the fence about his line reading on, “Did you hurt yourself?” And it just broke me every time. It broke Daniel Hart when he was writing the music. It broke the old sound mixers from Britain who don’t want to emote at all. That’s the singularity of our show, I think. I’m sure there’s other shows that are going for that too. You might know more about that than I do.
No, I would agree. The teaser for Season 3 is so amazing, but you have to be looking over your shoulder at those similar properties, right? How will you know when you’ve nailed it?
Again, Season 3 is not going to be for everybody. And it’s always like that, right? It can be that one reactive person that goes, “I liked Season 1. It was like a chamber piece, but Season 2, they’re all over the place with 9,000 fucking vampires and blah, blah, blah.”
I have no problem with a bunch of people for the first two episodes of Season 3 going, “That was my goddamn show. What have they done with this thing?” If they trust us like they did for the first two seasons, I think they will be pleased. At least, I hope that. Again, we haven’t shot a second of it yet, but we’re building it right now. I’m looking at my castings. If I tilted my camera you would see cards over here about certain things that are happening, and I’m still writing right now.
So we’re working, but Lestat has taken over the show and that will feel inherently different. Going back to adaptation, that is exactly the fucking whiplash that everybody had reading “Interview with the Vampire” and then turning to “The Vampire Lestat.” You’re like, “Wow, what is this?” [Laughter.] I think we are honoring that, even if it scares the shit out of a lot of people.
But man, I don’t know. It’s weird. Why is a vampire singing rock-and-roll in 2025? It’s fucking weird but that’s cool! I don’t know all the other vampire things out there, but I don’t think this one has been done. I know they made the movie “Queen of the Damned,” but we’re doing a different thing.
“Interview with the Vampire” Season 2 is streaming on AMC+.
