Any reservations I may have had following Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire’s second-season premiere have dissipated with what is arguably the way you kick off a change of time and scenery following a season-break time jump. Long gone are those dreary, muddied moments in the woods facing a creepy vampire creature who was terrorizing World War II refugees. We are now in gay Paris, in any and all senses of the term.
Claudia (Delainey Hayles)and Louis (Jacob Anderson) have arrived at the French capital, which is trying to rebuild itself following the war. There’s poverty there, of course, but also a sense of possibility, a way of living life that makes room for artists eager to make a name for themselves—not all of them professionally. As it happens, Louis has decided to take up photography in order, perhaps, to connect more viscerally with those humans he remains so enthralled with. Claudia does little to hide her impatience around such a hobby. She’s clearly struggling to fit into this new city, which just makes her feel all the more isolated, especially as beholden as she remains to Louis.
There’s friction here, which seems obvious to Daniel (Eric Bogosian), in the present, who truly wants nothing else but to keep digging into Claudia’s writings and yet keeps being interrupted by the dual lovebirds routine Louis and Armand (Assad Zaman) are putting on for him. They keep finishing each other’s sentences, cooing at each other as they reminisce about the moments when they first met in Paris, and all around turning this interview into a kind of dinner-party gathering where their shared memories have the feel of a well-worn anecdote (“Keep selling it,” Daniel grumbles), polished and perfected over time.