Some authors are proprietary about their characters; some readers even more so, which is partly why Stephen King’s novel “Misery” and the subsequent film were such successes.

When the casting for the 1994 film “Interview With the Vampire” was announced, author Anne Rice balked at the idea of Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, the antihero of the novel who becomes the main character in the subsequent books in the “Vampire Chronicles” series.

When the AMC series “Interview With the Vampire” bowed Oct. 2, some fans balked at the casting of Jacob Anderson, a Black actor, as Louis, “Interview’s” main character, and the updating of the setting to the Black Storyville section of New Orleans in the 1910s, instead of an 18th-century Louisiana plantation. Louis, they argued, wasn’t Black but white. How could the series change the essence of the character? (We should note that Rice, who died in 2021, was slated to be a producer of the series.) I would argue the new series didn’t fundamentally change the character, but it’s complicated.

Read more…