Davies gets into flow of vampire role
By: Bob Sokolsky, The Press-Enterprise
November 21, 1994
And now it's Tom Cruise.
And as even lackadaisical horror film and TV fans know by now, Anne Rice didn't want him to play her sharp-toothed hero, Lestat.
But she finally relented and she's become very happy about the whole thing, especially since the film version of her "Interview with the Vampire" has opened so well.
That makes the movie a worthy - and from all accounts more lucrative - companion to "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," the production that is winning a new corps of fans for Robert De Niro,
who appears to have picked up where Randy Quaid left off when he humanized the legendary monster in a 1993 TNT film.
Meanwhile, Geraint Wyn Davies is going blithely along, gathering his own brigade of followers while developing a vampire character that was already established well before Cruise had
become a gleam - or maybe it's a speck - in Rice's eye.
He's doing it the hard way, too. In most sections of the country his Nick Knight, star of Tristar's syndicated "Forever Knight" series, is well removed from prime time. In this area, for example, it has been turning up at midnight Sundays on KTLA (Channel 5). That's a rather appropriate hour when you come to think of it and Davies himself is well pleased with the strategy behind it.
"This is a fringe show," he says. "I don't know if it would do well at 9 p.m. But in time slots like this it is developing both a cult following and a mainstream audience. "
That development is taking place in a 2-year-old series that spotlights Davies as a 13th-century holdover currently struggling to cope with both the 1990s and his powerful blood lust. His present occupation is that of a police detective who, for reasons that are obvious to students of this culture, works the night shift. Catherine Disher is Natalie Lambert, the good lady pathologist who knows his secret, and Nigel Bennett is LaCroix, the seductive vampire leader who keeps trying to lure Knight back to the ancient ways.
"Nigel seems to be getting the darker letters from viewers," Davies says. "Mine are much more supportive, people saying they hope the character can finally find the peace he is seeking. A few
of our letters are kinky, but there aren't many whacky ones and certainly none that are scary. "
Davies, whose early training was in the theater, believes the new interest in vampires is more of "a cyclical thing" than the popularity of Rice's Lestat stories. "But I don't see how you can
avoid the Anne Rice influence," he says. "That's a definite factor.
And before her there was Bram Stoker. "
However, he adds, there are a lot of other reasons as well.
"There's the appeal of the bad guy trying to make good. There's the idea of immortality, and that's very powerful. Death is the biggest fear we have and here's a species that defies it. "
But the range of that defiance is changing for Knight. "He sometimes gets more melancholic," Davies says. "I've noticed that this year. There is now - what should I call it? - a forever angst
attached to him. But he stays the reminder of how difficult it is to be the outsider. "
The important thing, though, is to be a specific kind of outsider. That's why Davies, who had a recurring part in an earlier "Dracula" series, rejected the starring role of a vampire in another
production before turning to "Knight. " "I just didn't want to be associated with vampires," he says. "But this gives me some playing room. It's a 1994 cop show, not some 1600 vampire story. "
Copyright 1994 The Press Enterprise Co