Nope. They've very deliberately chosen to go in a Denis-free direction. If we're lucky, maybe they'll give some other random character the name "Denis" as an easter egg like they named the modern vampire in S2E8 "Felix" and the random kid at the Transylvanian inn "Andrei." And maaaaaybe that random character will be vaguely tangentially somehow connected to book-Denis, the way the random human doctor in Dubai was named "Fareed" (but has no other connection whatsoever to being the Fareed from the books other than being a human doctor.) Like maybe the easter egg character named "Denis" will be hired to run a random errand for Armand at some point? But he will absolutely not be Armand's kept pet. Armand will have no kept human pets at all in the show. From all the authors have said, his weird relationship dynamics going forward are going to be focused on Daniel only, who is no longer human.

The closest we'll ever get to Denis in the show is the guys we saw Louis "humanely" feeding off of in Season 1, Damek and Fake Rashid. I wouldn't call Real Rashid a substitute for Denis at all, as he is a purely professional servant, not a lover/pet. Denis didn't really act as a servant to Armand (unlike how Daniel was Armand's proper minion in later years), and we never see Real Rashid acting as a blood snack to Louis or Armand, or behaving as if he was depleted and weak the way Damek was afterwards, so we can conclude that Armand doing it as Fake Rashid wasn't something they actually do with Real Rashid.

So yeah, no Denis in the TV show, I'm sorry to say. But can you blame them? They had to soften up the edgy and creepy parts of Anne's story so so much to make it acceptable for AMC's network standards that I can absolutely see why the Denis character was one of the first things that got the ax in the Paris portion of the story. When writers for a network like AMC are thinking about their audience, they will think things like "watchers won't take Armand's love for Louis seriously if he already has another lover." Even if they aged Denis up to be an adult, so they won't be worrying about audiences being grossed out by Armand being a pedophile with his child lover, they'd still want him to be single to start with. They'd also be thinking "watchers would think he's too creepy and gross if he has this human he's keeping like a sex slave who's addicted to his vampire blood/bite." Yes, to fans of the Gothic, we're here for that kind of twisted stuff, but the authors are thinking of the mainstream audience who they want to capture, so they have to make the Louis/Armand romance they're setting up for the season as easy to swallow as possible so that the dark stuff they DO introduce (Armand's lies and manipulation) is where the shocks come in later. They'd want him to seem "normal' and "safe" at the beginning before the dark reveals. And if Denis had been in the picture when Louis first met him, the authors would be worried that would turn the mainstream (not-goth) audience off right away.

Overall, the AMC TV show adaptation is a very SAFE and soft adaptation of the books, made to be palatable to as many people as possible in order to make the greatest amount of money as possible--this is not a bad/cynical thing, because it means it will be able to spread as far and wide as possible so that it can last as LONG as possible. But unfortunately that means we won't ever get the best, darkest, most twisted parts of the books like Denis.

I wouldn't call those Armand's "favorites." They were just movies that "struck his fancy" at the time that they came out. That he would watch over and over for a while before he'd move onto the next one. Those were the ones he was hung up on in the early 80s when they came out. They were Of A Time, and he was fascinated by the groundbreaking emerging ideas of the zeitgeist, what the minds of human artists of the era could produce that to a vampire restricted by The Detachment seems so unreachable.

But in the 90s, Armand had moved on and was into the newest film adaptations of Shakespeare. Namely, Othello (1995), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Hamlet (1996) (specifically because Lestat told Armand that if he read all of Shakespeare he would finally understand humans, so Armand developed a HUGE Shakespeare obsession right before his suicide attempt). By then, he hadn't been into sci-fi genre stuff like Blade Runner and Time Bandits anymore in over a decade. But unlike with those films where he watched the same thing over and over again, Armand was binging through the entire Shakespeare canon, and had a huge buffet of works to read and films to watch.

I'd say it's similar for Louis and Lestat. In the late 80s/early 90s, the films Louis watches over and over again are The Company of Wolves, Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and The Dead (based on the story by James Joyce). If you haven't watched these movies, oh god, go watch them right now!! And you will see exactly why Louis of all people identified with them.

We also get an honorable mention of Louis standing in the street in the rain outside an electronics store watching Romeo + Juliet playing on a TV through the window. This is funny because at the time Anne wrote that she was fan casting Leonardo di Caprio as Lestat, so this was basically a soaking wet Louis sadly staring at a screen of a man who looks to him just like Lestat instead of just going home and being with Lestat himself 😂 This of course being the new generation version of Armand's obsession with Blade Runner because Rutger Hauer in it reminded him of Lestat. He doesn't really have the Lestat look in that movie (though he absolutely has the attitude), but look up pictures of Rutger Hauer in Turkish Delight and you'll see exactly why Anne fc him for Lestat in that era. 😁

Lestat never goes on about any particular passing favorites or obsessions with films. He mentions watching Death in Venice and Apocalypse Now and the impact their messages about evil have on him, and how good he thinks they are as films, but that's just to make a point to segue into why he needs to become a Rockstar. It's also just one example of how he watched a fuckton of movies in general when he woke up in 1984 to catch up on all he missed during his 50 year nap. But yeah, no particular favorites emerge from that edutainment endeavor.

But if you want some ideas for him, here's a good tip: look up on Anne's Facebook any time she ever mentioned any films she particularly liked, and you can bet Lestat liked them too! What Anne liked, Lestat liked, and vise versa. Lestat does also mention at one point how much vampires love to watch TV, and Anne was very into epic TV series like Game of Thrones with lots of story and lore and drama, so don't discount cinematic TV in there either!

Coming back to the word "favorite," maybe it's just the autist in me being too literal, but I guess I'm just thinking of it as like... when you live forever, it's kind of impossible to hold onto a "favorite." Something new is always going to come along to replace it. But it is nice that Anne did give us these mentions of things that the vampires were super into at least during a brief point in their lives to give us glimpses into never-ending the evolution of their tastes!

I have not! Is it good??

Tarot by Fyodor Pavlov