I've said this before, but--
I'm adoring all of the purposeful changes they've made to the original story, but the single best one is making Daniel Molloy a dying, acerbic, past-it old fart who truly doesn't give a fuck and has zero time or patience for bullshit.
Daniel "The Boy" Molloy is, as he has always been, the audience surrogate. In the original Interview (in which he is not named, and the only details we get about him are "he's a reporter" and "Louis thinks he's a cutie") he's the perfect stand-in for an audience raised on Dracula and horror movie monsters. "Golly gee willikers," says Purple-Eyed Like Sirius' Black's Long-Lost Daughter Daniel Molloy in 1977, putting his slingshot back in his pocket. "This world you're showing me sure is sensual and compelling but somehow also monstrous and unnerving, Mr. de Point du Lac! It sure would be swell if you made me a vampire!" To which Louis responds by slapping the propeller beanie off Daniel's head, followed by sucking out like 70% of his blood.
We next see him years later, in the 80s, dying of alcohol poisoning and general neglect on a park bench, having been Armand's secret lover for the better part of a decade, a barely functional schizoid drunk, any of his ability to engage with or appreciate the living world destroyed by his brush with immortality. In this appearance, I think he represents the super fans, the people who were obsessed (and, my little padawans, people were o b s e s s e s e d. It didn't have the cultural ubiquity of Twilight Mania, but The Vampire Chronicles walked so that shit could run. I leave it to you to figure out why something so evocative of queer loneliness and alienation, coupled with the awareness of the inevitability and nearness of death, was REAL big with the homos and counterculture in the 1980s).
Finally, we come to the new series. The original novel is 50 years old. It has that kind of past-it, feels-pretty-derivative vibe that I get from reading like, Lord of the Rings. It defined so much of the genre that it feels inescapably generic. "Well of course they're existentially tormented," says new reader, rolling their eyes. "OBVIOUSLY they're mourning their lost humanity while leaning erotically against a wrought-iron fence. That's what vampires DO, besides drink blood and serve in the Confederate army for some fucking reason do not even get me started on the baffling and unexamined ubiquity of that shit."
So this time, Daniel represents an audience STEEPED in vampirism, who can't walk five steps without tripping over some tortured dreamboat wrong-side-of-the-Civil-War-vet with soulful eyes and his cock out. He lives in a world where vampires appear on fucking Burger King cups. He was a fan back in 1977, he was taken in by Louis' self-serving self-pity, he was drawn by the sensuality and the Philosophy 101 stoned-undergrads-at-3:00am musings.
But now, Daniel's old. He knows about dying and death in ways he didn't, couldn't, fifty years ago. He's a world-famous investigative journalist who has spent his life steeped in atrocity and (based on what we hear about his books) listening to the self-serving lies that people come up with to justify their evil. He's spent decades asking questions that hit right at the balls, and it doesn't matter that there's almost 700 years of bullshitter sitting on a couch holding hands in front of him, he's up to the task.
He's not impressed. He's not enamored. Louis offers him the Blood and Daniel tells him to piss off. The glamorous, immortal Vampire is no different from the Enron executive: a bad person serving bullshit to make themselves feel better.
And he is having none of it. And that's why I think he's the single best addition they could have made.
And also he thinks he's straight and he's very angry that Louis gives him a boner GOOD NIGHT.
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