cool

Thank you SO VERY MUCH for your time as a reader and as an artist!

This is remarkable. I am really just so moved by this!

Victoria Monét 🐾

I'm not tagging this as "tvlcritical" because this issue goes beyond audience or critic opinions of AMC's The Vampire Lestat (TVL) also known as Season 3 of Interview with the Vampire. This isn’t a difference of character perspective, tone, “immoral characters”, “gothic fiction”—the writing in the "Montreal" episode is blatant hatred for Black people.

What happened?

The episode titled "Montreal" aired on Sunday, July 12, 2026 with Kevin Hanna and Ryan Kattner credited as writers; the rest of the writer's room consists of Rolin Jones, Hannah Moscovitch, Jonathan Ceniceroz, Anusree Roy, and Daniel Hart. There are zero Black writers on TVL.

3x06 is violently and proudly anti-Black, full stop. The language written and greenlit by AMC was racist, full stop. The Black actors—Jacob Anderson, Delainey Hayles, and Sarah Afful—are not responsible for the script written by a non-Black writer's room. These actors work in a deeply anti-Black industry and have to navigate the ever-present threat of being fired and/or blacklisted for any "flaw" in their performance and conduct on set/in promotional materials or events.

There is zero excuse or justification for the anti-Black language used in TVL to date. We cannot allow this hatred to be met with silence.

What can I do?

Report this episode to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Hollywood Bureau which specializes in anti-Blackness in television and film. Important details to include is the writers, episode release date, and the racist material in question. All of this information is available under the cut.

Emails to the NAACP should be addressed as "ATTENTION: Report, Hollywood Bureau" and sent to [email protected]

Emails to AMC can be sent to three TVL-specific Public Relations contacts:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

The choice is yours, but I will personally be copying the AMC contacts on my email to the NAACP. This is a serious matter and it needs to be treated as such.

Many thanks to @dulacloverboy for pulling contact info together for the NAACP and AMC <3

My email was long, cuz I also described in detail and directly linked them to additional receipts about AMC's racism, including:

the racist AF Trail and the insufficient language minimizing it as a "stoning" when Jacob explicitly called it a "lynching". Because the context of Claudia's death directly plays into just how egregious it is for her ghost to be using antiblack racist slurs against LOUIS, meanwhile her WHITE father who HELPED her get LYNCHED gets off scott free?! Make that make sense!

AMC's pisspoor racist AF marketing sidelining the Bipoc cast (with links to all the wild ish Mark Johnson & Kim Granito & Hannah Moscovitch said to downplay the Bipoc cast's importance and distance themselves from the Bipoc fanbase in order to pander to Heated Rivalry's predominately-white fanbase instead)

Let the NAACP know ALL tea, everybody. Cuz this ish has been going on for A WHILE.

[EDIT]

they would've told us what she apparently changed (did the train scene happen at all? if so, what was said?) and why ("to make Louis leave" - yes, but what did she think would be the motivating factor? fear for her safety? desire for her freedom? guilt that he's being used as the justification? and why did she really want him with her when she can operate alone?)

instead, it is transparently an attempt to soften the racial commentary and abuse this show depicted in season 1 with the slave-catcher imagery of the train scene, with Claudia referring to Lestat as "Massa" and saying to Louis, "we are his slaves and i will free us both"

if it was at all about Claudia - and in an act of supreme irony, it is very much not about Claudia - the focus of the seance wouldn't've been on her supposedly dressing up the train scene with runaway-slave imagery, or on her saying that Louis is inherently a slave (which...sorry AMC, even if I could swallow that she'd say that specifically - "it's in the book" is not really true and does not justify this choice either way - you can't have a slave without a slave-owner, so you haven't even achieved your goal of 'freeing' Lestat from the commentary that makes you so anxious and uncomfortable. unless they're trying to say that Claudia is the slave-owner? jfc).

if it was about Claudia, the focus would've been on properly unpacking any one of the million very legitimate grievances that she had with Louis and Lestat. we had a few bites of interesting content in that scene, but it should've been a Claudia-centric feast.

it's cowardly and it's racist. yes, you can make it work with Claudia's characterisation if you're motivated enough, and yes, you can find a way to rationalise it with the show's plot to date if you have to.