AMC’s ‘Interview with the Vampire’ With Executive Producer Mark Johnson and Actor Sam Reid

In 2020, AMC acquired the rights to 18 of Anne Rice’s books and asked producer Mark Johnson — who’d worked with the network dating back to Breaking Bad — if he’d be interested. But Johnson had never actually read Anne Rice before. “I immediately did my homework,” he admits. During an April 4 conversation with The Ankler’s Series Business author Elaine Low, Johnson and Sam Reid, who stars as Lestat de Lioncourt, detail the joys — and extreme pressures — of bringing Anne Rice’s gothic horror novel to life with Interview with the Vampire. Reid’s way of dealing with the pressure was to lean into his character’s history. While shooting the series’ first season, he placed all the Lestat fan art he could find up on the wall of his trailer. “I was looking at it going, ‘This is what this character is to all of these people,’” he says. “In the psyches of an audience, it can be very personal.” You can watch Interview with the Vampire on AMC+. Chapters 0:00 Elaine Low welcomes Mark Johnson and Sam Reid 0:05 Building the Anne Rice television universe at AMC 0:34 Mark Johnson on AMC, the deal history, and taking on the books 1:02 Mark Johnson on discovering Anne Rice and meeting Rolin Jones 1:40 Expanding to ‘Mayfair Witches’ and ‘Talamasca’ 2:36 Sam Reid on Season 2 as an exploration of memory 3:02 Playing Lestat through others’ perspectives and “past lovers” 4:10 How the show reveals shifting versions of the truth 4:31 Sam Reid on playing “dream Lestat” inside Louis’ psychology 5:34 Seeing softer moments and then the “real” Lestat later 6:29 Mark Johnson on tone: comedy, gothic horror, and trauma 7:29 Sam Reid on finding tone and using music as a compass 9:08 Using New Orleans, Paris, and World War II as backdrop 10:37 Handling the fan base, book expectations, and pressure 11:42 Fan art, audience ownership, and the feedback loop 13:02 Acting telepathy scenes and the earpiece workaround 14:44 Tonal hairpin turns and filming the Season 2 reunion scene 16:59 Samuel Beckett easter egg and Waiting for Godot 17:54 Closing question: what gives them hope for the industry 18:23 Sam Reid on art, adversity, and helping people feel seen 20:22 Mark Johnson on stories enduring and the industry resetting 21:20 Wrap-up and thanks