Vampires were only the beginning, it seems. The AMC network has just announced that its adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved novel Interview With the Vampire (which recently cast Sam Reid as Lestat) will be joined by a Mayfair Witches series, based on Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches book trilogy.
Although the books, which came out in the early 1990s, were all bestsellers upon publication, they’re not nearly as well known as Rice’s Interview With the Vampire and the Vampire Chronicles series it kicked off. Mayfair Witches seems quite complicated, but here are the basics. Like many of Rice’s books, it’s set primarily in New Orleans, where a doctor named Rowen Mayfair discovers she’s the latest in a long-time family of powerful witches. Of course, it’s not nearly so straightforward as that, as there’s multi-generational drama, a secret society poking about, and a mysterious, evil entity named Lasher that has haunted the family for centuries in hopes of regaining a corporeal body.
Having read the Wikipedia summaries for the three Mayfair books, my question is: how in the hell is AMC going to adapt this? Because the books seem to be filled with sexual violence, taboo-breaking, and other pretty upsetting things. Just omitting the presumed nudity would not mitigate these scenes’ problematic cores at all, especially in terms of their sheer volume. I suppose the network must have some idea of how to adapt the show without it making Game of Thrones’ many problems somewhat tame in comparison, but we’ll see.
Characters from the Mayfair Witches novels make appearances in three books in the Vampire Chronicles series, meaning if all goes well for the two series the potential for a crossover is quite high. In total, AMC has the live-action adaptation rights to 18 of the author’s novels, so chances are Interview and Mayfair are only the beginning of this burgeoning Rice-a-verse.
Esta Spaulding and Michelle Ashford, who both worked on Showtime’s series Masters of Sex, will both write and produce Mayfair Witches, while Spaulding will also serve as the showrunner. The show has a very generalized release date of 2022, as does Interview With the Vampire. We’ll keep you posted.