Jacob Anderson is starring in the 2022 series adaptation of the late author Anne Rice’s ‘Interview with the Vampire,’ and it has been receiving a lot of positive feedback from its viewers.
In a recent interview with Vulture, the 32-year-old British actor talked all about his role as the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, as well as how some of his intense scenes were filmed and what goes on behind-the-scenes.
A bit of spoiler incoming…
In a scene where Louis saves Claudia (Bailey Bass), Anderson revealed that the fire on set was actually real.
“All of the fire was real. They enhanced it a bit, but they built a set you could set fire to. I want to say it was hard, and obviously it was dangerous, and you have to be responsible and you have to be safe, but it’s also my childhood fantasies come to life: running into a burning building and being whatever my strange version of Bruce Willis is. It was a lot of fun, and not only are you being paid to do that, but you’re getting to pretend to be a vampire jumping into a burning building. [Laughs.] I loved it,” the actor expressed.
He also shared how his scenes involving feeding on animals, such as rats and a cat, were filmed stating,
“I did hold real rats at various points, but Tami Lane and Howard Berger [of the makeup department] had these little rat dolls. They’re like dog toys, so that you could bite into them or squash them. They’ve got really intricately punched-in hairs. They’re like little beanbags, hacky sacks, hacky rats, hacky-sack rats. I’m biting into them whenever you see me biting into a rat. They’ve got really detailed faces and tails, but he VFX team has CGI-ed movement in the tail and in the face. I had something practical to bite into, but the hair gets stuck in your teeth. It gets stuck behind the fangs. You have blood as well in there. I was swilling water to get fake blood and rat hair out of my mouth for days afterwards.”
Anderson continued,
“The cat as well — it was a real cat that I grabbed. There are two cats: There’s a cat that’s full of beans, like the rat, but it’s a very realistic black cat that was modeled after the real cat they used. With the real cat, there’s a point where I’ve got the cat in my hands on its back with its tummy up, and they were shooting from behind, so it was meant to look like I was biting into the cat and then drinking from it. But I was just tickling its tummy with my face. [Laughs.] It was like with the baby. I smiled at the baby in a way that would look like I was about to eat the baby if the camera caught it. But the baby just saw me grinning at it.”
It takes a lot to portray a vampire who has decided to stop feeding on humans, that’s for sure.
‘Interview with the Vampire’ airs every Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on AMC.
Sources: vulture.com, cosmopolitan.com
