Summary

• Daniel Molloy is the underrated heart of Anne Rice's work, shedding light on real social struggles.
• Interview with the Vampire's adaptation gives Daniel the screen time he deserves as a crucial character.
• Eric Bogosian's portrayal of Daniel adds depth to the story, challenging traditional genre expectations.

Interview with the Vampire is giving Daniel Molloy the screen time he deserves as an underrated Anne Rice character. Jacob Anderson's uncanny Louis de Pointe du Lac launched the first two seasons, and Sam Reid is right on time as the Lestat de Lioncourt about to take over as the main character in Interview with the Vampire season 3. However, Eric Bogosian, with a little help from Luke Brandon Field, centered on Daniel in this adaptation. In the best possible way, he threw a spanner in the works of what was a story about Louis, Claudia, and Lestat in canon.

This spanner in the works is no oversight. In actual fact, this is a disruptive innovation that gets right to the heart of The Vampire Chronicles as a whole. Season 1 and season 2 of Interview with the Vampire adapted the 1976 novel of the same name, the first book in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles book series. Daniel Molloy was not a main character in this novel in the same way that Louis, Lestat, and Claudia were. But he had an importance in the series overall that, even in literary circles, is perhaps little understood and too seldom celebrated.

Why Daniel Is So Powerful In The Books

Daniel Molloy Was Special To Anne Rice

Daniel Molloy had a unique meaning personal to Anne Rice. Alcoholism killed Anne Rice's mother when Anne was 15, and it nearly killed Anne Rice. It reached perhaps an all-time low after the death of her five-year-old daughter from leukemia. It's from this struggle that Interview with the Vampire was born, and it is this struggle that gives it its harrowing power. While Louis was the eternal addict, doomed to need to drink forever, Daniel was the real, human addict in The Vampire Chronicles.

Without a metaphor to transform, alleviate, or soften the blow of his difficulty, Daniel Molloy may have been the closest Anne Rice got to a frank examination of the real social issues at the heart of her story. In The Queen of the Damned, Daniel was a homeless alcoholic queer facing down death every time he fell asleep on a bench. Anne Rice's vampires romanticized death, but in Daniel, Anne Rice recognized death as the logical conclusion of an unjust system that locked out its most vulnerable, and she raged against it.

Daniel was a homeless alcoholic queer facing down death every time he fell asleep on a bench.

With the glamour of vampirism stripped away, Daniel's horror wasn't gothic, it was worse - it was real. Perhaps Anne Rice needed the veil of vampires to start to talk about these things, because it was too painful to write her whole series with this searing honesty. A journalist and writer like Rice, the quintessential struggling creative, Daniel was all too close to Rice's own experience. As Daniel wandered the streets half-crazed, The Vampire Chronicles was suddenly no longer a gothic fantasy, it was stark social realism, and the author's anger was incandescent.

How The Show Changes Daniel Molloy From The Books

Daniel Is A Lead In The Show

Daniel was not a chief actor in the events of the first Vampire Chronicle, like he is in the novel's TV adaptation, Interview with the Vampire seasons 1 and 2. However, he was totemic in the series as a whole, and the show is capturing this significance. In the book, Daniel was 22 when he met Louis and Armand and got his interview with Louis published. In the show, Daniel was 22 when he met Louis and Armand, but never got his interview published. That allows Daniel to have his "redo" interview with Louis 49 years later in the show.

Interview with the Vampire season 3 is due out sometime in 2025.

This redo allows the show to ask the wonderfully humane question of how this interview would go now, casting off the social and sexual shackles of the 1970s. After all, that was the miracle of Anne Rice's vampires - immortals have these second chances. The show plays in the sandpit created by Anne Rice, whereby reinvention is not just possible, but the lifeblood of the story. In a way, even though aging Daniel up made for a different plot, it was the most Anne Rice thing the show could have done.

Daniel faded in and out of The Vampire Chronicles but never stopped being the struggling creative, perpetually at war with himself to reach higher goals, which the show strangely captures. Even as a man, Daniel labored intently at the creation of tiny model cities, compelled by some force outside of himself to make something of value. This exact version of Daniel will never transpire in the show due to the timing of Daniel's arc and vampirism being different from show to book, but the show's Daniel is also a creator before he is anything else, as he says to Louis:

I destroyed two marriages. I fսckеd up two daughters. But I stayed a journalist. I was never so lost I couldn’t hold down a job.

Daniel Could Be One Of Interview With The Vampire's Most Important Characters

Eric Bogosian Has A Key Role

Previous Anne Rice adaptations felt like niche genre stories, which is a gross underselling of Anne Rice, but Daniel won't let Interview with the Vampire be a genre story. Interview with the Vampire is a melodrama, but Daniel is a counterpoint. Louis tried with all his might to make it gothic horror, sometimes pulling Rice's flowery lines straight from the pages of the 1976 novel, but with his acerbic and fiercely modern original dialogue, Daniel is Interview with the Vampire's refusal to be pigeonholed. Daniel is what makes Interview with the Vampire a story for everyone.

It's the smartest choice Rolin Jones made in adapting Anne Rice, because romantic and horrifying though this complex body of work may be, it consistently defied categorization. Jones is a rebel storyteller, just like Rice, and he is the captain this ship always needed to set sail on screen. Interview with the Vampire's tight focus on a few characters is its power source, and its cast is what will make it go nuclear. It was wise to open with Eric Bogosian. For all Louis' quiet strength and Lestat's transformative joie de vivre, Daniel Molloy is the human core of the show.

Like Daniel was Rice's avatar, he is the audience avatar in the show.

Judging from the Interview with the Vampire season 3 trailer, the fact that Daniel is now a vampire hasn't actually changed a thing about that. Daniel brings the story up to date, puts the vampires in their place, and brings some much-needed perspective to the absurdity of vampire fiction as the cool, cerebral cynic through which all powerful emotion is filtered and mediated. Vampires are the fantasy element, but Daniel is the viewer, casting all the judgment of the 21st century on Louis' story and Rice's story. Like Daniel was Rice's avatar, he is the audience avatar in the show.

Daniel overcame madness and became wise beyond his years, "a slayer of the evildoer only." This moral victory is what most Interview with the Vampire characters could only grasp at feebly throughout the books. Daniel rose from street urchin to real hero in a sea of anti-heroes. From rags to material riches to riches of the spirit, one gets the impression that Anne Rice needed Daniel to be her symbol of hope. And maybe the rest of the world does too. Good thing, then, that the show is delivering on this important character.