Eric Bogosian & Assad Zaman – Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

By: Jamie Steinberg

Q) Eric, this is such a fascinating role because Malloy doesn’t seem to have any boundaries with Louis. They both seem to hold each other’s feet to the fire. Is that because Daniel doesn’t feel there’s any consequences for him because he has this illness and Louis sort of can’t touch him physically or because he’s sort of his biographer. What’s their dynamic?

Eric: That could be part of it, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening. As far as I can tell, and…Acting in such weird stuff. I have to reach down into myself, and I’m a guy who I was bullied when I was a kid. And so, I developed a completely different approach to things by the time I was a teenager, and if somebody steps into me I just I come right back at them much harder and often to not too good ends for me. A person can be much powerful than me bigger guy or something and I’d get in fights and stuff. So that was when I was a kid. It’s just my nature that if I think somebody is screwing around with me, I’m going to go right into them. I don’t really worry about it and I don’t think Malloy worries about any kind of physical harm. Not because he’s sort of sick anyway. But because it’s just his nature. It’s just the way he’s built. He’s that dog that chases cars and then doesn’t know what to do with them when he catches them. He gets run over and he’s that’s who he is. And that’s what makes him a good journalist. I think that this has been his MO throughout his career that he finds that if he really goes at the story, he will ultimately succeed or not. At least he survived this far. In the course of thinking about the show after we finished it, somewhere along the line the notion of Malloy being a kind of Ahab character chasing the white whale started to evolve in my mind. And the more I think about it, the more I that’s where I’m at with it. And of course, Ahab was perfectly willing to chase Moby after having already his leg bitten off. He then continues to go after Moby Dick and to his own end at the end of the story.

Q) Both of you are enamored with Louis for different reasons. Why do you think you both have this attraction to him?

Assad: Is it just both of us or is it literally everyone in the “Interview with the Vampire” world?” I think that’s partly Jacob and his brilliant performance and also, Louis is that he’s just I think that’s what Anne Rice was kind of focusing on with that first book. She was in she was in this place before she wrote the rest of them where it was exploring the humanity of someone with immortality, and Louis is the most human vampire or immortal that you can kind of spend time with and explore and enjoy. Speaking from Armand’s perspective, that’s magnetic because when you’ve lived as long as you’ve lived, then those kinds of energies aren’t around you anymore. Unless they’re actually human and you can’t really interact with humanity by that point anymore because it’s all cyclical. Everything goes on a cycle so to finally find someone who after this with all this immortality is still so mortal, that’s just too precious for anyone to let go off for any immortal to let go off. And that’s why I think myself and anyone else who falls in love with Louis which is most people why they do why they’re drawn to him.

Eric: I would say Louis has a puzzle that hasn’t been solved by a guy who spends his life getting the story. And I find one of the most interesting lines in the whole show is that I’m describing my former self and I say, “It’s a tale told to an idiot.” Well, who’s the idiot? That’s me. I’m calling myself an idiot. So, I’m calling my youthful self an idiot and I want to make up for that by going back and finding what had to be the greatest story I had ever investigated, but ineptly forty something years ago. I can easily imagine that. That comes up all the time in everyone’s life. I mean, it’s in its worst form. It’s like you get a Facebook account and you find that person you wanted to go out with in the ninth grade. You find them again, it turns out they will go out with you on a date and you’re willing to go and you’re just like, “Maybe this time I can get her to kiss me.” So maybe this time Louis will kiss me.

[laughs]

Q) I was struck kind of from the beginning, looking at you and going, “I want that to be Armand. There’s something about him.” When did you know? How did you give that characterization without giving too much? What was that like to try to figure out?

Assad: Yeah, it’s quite overwhelming because I’ve been living under a rock for the last six months since we finished filming. I actually found out halfway through the audition process that Rashid is actually Armand. I went into the audition thinking I’m playing this Louis’ trusty assistant and I had a fairly kind of clear idea about his motivations and where he is and how he wants to sort of…And it was very, very clear cut and direct. Then, Rolin [Jones] on my third audition asked me in for a meeting – a Zoom call where I sat down and he basically told me, “Oh, we have to do a few more rounds and we want to see a few more things from you. But, basically, this is Rashid is. This is who Rasheed is. This is where we want to go, and we would like to sort of add a bit of that flavor into the next few auditions.” And I’m sitting there like trying not to lose my cool. So, yeah, and then that made the next few auditions really terrifying, but it gave me a chance to really think about how…Okay, Rashid, there was always a clear objective there, but now this is this kind of complicates it a little bit, which is an absolute, like, dream for an actor. And, yeah, so we spent some time working out what that kind of level of Armand slash Rashid we can play with. And I said this already, I think for me and for Rolin, the important thing in this first season, especially in the first few episodes, and it’s great if people like kind of grab onto Rashid or see something and that’s fantastic, but wit was important to tell Louis story and to make sure that the focus was on Daniel and Louis and that interview. And then going into 1920s, we wanted, we didn’t want to undermine that in any way by sort of having this lurky character always there. And flagging it too much, because I think that would undermine it. And not that it needed us to sort of play it back because these two, Eric and Jacob was so frickin amazing. And, and the other guys, Sam [Reid] and Bailey [Bass], doing their thing, you’re sucked in and you’re in that world already, but it was nevertheless it was important to sort of make sure that we play enough but not too much to sort of…Also in like a real life circumstance, it’s really important that I do keep a lid on it and that Daniel doesn’t realize what’s going on or realize that this is someone that he’s met before. So, yeah, all of those things were a balancing act, but if you go back and watch it, I’m sure you’ll find little moments where I was allowed to sort of have a reaction that kind of takes him out of being Rashid and then he has to sort of very, very carefully step back again. It was it was fun. It was really fun to play.

*CONFERENCE CALL*