[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 5, “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape.”]
Eric Bogosian and Luke Brandon Field‘s casting as Interview With the Vampire‘s Daniel Molloys is ridiculously good. The actors are not only spitting images of each other despite being of no relation, but they also are two artists cut from the same cloth. Field, who delivered a stunning performance in the show’s exemplary San Francisco interview episode in Season 2 Episode 5, tells TV Insider that he and Bogosian unknowingly were inspired by the same person when creating their Daniels.
“I should probably do that paternity test. It’s strange, you know,” Field teases of their similar mugs. As showrunner Rolin Jones tells us, Bogosian himself helped pick Field when casting for Season 1. (Bogosian is equally top-notch in the episode as he worked with Jacob Anderson‘s Louis to retrieve their missing memories of San Francisco.)
“When we originally cast him, I always like to invite the actors’ input all the time, and I showed six actors who auditioned for it, and I sent it to Eric. I was like, ‘Who do you think it is?’” Jones says. “We had our own idea. But Eric was like, ‘It’s clearly that guy, right?’” Clearly.
While Young Daniel only appears in a brief cameo in Season 1, Jones knew the actor in this role would one day have to take on the horror show and acting masterclass that is the San Francisco flashback. It seems to be an added bonus that Field could very well be a doppelgänger for Bogosian. “He looks like him too,” Jones says, “but there was just intonations” that made him a perfect match for the Succession alum. “He was just like, wow.”
Larry Horricks / AMC
Season 2 Episode 5 was the first episode filmed for the immaculate second season, which currently has a 98 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This being Field’s only episode of the season, he was always going to have a daunting few weeks at work (the episode took around two weeks to film and was shot in order as if it were a play — get a full breakdown of the series standout in the link below).
“We started off our second season, first day with essentially a day player who did one scene last year and a guy who had pretended to be somebody [Assad Zaman as Rashid and Armand], but this was his first thing [as Armand]. “That’s half of my [205] cast that were out on a f***ing ledge. We just shoved them off and it’s like, ‘Let’s go.’ That is Season 2 in a nutshell. Literally every step of production was like that. Just leap and hope that it works out. There’s a lot of obstacles.”
Field learned Bogosian’s role in his casting straight from the source. “Eric told me that when I was in New Orleans,” he tells us, slipping into his Molloy/Bogosian voice next. “He saw a couple of tapes and he was like, ‘That’s my guy. That’s it. You’re pretty cool. You’re kind of a hipster.’ And I was like, ‘Thank you.’ I think that’s a compliment.”
Field says he and Bogosian didn’t work together to create similarities and differences in their past and present Daniels, but they didn’t really need to — they were unknowingly already on the same page.
“We’d met before in New Orleans. We went for a really nice breakfast and a walk, but I was familiar because I’d watched Talk Radio in the pandemic randomly,” Field shares. “I didn’t want to take too much of Eric because who Daniel was in the ’70s is not who Daniel is nowadays. Very different people who have gone through so many different experiences, but it was little touches, little flavors of Eric.”
Field says he “took a lot more [inspiration] from Talk Radio” than present-day Bogosian, but “the two of us had the same inspiration for the character, but at two different points in the person’s life, which I didn’t even know about until very recently where we talked about it in New York, which was Lou Reed [the late lead singer and guitarist of The Velvet Underground].”
“I wasn’t trying to play Lou Reed, I wasn’t trying to play Eric, but I was trying to play little ideas of the two of them together, mixing in my own thoughts with Daniel Molloy,” the Jojo Rabbit actor explains. “I’d read [Interview With the Vampire] at school, I’d seen the movie. Again, you wanted to take little pockets of it, but also very much make it your own. But Eric and I both were like, there was this strong element of Lou Reed from when he was younger, his playfulness, but aloofness and being very inquisitive. And then obviously when he’s older and he’s more experienced and learned, he’s quippy, wise, but you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him.”
Larry Horricks / AMC
Daniel is much more green and more excited than a supposed objective interviewer should be in his 1973 interview with Louis. “He’s charmed and enamored by him for sure,” Field says. “He’s never met this. He likes to know about the people that have fallen in the cracks of society, but this is sublime … He’s scared and yet so excited. To find this and then to possibly have immortality, I mean the elixir of life, that I cannot even fathom.”
Daniel in 2022 doesn’t feel the same thrill. He’s questioning every move Louis and Armand make and why they made it. Bogosian tells TV Insider that the shared experience of recalling their identically wiped memories in Dubai in 205 doesn’t necessarily make Daniel trust Louis more.
“It’s not about trust. It’s about always picking up on all the information that’s coming to you,” Bogosian explains. “Two examples. One, as a poker player, I am looking for tells in the other person that they may not even be aware they’re giving off. It comes in many shapes and forms. It can come in your hands. It can come in your feet, where your mouth is. These are all things that are clues.” Referencing research he did for his 2017 book Operation Nemesis, Bogosian notes that any good investigator is looking for what’s being concealed.
“It wasn’t always what I found. It was what I couldn’t find,” he notes. “So likewise [with Louis and Armand], I have to sit there and go, ‘What are they telling me? What are they not telling me? What have they left out of the story?’”
Lou Reed and Talk Radio‘s main character, as it turns out, remind both of the actors of Daniel. Bogosian brings up the main character from his Pulitzer Prize-nominated play and film as a reference for his performance.
“I wrote a guy named Barry Champlain, who was the Talk Radio guy in the movie. Barry Champlain is very smart and has a really fast answer for everybody. It took me months to write those fast answers,” Bogosian explains. “And likewise, my brilliant character, Daniel Molloy, is the product of Rolin Jones’ months and months and months of putting the clues together and having him solve them. Rolin Jones creates the situation where this magnificent investigator can take all the clues and put them together. I don’t think I’d be able to do it. It is a mystery. It is a puzzle, and he has to put it together.”
The answer to the mystery isn’t who’s to blame for all these vampiric tragedies, Jones notes.
“The easy part is yeah, who’s to blame or who did these awful things and what’s the source of trauma. That’s actually not what the season is about,” he explains. “‘Memory is the monster‘ is a real engine for the show in that they’re all monsters, right? They did these things to you, but the articulation and the coming to grips with what really happened to you as a character and who you are and the story that you have told the world and the story you’ve told yourself are at play. And so the show is actually hurtling its way towards something else, not about blame. It’s actually all these vampires beginning to turn inward and go, ‘Where am I responsible? How am I accountable? Is there contrition and forgiveness on the other side?’”
This older, wiser Daniel is hellbent on uncovering the truth of the parts each vampire played in this dangerous tell, threat to his life be damned.
Interview With the Vampire, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming Sundays on AMC+