Eric Bogosian’s Killer Gig
Recently, the actor and playwright Eric Bogosian, seventy-three, was relaxing in his sunny, cactus-filled office, in Tribeca. Bogosian, who plays the interviewer on AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire,” is wiry and affably neurotic; onscreen and off, he seems to be urgently looking for answers. The office was homey—incense, couch, art, kitchen, books. “This is the funnest place in town,” he said. Bogosian and his wife, the director Jo Bonney, live in the building. When their sons were little, he bought a tiny second unit to write in. Later, a neighbor wanted to annex it for a piano, and in exchange Bogosian got this—a one-bedroom corner apartment with views of lower Manhattan. “I keep winning lottos in my life,” he said. “I can’t explain it beyond that.” He poured a glass of water and sat down to talk vampires.
In the series’ latest installment, titled “The Vampire Lestat,” Bogosian’s character has also become a vampire. “It was a dream come true,” he said. In 2022, he recalled, he was flying to Chicago to see a play of Bonney’s. “On the plane, I’m just, like, musing,” he said. “I go, Yeah, I’ve done a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to do. I was a bad guy in a Steven Seagal movie. I did a lot of ‘Law & Order’ episodes where I never smile in any scene”—sixty-one of them, as a police captain on “Criminal Intent.” “And, of course, ‘Talk Radio’ ”—starring in his Pulitzer-nominated play, from 1987, and the movie adaptation, directed by Oliver Stone. “Great, very dramatic. So what’s left? Oh, I want to be a vampire.” In Chicago, he went to Bonney’s place, “and there’s a call waiting for me, and it’s the offer to do ‘Vampire.’ ” Another lotto won.
As in recent roles in “Uncut Gems” and “Succession,” Bogosian makes ample use of no-bullshit directness and a piercing stare; yellow vampire eyes intensify it only slightly. “I read the book in the seventies, when it came out. I loved it,” he said. “I saw Frank Langella on Broadway playing Dracula, in 1977, around the same time. He was so powerful. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get to be that sort of vampire on this show.” Others do, “like Ben Daniels, in the second season, at the Theatre of Vampires”—debonair m.c. of a campy Parisian theatre act that disguises a coven’s live-action bloodsucking. “That’s my fantasy. I’m kind of dicey this season. I’ve had a couple of moments—I actually kill a couple of people, or I bite people.” In one, biting someone in a dressing room, he’s startled and looks up. “It’s like when you surprise a raccoon going through your garbage,” he said. Inelegant, in other words—“more like weird.” (His sort of vampire also wears a leather jacket and yells things such as “I heard there was an after-party on the asshole floor!”)
He gave a tour: black-and-white photos from his plays, including “Talk Radio,” at the Public (“Joe Papp kind of adopted me”); a Silver Bear from the Berlin International Film Festival (“I guess I should polish him”); rock memorabilia (“AC/DC is my favorite band”); a “Taxi Driver” poster, which he fondly rapped with a knuckle (“I named my second kid after Travis Bickle—I told De Niro that, and he really didn’t know what to say”). He opened a door to a library/weight room. “This is about half of the research I had to do for my book, a true story of a cadre of assassins who killed the leaders of the Armenian genocide,” he said. “So I ended up having to read all this shit.” It took seven years. “What the fuck did I know what I was doing? But, anyway, I wrote this scholarly book.”
Bogosian grew up in an Armenian community in Watertown, Massachusetts, and then in a nearby suburb. Some of his forebears emigrated before the genocide; others barely got out. “My mom’s dad escaped while his village was burning and got his mother out of there—that kind of hellacious shit. We were a typical immigrant-type family”—some accents, cousins, “and it’s all about food.” At school, he felt like an outsider. After an English teacher had him play Lord Capulet, Juliet’s father—“I rose to the occasion, very histrionic”—he joined the theatre club, where a “marvellous” teacher had students write plays. Writing and acting “were fusing from the get-go.”
Back in the cactus room, a final musing. “I don’t completely understand acting,” he said. “For me, it’s pretending to be somebody that I can’t be in real life. I saw ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ when I was a little kid and got a sheet and ran around the yard being Lawrence of Arabia. I love to make believe. That’s my place, a very happy place. More happy than actual . . . being alive.” ♦