vkusno

Bro what??? How are your actors not at least apprised of what's coming??? Why did they spend months in that Writer's mansion in LA if they couldn't even give them the full scripts ahead of time??? Rolin Jones, dude WTF

Full interview here:

Magnolia

😭 And like, actors can ask for notes. They can ask for clarification on why their character is written a certain way so they can better perform the scene and the needed emotions. Assad still not knowing about the branding means either, he wasn’t given an explanation or the explanation made zero sense!

Also the Big Boss performance was already very dehumanizing, but now that it’s been confirmed Lestat was there for retaliation, it’s just more disturbing. Lestat mocking Armand for murdering Claudia when he played a major role himself?? And ghost!Claudia didn’t have ANYTHING ELSE to say to Lestat at the seance??????

And of course you shouldn’t bank everything on interviews. They’re good for clarification, but ultimately, canon is only what’s established in the show itself. They can still offer good insight though, especially when it comes to ambiguous moments.

The season 1 ending reveal? That shit never made any, like, sense, it was clearly just there to be a capital T Twist (that I always thought must have been super lame for show-only watchers, because they don't even know who Armand is and why they should care). Sure, people kept making memes about kink roleplay after the season dropped ("heeheehaha Armand has to listen to his husband wax poetic about their shared ex's dick"), but the entire season "arc" of fake Rashid is brushed aside for a bitchy Daniel joke comment and that's it. Sure, whatever. I guess. At least it gave us a lot of Devil's Minion fanfiction.

Season 2 rolls around. Armand gets the double whammy of being made both weaker and more maliciously manipulative than his book counterpart ever was. Weaker in several ways - weaker in his convictions (he wants Louis "more than anything in the world"? No, he doesn't, he is willing to have him lynched to appease Santiago and the coven at a moment's notice! He is in fact very willing to give up on Louis!) and influence (He bows to the whims of the same Santiago he had at his complete mercy feat. Shakespearean insults in a previous episode! He is not in control of the actual coven to the point where they all point and laugh at him to his face re: "Companions? - Yes/No."! He could not possibly even attempt to save Louis from the sham trial, Lestat does that!). Even in his own version of the Paris tale, he is discarded by Lestat all-too-easily. His marriage to Louis is built on spite, not so much any actual fascination or love Louis holds for him for his own sake rather than in comparison to Lestat. He gets added backstory trauma in addition to his ALREADY VERY TRAUMATIC source material backstory. The traumatic backstory monologue in the Louvre, so beautifully performed by Assad Zaman, is undercut by a cut of Hallucination Lestat barking for... comedic? ... effect.

Louis gets stripped of the character beat of knowing about Armand's involvement in Claudia's trial the whole time and STILL choosing him. Instead, the new season finale twist is a... gasp! Armand betrayal! Is the audience shocked yet? Armand, who the show made a thief of both Daniel's and Louis' memories, who oh-so-cruelly let Louis suffer in sunburnt agony before deigning to give him his healing blood, who tortured Daniel for days. Armand, whose response to this grand reveal is to sit there dumbly, call out to Louis, silently stare at Daniel and get slammed into a wall. The last shot we see of him is cowering on the ground, covered in debris. The follow-up to the OG plot twist is that Armand has done another shocking thing - Daniel is now a vampire! SURE. Okay. Let's still see where they go with this, I thought.

Season three airs. The Paris era of Armand's satanic cult is not revisited at all. Armand's seemingly only autonomous action towards Nicki is his initial kidnapping - he doesn't actually cut off his hands and lock him in solitary confinement as a measure to counter his erratic moods, you see, he now just stands in a corner and has to be prompted by Lestat to "help" Nicki. We cut away from Nicki's actual death. Show!Armand does not get to push Lestat off a tower to break every single bone in his body, to gloat at his disheveled and pathetic state post-trial. If anything, Lestat gets to gloat over Armand's lack of knowledge re: Akasha (and Marius by extension, but the show is very particularly skittish about actually doing anything substantial with Marius as a character or even let Armand explore any feelings he might have about that dynamic, which given the Louvre monologue is A CHOICE). Armand - book!canonically very much a switch, by the way - spends the season being insulted by several characters specifically for being a bottom sub sprinkled with a general sense of derision and implication that characters find the thought of genuinely loving him, or even having mind-blowing ("rings of Saturn"-esque, pehaps) sex with him either hilarious (Lestat) or gag-inducing (Daniel). A character who was originally defined by being essentially too desirable for his own good.

Vampire!Daniel is a non-starter - no true exploration of his new existence and all of his scenes with Armand fall flat because while especially their season 2 dynamic was built on tension and things left unsaid, season 3 seems to think "tell don't show" is a winning strategy. Unless you hardcore project a certain well-known chapter from Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned (1988) onto this (which you can't, you are forced to make up fanfic to fill in the gaps to make up for substantial deviations even in the best case scenario), there is nothing of substance to hold onto. Armand gets instead to be insulted by his only fledgling (and past lover? Show is still technically ambiguous on that part) re: his "shitty" blood, with the implication that what keeps Daniel with him is not even anything like journalistic or personal curiosity, but the prospect of incest gossip and the ability to walk in the sun. "Ooooh just wait maybe in season four-" shut up boooo tomato tomato, I simply do not believe the writers care about developing their dynamic at this point. AO3 is all we have left, folks.

Armand gets no character to truly bounce off of this season. Freshly divorced-from ex-husband Louis? Torture sequence and the Regina reveal as Shocking Plot Twist #3.5 (aren't they tired). Past lover and complicated narrative foil Lestat? He is dismissed and insulted and little else. Gabriella? She gets to make snide comments about Marius while show!Armand does not even get to fire back with cutting insights about the true emotional disconnect between her and Lestat and the resulting instability of their bond, mainly because the character assassination of Gabrielle has made that point null and void! Marius? Essentially not relevant, somehow (HOW?). You know who Armand gets to hang around with? Lestat's fucking band OCs. Just what we were all looking forward to, I am sure.

Like many, many people already said: I WANT Armand to do terrible things, but I want them to be IN CHARACTER. I want his character to still be treated seriously. But so far the main role Armand seems to have been assigned is "plot twist dispenser and temporary obstacle to Loustat OTP".