\u201cIt\u2019s the best, but it\u2019s full-on,\u201d says Anderson. \u201cYou don\u2019t really get a lot of rest. And it\u2019s dense writing, so you\u2019re putting your whole body and brain into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all hyperaware that it\u2019s a dream job,\u201d Reid adds. \u201cYou get to do everything that you could possibly ever want to do as an actor in one single show. It\u2019s quite stressful with how fast we move and how much they want to do, but if you don\u2019t pinch yourself every day and go, \u2018Wow, how fun is this?\u2019 then you\u2019re wasting your time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The original Vampire Chronicles novels by Anne Rice have sold over 80 million copies, while the iconic 1994 film starring Hollywood juggernauts Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt<\/a> grossed more than $200 million worldwide. The AMC TV show<\/a> had, as showrunner and producer Rolin Jones tells it, much to live up to: \u201cIt was a remake of that thing from the \u201990s, and the expectations are low.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet his Interview With the Vampire exists entirely outside the formidable shadows of its predecessors, accumulating critical acclaim\u2014and a passionate, ever-devoted fan base\u2014on its own. It received a renewal for season two before season one was even out, expanding Rice\u2019s first Vampire Chronicles novel into 15 episodes. Now, the series is ambitiously venturing into the first-ever onscreen adaptation of the second book, The Vampire Lestat. In doing so, it\u2019s blowing up the formula it built its success on and taking bigger, gutsier, crazier swings, veering left of the stylistic choices that have made it so beloved, and layering in new stories in a wildly different tone.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s quite joyful to be in the thing that does reinvent itself all the time, as actors,\u201d says Reid. \u201cIt\u2019s very joyful to be in a new show every season. You\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou get to play a slightly different character every time,\u201d Anderson completes the thought.<\/p>\n When Sam Reid booked the role of Lestat de Lioncourt, he began making collages.<\/p>\n He had read Anne Rice\u2019s The Vampire Chronicles series before the script for the show came across his desk, and when it was confirmed Reid would become the Brat Prince, he went back and reread them. Then he spent weeks cutting up old National Geographics, finding imagery that evoked the characters\u2014old Venetian paintings, darker images of soldiers after war\u2014and placing them together.<\/p>\n \u201cI had stuck them all over my kitchen cabinets,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI think I was a crazy person, but I love collage.\u201d<\/p>\n If you couldn\u2019t tell from all the collaging and reading, 39-year-old Reid enjoys the simple life: being back home in Sydney with his partner and their dog, gardening, and going to local markets (again\u2014not nearly as similar to his hedonistic character as some might imagine). He\u2019s not new to period dramas and romances, but while shooting the first two seasons of Interview With the Vampire, he was also playing the male lead on something completely different, the Australian drama The Newsreader; right after The Vampire Lestat\u2019s summer release, he\u2019ll exchange Lestat\u2019s tight leather pants for vestments, playing a priest in a stage production of Doubt: A Parable. He\u2019s a chameleon, disappearing into roles with no trace of Sam Reid left behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s the best, but it\u2019s full-on,\u201d says Anderson. \u201cYou don\u2019t really get a lot of rest. And it\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,569,75,258902,1316,19835,5131,1778,348,343,258903],"class_list":["post-714575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-gq-hype","tag-netflix","tag-onecolumn","tag-streaming","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","tag-tv","tag-web","tag-what-to-watch-on-netflix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}