Armand, colonialism, and the weaponisation of anti-Blackness.
How season 2 of Interview with the Vampire explores race through Armand's characterisation.
Above death, gore, and the prison of eternity, the most distinct horror AMC’s Interview with the Vampire explores is the experience of dating a white person. The 2022 television adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel, created by Rolin Jones, established itself firmly as a commentary on race in the vampire genre (and in America, and in the queer community, and in the w-) when it cast Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac, Rice’s titular 18th century Louisiana slave plantation owner turned vampire interview subject, now a relatively affluent Black man born a little over a decade after Juneteeth.
The series began with Louis in 2022 Dubai being re-interviewed by Daniel Molloy after their “first time ‘round” in 1973 San Francisco, about his 30-year de facto marriage with white French vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. In this updated context, the first season of IWTV turned Louis and Lestat’s strained companionship in Part I of the novel into a nuanced portrait of racialised abuse and intimate partner violence in queer relationships; at many points reclaiming the exploitative portrayals of gay and Black men of its canon source and turning them into authentic community representation.
Climaxing at Louis’, and their now-also-Black vampire daughter-sister Claudia’s, attempted murder of Lestat, the finale ended with the reveal that present-day Louis had been living this entire time with his second husband, the vampire Armand. He, like Louis, has been race-bent. Played by British-Asian actor Assad Zaman, the show’s Armand is a far cry from the red-haired pale-faced barely-post-adolescent Slavic cherub Rice described in increments over several books.
The second season, released 2024, proceeded to adapt Part II of the novel, relating Louis and Claudia’s escape to Europe in search of other vampires, ending up in post-WW2 Paris where they first encounter vampire coven leader and community theatre director Armand. In Dubai at this point, the previously disguised Armand has joined the interview with Louis as they recount to Daniel the tale of how their romance blossomed leading up to, and endured past, the tragedy of Claudia’s death in Paris.
Maître
Centering two gay men of colour, IWTV season 2 is a rare gem in mainstream western television. Brown-skinned and bright-eyed, one of the first things Louis and Armand tell Daniel together on record is that Louis, to his welcome astonishment, didn’t experience the same harrowing level of racism in mid-20th century France compared to what he’d faced in New Orleans. An incredulous Daniel scoffs, tries to whitesplain, and is rightly shut down. Why must people of colour in period dramas only be shown suffering the oppression characterising that time, Mr. Molloy? This isn’t that kind of show anymore, Mr. Molloy, we’ve said all there is to be said on the inherent whiteness of vampire fiction tropes! It’s not about the shitty white boyfriend anymore, it’s about the “awakening” Louis found with the true “love of his life”, Mr. Molloy! Keep up.
Unlike the first season of IWTV, historical racism is given very little room for explicit discussion in its second. Present-day Daniel continues to spew micro-aggressions until Louis puts the fear of Louis into him, but back in Paris, Louis lives as an unbothered American tourist “grateful knowing no one wanted to lynch (him) or direct (him) to the far corner of the café.” Even Claudia felt safe there at first, assuring Louis after their first coven meeting, “Fourteen hapless vampires being led by a vampire with skin darker than yours? What else is there to be scared of?”
Standing backstage at the theatre beneath a painting of the co-founder Lestat, Louis and Claudia lie to the Paris coven about their true Maker. Armand, whose coven refers to him with the “endearment” Maître (Master), clocks from Louis’ unguarded thoughts that it is in fact Lestat. In their first full conversation together, flirting and smoking while a mansion of rich people is massacred in the background, Armand tells Louis to not bother lying to him about Lestat, and sternly warns him to keep the details of his acquaintance from the coven. When the intimidated Louis answers “As you suggest, Maître,” Armand tells Louis he’s allowed to call him by his name.
It’s a gesture of intimacy, and tangentially can be seen as the first step towards establishing their eventual sub/dom roles as sexual partners. But it’s also likely, given Armand’s own past relationship with Lestat, that he figured not having to call another man “Master” was an assurance that might endear Louis to him after whatever he may have experienced back in America. Because it’s not about the shitty white boyfriend anymore, Mr. Molloy! It’s about the new guy who isn’t limited by the white gaze and can thereby empathise with his fellow man of colour.
Which of course, Armand does not. Not really. It’s not empathy, it’s calculated. The racism of mid-20th century Europe has only been downplayed in the interview to paint Louis’ place by Armand’s side as safer and more idyllic than the white shadow of Lestat. Claudia had always been a sort of fire alarm in Louis’ life, making sure he knew when Lestat had burned him. Though Louis spends much of this season separate from Claudia, her diaries still help clear the air from smoke.
The racism Claudia herself experiences from the Parisian public and the other coven members is recorded, and notably not redacted. And if Armand really did tell Louis not to call him Maître out of principled racial sensitivity, he would have extended that same consideration to Claudia. And also not made her perform on stage in minstrel-esque makeup. Don’t worry about what Claudia may or may not have written about Armand in those pages he surgically removed, Mr. Molloy.
Arun
As for Armand himself, being a brown South Asian man in post-war Europe racialises him in a different way to Louis and Claudia. We can infer that he, who in the story’s present day is 514 years old, would have been born around the time of the first European invasion of the Indian subcontinent by Portugal. But Armand is never shown experiencing direct instances of racism (other than Daniel’s micro-aggressive gag about Shah Rukh Khan). Instead, the historical implications of his ethnicity manifest metaphorically.
Towards the end of the novel, after Louis burns the theatre down, he enlists Armand’s help to break into the Louvre. He hopes the celebrated art he’d been denied in his sun-challenged state will break his grief for Claudia, but finds only disappointment.
“I had gone to the Louvre that night to lay down my soul, to find from transcendent pleasure that would obliterate pain and make me forget even myself… Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understand of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing… The magnificent paintings of the Louvre were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone.”
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (1976)
The television adaptation instead pulls this museum visit back to the middle of the season, and recontextualises it as a romantic date of sorts. The scene is no longer about Louis’ grief, it’s about Armand. Standing before a 400-year-old oil painting of his young mortal self, he summarises his own tragic history.
“This is Amadeo. He’s 20 years here. He was rescued from a brothel when he was 15, named… named Arun then, I think. I cannot be sure. The abuse of the brothel was such that he cannot be sure that is what his parents named him. Arun. The parents that sent him to work on a merchant boat in Dehli when in actuality they had sold him into slavery to the ship’s captain. All fragments. Shackled on the boat. The brothel. My Maker’s purchase. His renaming me. His reluctance to share the Dark Gift, knowing what it would do to his beloved Amadeo. I served him with all my heart. Basked in his mercy, his worshipful mercy. Still… Amadeo had a skill. And if a friend wandered into town, I was occasionally… donated.”
He lost his Hindu-originated name “Arun” when he was trafficked from Dehli as a child, was renamed “Amadeo” by his paedophile Maker the vampire Marius, then finally assigned “Armand” by the Roman coven before they sent him to France. He’s also lost his voice in a way, shown code-switching and adopting different accents in different settings. Throughout world history, colonised peoples have often been forced to adopt the languages and names of their oppressive colonisers as a way to erase their cultural identities.
Armand’s history was essentially colonised. His personal sexual trauma is an allegory for wider colonial and orientalist trauma. This idea was explored similarly in Park Chan-wook’s 2016 film The Handmaiden, where the character Hideko’s forced exposure to pornographic Japanese literature as a child is meant to parallel the colonial oppression of the Japanese occupation of Korea.
The only evidence remaining of Armand’s experiences of sexual and colonial violence is this painting The Adoration of the Shephards With a Donor that hangs in the Louvre. Another cruel irony here is that ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ is an episode of Jesus’s nativity. Arun as a (presumably) Hindu boy was used as a prop in a Christian narrative. The one historical document that exists of his mortal life is a depiction of his religious assimilation. Completely divorced from his roots, with no identity outside the roles his abusers assigned him, Armand, Amadeo, and Arun “were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone.” Being immortalised, “donated”, and placed on display in a European museum, a space he’s not even really allowed to access, for the mostly-white gaze is a clear metaphor for colonisers’ persisting theft of cultural artefacts belonging to their victims.
The only consolation this journey has for Armand is creative inspiration. He took Amadeo, trapped in the horror of his youth for the entertainment of others, and transferred that idea into the play My Baby Loves Windows to torture Claudia.
Actually, another visible outcome from this are his attempts to fetishise his own trauma with his romantic partners. When considering his code-switching, there is also something to be said here about the characterisation Armand adheres to while disguised as Rashid during season 1. Rashid, the South Asian servant of a Dubai millionaire, who is clearly in a sexual relationship with his employer. Louis’ origins as a Black American dilute Armand’s script to some degree, but his intention is clear in the subtext.
Othello*
Armand was a slave to a paedophile, then a slave to a cult, until he and Lestat founded the Théâtre des Vampires and was then left to govern that coven by enforcing the “Great Laws” using the power he’d slowly amassed as he grew Ancient. In this position held together by rules, Armand achieved the most autonomy he’d had in his life thus far.
Therefore the next thing to consider is Armand’s relationship with the coven, specifically Santiago. At a few points early in the season he expresses resentment towards Armand for his strict hand and the harsh finality of his punishments. There is no overt racial tension between them, but this show has always had an adamant opposition to colour blindness (up until this point). It means something that Armand is a brown South Asian man in mid-20th century Europe, post-war and post-Partition, and that Santiago is a white English man, the youngest vampire of the coven, whose time in human society, specifically white British society with all its colonial prejudices, would have been relatively recent.
The show even goes so far as to provide Santiago’s mortal backstory as the actor Francis Norton, “the best Iago to walk the York Royal”, directly connecting his career to the role of one of the most famous fictional racists of all time, Iago from Othello.
*Given his own anti-Blackness, it is discomforting to dwell on the parallels between Armand as a character and Othello himself, but the main plot comparisons to draw here are that Iago is an antagonist whose racism drives him to topple the authority of a man of colour; through quietly influencing dissent amongst Othello’s followers, then by stoking his jealousy far enough to kill the woman he loves, who is, more relevantly in this case, the daughter of a man he needs in his favour.
When considering these subtextual parallels, it becomes difficult to believe that Sant-IAGO, with his particular and general history, doesn’t take any issue with being beholden to a brown man, or with seeing the Great Laws this brown man brutally wielded to keep him in a choke hold and his Maker in a box be inconsequential to the two new Black vampires in town.
And Armand is fully aware of this. He wants Louis, but he knows by the Laws he himself imposed that he can’t get out clean.
Director
And so Armand placates Santiago’s racist animosity by betraying those two new Black vampires, throwing Claudia and Louis into the coven’s jaws. Louis is ultimately ‘rescued’ and sentenced to banishment over death while Claudia is left to perish.
I Could Not Prevent It is one of the most powerful episodes of television in recent years, following beats of recent publicised spectacle trials of high-profile abuse victims such as Amber Heard and Evan Rachel Wood when they were sued for defamation by their abusers, and even the horrific treatment of Megan Thee Stallion by the public during her own assault trial. Echoing recent films about this cruel phenomenon like Anatomy of a Fall and Saint Omer, the episode delivers a fresh and brutal commentary full of conviction on the racialised experiences of Black and queer abuse victims. Though highly genre-specific, this episode of IWTV is strikingly un-metaphorical in its interrogation of the roles racism and patriarchy have to play in cycles of abuse.
Though the episode is primarily a commentary on the depths of evil of white racists like Lestat will sink to, employing DARVO tactics against their Black abuse victims (discussed further here), Armand’s role in the scripted trial cannot be ignored. Whether he was a passive, opportunistic bystander with a flimsy alibi or an active director, he is complicit in the anti-Black racism experienced by Claudia and Louis at the trial.
This is not to argue that Armand is in fact worse than the show’s white antagonists, or that he is the ‘true’ villain over Lestat, but he certainly is another villain (for anyone somehow still in doubt by this point) in Louis’ life who is not above enacting and/or enabling racist violence to abuse him. Armand’s front as a safer alternative for Louis to Lestat and his whiteness is literally skin-deep. Selling them out to his shitty white ex-boyfriend and the disgruntled coven, Armand used racial hierarchies and anti-Blackness against Louis and Claudia to protect himself.
Because one of the saddest and vilest truths in our society is that non-Black people of colour are very much capable of perpetuating anti-Black racism and selfishly weaponising it to protect themselves from white racists. Non-Black people of colour, who have experienced racist violence from white people first-hand, who themselves have been victims of white imperialist colonialism and subjugation, who can even recognise their shared experiences of racism with Black people, can and have been perpetuators of anti-Black racism throughout world history and to the present day.
In the series finale, Daniel obtains the original working script of the trial-play and Armand is caught red-pencilled and exposed as the true director and co-producer of the spectacle that murdered Claudia. Though this concrete evidence is damning enough, Daniel proceeds to come in with a steel chair and proposes that Lestat is actually the one who saved Louis from the death sentence, and not Armand. While Armand’s role as director indeed checks out, this second major ‘reveal’ is a concerning and disappointing writing decision. Primarily because it drains so much conviction out of the previous episode’s commentary on racist intimate partner violence when the abuser is white and the victim is Black.
An abusive relationship always has a power imbalance. Louis can lash out all he wants, mocking Armand’s sexual trauma and hitting back when Lestat hits him, but when partnered with either of these men he will always be the victim. Throughout the season, we see Armand using his innate vampirism (Ancient dominion, memory tampering, even blood dependency) against Louis. This is in contrast to Lestat, who mostly used his social advantages of whiteness and wealth to control Louis. They’re different forms of abuse. Armand prefers more subtle emotional manipulation, but we know he’s not above going “Textbook Lioncourt.”
Armand’s empathetic moments of racial sensitivity and solidarity with Louis (which he never extended to Claudia) were calculated. The tentative sharing of his own history of racist colonial abuse, however true it may be, was calculated. Armand knows Lestat broke Louis with his racist abuse. And with the trial-play, he weaponises that trauma against him.
Whether he intended to leave Paris with Louis or not, there’s no way Armand was going to cede power over the Théâtre, the place he’d held the most autonomy in his life, to Sant-Iago without using the power of that world he controlled one more time (to kill Claudia) to establish control over his new world (Louis).
With the production of this trial, Armand platformed not only Louis’ shitty white ex-boyfriend, but also other white and non-Black vampires and humans, to indulge in the racist torture of Louis and Claudia. The trial was one last bombardment of violent white-faced racism, poisoning Louis to the world so he would retreat into the safety of the eager coffin that is Armand. In this way, Armand cleaned up Lestat’s mess and succeeded where Lestat failed. He isolated Louis by eliminating Claudia. Lestat couldn’t own Louis so he broke him, and after the trial Armand owned the pieces left of him.
There is still room for ambiguity in the text about who really saved Louis— it’s really only Daniel’s theory backed by the damning working script that makes anything else Armand says impossible to believe— but post-finale interviews with most of cast and crew confirm Lestat as Louis’ saviour. It does feel bit bizarre to argue in Armand’s case on this one detail (it doesn’t even do him any favours!), but to reiterate: positioning Lestat as Louis’ saviour from the racist trial he co-wrote and most definitely co-produced drains so much conviction out of any commentary made in the previous episode on racist intimate partner violence perpetrated by white abusers.
But anyway. Assad Zaman and Jacob Anderson truly deserve every accolade for their performances this season. Louis and Armand’s divorce is by far the most interesting thing televised in years. Interview with the Vampire has always been a series about the horror of dating a racist white person, but season 2 has also given us an impressive portrait of the horrors non-Black people of colour have in their capacity.
Congratulations to Louis du Lac on escaping them both! For now.
love this! i also thought the 'reveal' hollowed out the racial commentary by positioning lestat as louis' final white saviour quite literally.
also the forgiveness/comfort that louis extends to lestat in his post-divorce actually boiled my blood. the woobifying of lestat as some 'broken thing' just as he had made louis, as if he didnt do it to himself by not attempting to save both of them or idk NOT cowriting their death sentencing, is disgusting to watch.
I dont give a fuck if he regrets his mistake, he still had her 'stoned'- which i put in quotations because despite trying to be racially aware the writers still felt too uncomfortable committing to calling the trial a lynching. because then how could they still sympathetically portray the man who helped to orchestrate it? its plain that they still needed a way to let the audience empathise with him, so they gave him the out of having saved louis, just so they could make him the star of the next several seasons of the show ig.
i dont think i can bring myself to watch anymore of it, and i really believed that it could be better than this. a shame and a pity.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️