MD Bastek
AMC has given the green light for two series based on novelist Anne Rice’s works, Interview with the Vampire and The Mayfair Witches.
In 2020, Variety reported that AMC Networks acquired 18 of Rice’s books from The Vampire Chronicles. Yahoo News quotes Dan McDermott, president of entertainment and AMC Studios at AMC Networks, saying that includes “[…] everything from all the ‘Interview with the Vampire’ and ‘Queen of the Damned’ and the ‘Lestat’ trilogy to the ‘Mayfair Witches’ books and also incorporating the Talamasca Caste characters.”
No release date has been set yet for either series. However, it’s been announced that Interview with the Vampire stars Sam Reid (Lestat), Jacob Anderson (Louis), and Bailey Bass (Claudia). The Mayfair Witches cast is led by Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Mayfair, a neurosurgeon who discovers that she’s descended from a powerful family of witches.
AMC has dropped a few teaser trailers for Interview with the Vampire. There’s a recent trailer that shows someone turning on a cassette player on an ‘80s-style boombox with the interviewer asking, “You weren’t always a vampire, were you?” A voice answers, “No, I was a 33-year-old man when I became a vampire.” A more recent trailer posted on AMC’s website opens with a horse-drawn carriage passing in front of a mansion. A very old-style automobile sits outside. A man in a cloak rushes into the house. An arm wearing a billowy, 18th-century style shirt pulls a lever that draws a window closed to block out the sun. The final shot is of two dark wood caskets sitting side by side.
McDermott said that the network is in the process of developing other projects based on Rice’s work. “We have other projects that are in development. They’re sort of unofficial right now, but we really plan to have five or six series in that universe over the next five or six years,” McDermott says. “And there will be an opportunity to pull characters from different shows and do what we refer to as our ‘all-star’ original series, taking supporting characters and maybe a lead character from one or two shows and doing original series that will be based in the Anne Rice universe.”
McDermott added that the network is looking to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as inspiration: “The best model would be an ‘Avengers’-style series, where you take characters from different shows and bring them together, and you tell an original story using all of them and their backstory and the mythology. The objective is to honor everything about the source material and the characters’ backstories and mythologies as well. But I think that’s a really exciting proposition.”
