How the ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Makeup and Costume Team Created ‘Beautiful’ Vampires and ‘Elegant Bloodletting’

 

How ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Made Vampires Look ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘Classy’ When They Bleed

The first season of AMC’s “Interview With the Vampire” shows us a cool and colorful world, then makes us watch it go up in flames and blood.

Anne Rice’s awesome story of Lestat (Sam Reid), a vampire who’s been dead for ages, and his new buddy, Louis (Jacob Anderson), tells us how they got together with blood, fell in love with passion and broke up with betrayal. The series’ crafty teams made Louis and Lestat’s relationship look amazing and matchy-matchy with one thing — color.

Production designer Mara LePereSchloop and costume designer Carol Cutshall spent days playing with fabrics, picking the colors for the series, which moved Rice’s old-timey New Orleans story to the early 1900s and the city’s naughty area Storyville.

“Even though we were showing places like brothels, we imagined these places like old photos that are brown or black and white,” LePere-Schloop says, who lives in New Orleans. “That way, when we see Lestat’s townhouse — this awesome and colorful place with fancy stuff he brought from Paris — it’s like you’re jumping into a new world. It’s like what happens to these vampires. They feel everything more.”

At first, Cutshall dressed Louis like he was the heart of the story, and his yellow color changed as Lestat got more clingy.

“When he’s happy, he looks warm and golden,” Cutshall says. “That’s why when Lestat sees him, he can’t resist. He shines in this dirty world.”

To make their love look better than the people around them, Cutshall made the extras wear colors that made them look like sweaty cows, while Howard Berger’s special effects makeup team made them look gross.

“Our vampires don’t look like monsters and have pale makeup,” Berger says. “They are the prettiest people on Earth and then we made everyone else look kind of messy.”

But soon, colder colors and stripes show up in their clothes as Louis starts to feel like a pet trapped by his feelings for his maker, lover and jerk.

Even their home shows how they feel stuck. LePere-Schloop didn’t know at first that the townhouse she made for Lestat would get wrecked by their fights at the end of the season. But as they live together and make a friend in Claudia (Bailey Bass), the coffins they share and the sweet stuff they say turn into years of junk and bad feelings that start to take over.

Claudia Textile Sketch – Interview with the Vampire _ Season 1, Gallery – Photo Credit: Carol Cutshall, Costume Designer, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire/AMC Carol Cutshall

“Everyone thinks that it’s hard for us in the art department to ruin sets, but honestly I kind of like it,” LePere-Schloop says. “It makes it more real, it has a life.”

LePere-Schloop and Cutshall weren’t the only ones who used color to make things look good. Berger’s team made different kinds of blood for different things, like human blood, blood to put on actors, blood they can drink, blood that washes off and vampire blood that sparkles.

While LePere-Schloop and Cutshall made Lestat and Louis look rich and fancy, they were careful when it came to blood. “This was classy bleeding,” Berger says. “It wasn’t gross. This is how they live. That’s what blood means to our vampires.”

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