AMC‘s Interview with the Vampire does not hold back when it comes to gore, glamour, or gorgeous sensuality. The Anne Rice adaptation’s premiere episode features a vampire punching his fist through a priest’s skull, the pleasure houses of 1910s New Orleans and Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) and Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) consummating their relationship with a beautiful, floating, gay vampire sex scene. The moment doesn’t just signify a major turning point for Lestat and Louis’s relationship, but highlights the depth of their passionate connection. Simply put, it’s a wild and wondrous sex scene.
Based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, AMC’s Interview with the Vampire imagines journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) not as “the boy,” but a grizzled veteran of his craft. Decades after first interviewing Louis, Molloy is beckoned to Dubai, where Louis swears to set the story straight of how he became a vampire. In this version of events, Louis is not an 18th century plantation owner, but 20th century Creole businessman trying to make money as a brothel owner. He crosses paths with Lestat and the two become first friends, but then lovers.
A little over halfway through the first episode of Interview with the Vampire, “In Throes of Increasing Wonder,” Lestat invites Louis and his “friend” Miss Lily (Najah Bradley) to have a nice night in. As Louis starts kissing Lily, Lestat makes intense eye contact with Louis, all while undressing himself. Soon Lestat joins in and it briefly becomes a threeway. Lestat then puts Lily to sleep and Louis aggressively kisses the vampire. Lestat bites Louis on the neck and soon the men are lifting in the air by their passion.
“Yeah, it’s beautiful,” Jacob Anderson said when Decider asked the actors about the scene.
“I mean, you know, it just goes to show the intensity of their connection,” Sam Reid said. “That was translated really beautifully. Read it on a page and you think, ‘How the hell is this going to happen? Like how does this work?’ and then you see the mechanics of it and then you think, ‘Oh, okay. It’s quite straight forward.'”
How exactly was it straight forward? Decider was sent an early version of the Interview with the Vampire pilot with unfinished VFX. In that version, the scene in question was no less captivating, but you couldn’t help but notice that Reid and Anderson were on a small platform being lifted by a mechanical crane. So what was that like?
“What was it like?” Reid said. “It was, you know…”
“The bicycle scene,” Anderson said. “We called it the bicycle scene,” Reid said. “It was quite uncomfortable, I got to tell you the truth, it was quite uncomfortable. We’re balancing on that [rig] and sort of holding onto each other for balance as well.”
“Yeah I just like, don’t want to kill the magic of that scene, but it was…we were naked in front of the whole stunt team,” Anderson said.
“The whole stunt team who were pulling the thing down…”
“Basically on a steel seesaw,” Anderson said with a laugh.
Anderson didn’t want to spoil the magic, but he added that he was specifically proud of the single shot that circles around Louis and Lestat in that scene.
“I know I said I didn’t want to ruin the magic, but one of the most magical shots in the whole show is there’s like a crane that goes around from our feet to the top of our bodies and that was done completely in camera,” he said.
Just goes to show you that some of the magic in Interview with the Vampire is most definitely real.