Your ‘Interview With the Vampire’ tattoos humble (and horrify) showrunner Rolin Jones

Be who you want to be and be that thing for all eternity.

Be everything you want to be and be that thing for all eternity.

Be all the beautiful things you are and be them without apology, for all eternity.

These are three iterations of the same line from various drafts of the pilot episode for AMC’s “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire.” And there’s probably a perfectly fine 800-word essay one could write about the little journey Anne’s desperate line of seduction made along its way to television immortality. Except Anne Rice didn’t write that particular line of “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire.” I did. And were you going to just blow past the words “television immortality” and move on to the next sentence? ’Cause, yeah, that’s quite the boast coming from a writer who almost certainly got this gig because Mike White or Quinta Brunson turned it down. Well, it’s a fact. And I know it’s a fact, because recently, while dragging my knuckles through writing Season 3 of this same show, it was brought to my attention that several people sharing our planet have tattooed the third iteration of that line onto their bodies. And this is the weirdness I’d like to share with you today.

Jacob Anderson, left, and Assad Zaman in “Interview with the Vampire.”

(Larry Horricks / AMC)

My first reaction to seeing internet photos of the physical evidence was, “Well, that must be fake.” When I saw a second photo of the line on a second body (different body part, more modern font), I heard myself mutter, “Oh, dear.” I followed that quickly with a performative “why” and twice a week ever since, when I remember these horrors have occurred, I stop what I’m doing and consider tracking down these souls and offering them money for ink-removal sessions. In these reveries, I tell Those Who Have Been Inked my concerns. I tell them about the guy I once saw at Casey’s Tavern in Woodland Hills with a Where’s the Beef tattoo. How friendless he seemed nursing his can of Hamm’s underneath the No Swearing reminder. I tell them to consider the inevitable moment many years from now (after the robots have enslaved us all) when they are staring at their betraying flesh in the bathroom mirror, deciphering the lateral backward words, “Be all the beautiful things you are and be them without apology, for all eternity” and shouting back, “I DID! AND LOOK WHAT F— HAPPENED!” The reveries always end poorly, usually with me shouting something like “Your body is a miracle!” and their owner robot escorting me off its property.

Speaking of robots, when you type the line B.A.T.B.T.Y.A. (451 words so far, people), Google’s Generative AI search spits this out. “The phrase is often attributed to the character Lestat de Lioncourt from the Anne Rice’s ‘Interview With the Vampire.’” The grammar-challenged robot continues: “The phrase resonates because it speaks to the universal human desire for authenticity and self-acceptance. It suggests that true beauty comes not from conformity or striving to be someone else, but from embracing one’s own unique essences, even it’s imperfect or unconventional.”

Rolin Jones.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Really? I wrote it and I’m not sure I believe all that. Of course, I’m what the biz calls one of those “given-circumstance hacks.” And when I think back to the salad days of COVID-19, when I was massaging the line, I think I was mostly trying to figure out how vampire Lestat de Lioncourt could get himself out of the two-murdered-priests hole he had dug himself in with the mortal Louis de Pointe Du Lac. Make him feel seen. The kids love that sentiment. Oh yeah, maybe cast a very attractive Australian with a voice that sounds like what a Hästens mattress would sound like. Just get it to Episode 2. No one’s tattooing this on their body.

Except they did. And as I type (655 words in, you’re almost there, stay strong), I have now seen three separate tattoo photos with this line of text inked on flesh along with several other photos of different lines or images from our show on other parental-saddening torsos. And yeah, it fills me with horror. But it’s also quite humbling. These beautifully unwell fans we have, they’ve taken the thing we wrote (from Anne’s lovely novels) and made it a permanent part of their lives. They carry the words with them wherever they go. These are generally young people doing this. And more than the horror or the humility, or the primal fear of servitude to robot overlords, they remind me of when I was young. When I loved things with that kind of intensity.

Mike and Quinta, enjoy your Emmys. I have two arms and a thigh.