The Cruel Beauty of Armand in AMC's "Interview with the Vampire"
Assad Zaman gives an emotionally taut performance as one of Anne Rice's most enigmatic and tragic immortals.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
As we gear up for the sixth episode of this season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, I thought it was high time to take a closer look at one of the series’ most intriguing and enigmatic characters, Armand. It’s become increasingly clear as this season has unspooled that he is just as much of a queer villain as Lestat, though arguably a more subtle one. Unlike the blonde-haired Brat Prince, Armand prefers to work from the shadows, employing tools of subtle (and not-so-subtle) emotional manipulation to get what he wants, whether from the coven he leads or from Louis.
The characterization of him in the series is somewhat at odds with the one in the book–both Interview and his own point-of-view book that bears his name. The latter paints him in a rather melancholic and tragic light, and you won’t be surprised to find that way back in my high school days I found Armand to be one of Rice’s most compelling immortal creations. I’ll also admit that this was largely because I saw a great deal of myself in his story, particularly in his jealousy of Lestat. Unlike the latter, who was always capable of spreading chaos wherever he went (to say nothing of making everyone fall in love with him), Armand seemed to always be relegated to the shadows, condemned to watch and desire his charismatic nemesis.
That being said, I do think Assad Zaman is closer to the character Rice created than Antonio Banderas (no shame to the latter, of course. He’s great as Armand in the 1994 film, but that is definitely a very different kind of Armand). He’s subtler and slyer, for one thing, but also far more haunted and tragic. He embodies so many of the contradictions that have always characterized Rice’s vampiric creations, and he makes us pity him even as we are also more than a little repulsed at the actions he takes towards those whom he claims to love.
Take, for example, the fateful moment in Paris when he takes Louis on a tour of the Louvre. As the two stand gazing at an exquisitely-crafted Renaissance painting, he relates his own history: taken from India as a child by slavers, brought under the tutelage of Marius, stolen from his maker and forced to become leader of a coven. This might not be exactly the same story as it was in the book (book Armand was from the Kievan Rus rather than India), in many respects it does match, and it’s as full of tragedy and pain. You can see and feel Armand’s remembered agony as he recounts the downfall of Marius at the hands of other vengeful vampires, just as you can also feel his anguish at the memory of that same Marius using him as a young prostitute.
Given this background, is it any wonder that Armand becomes so desperate to find connection and that he gravitates so much to the vulnerable Louis? He sees in the younger immortal someone that he can take under his wing, someone who can, perhaps, give him the emotional and spiritual satisfaction that he has so desperately sought through the long and tedious centuries. And, given that his own life has been marred by the actions of others, it makes sense that he would prove to be quite manipulative in his own right. In this universe of immortal vampires, trauma is even more self-perpetuating than it is among mortals, echoing down the centuries.
It’s not until the fifth episode of the second season, however, that we really see how deeply Armand’s duplicitousness goes, once we learn the extent to which he has deliberately distorted the truth about the original interview and its aftermath. It takes a pretty cold-hearted immortal to go to all of the trouble of brainwashing both Louis and Daniel in order to hide the truth of what happened that fateful night in the 1970s. As I’ve written before, there were already signs that there was more to Armand than he was letting on. This was the vampire, after all, who masqueraded as someone else for an entire season, before the reveal in the finale showed that he’d been Armand all along.
What makes Armand such a great queer villain is the extent to which he seems to truly believe that he’s in the right when it comes to his actions with Louis. Say what you will about him, but he truly does seem to love the other man, for all that he’s frustrated with him and can’t quite wrap his head around why Louis would find humans so compelling and so fascinating. All of which makes it that much more remarkable that he can’t even do Louis the courtesy of telling him Lestat’s message of love. It’s one of the pettier things that he does, and while it’s clear what his motivations are–he’s hardly going to tell Louis the truth, considering the extent to which the latter remains beholden to him, in all senses of the word–it’s still hard not to do a bit of a double-take. He’s a cold bastard, is Armand, but he draws us in despite (or perhaps it’s because?) of that coldness.
There are many things that I love about the television adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, but I think the thing that makes me the happiest is the way that it really does justice to the moral ambiguity of Anne Rice’s vampires. We love these creatures and are enchanted by them, but we’re never really allowed to forget that in their allure also lies their great danger. The longer they live, the less human they become, increasingly unbound to anything resembling quotidian human morality. This is precisely what makes his relationship with Louis so fraught, for if there’s one thing that you can say about Louis, it’s that he is the one vampire in the entire Vampire Chronicles who retains the strongest ties to his mortality.
In the end, there is something cruel yet beautiful about Assad Zaman’s Armand, with his finely-carved face and his glowing eyes. We understand why Louis finds him desirable, even as we also recoil from the things of which he is so manifestly capable. As the series races toward its conclusion, I’ve no doubt that we will see more examples of Armand’s exquisite queer villainy.