You can live forever, but can you live with yourself? That question becomes harder to answer with each passing episode for the characters of Interview With the Vampire, retitled The Vampire Lestat with Season 3. All three seasons depict an odyssey of recollection for narrators Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid). Season 2 ends with Louis finally embracing the gift of vampirism and, by extension, himself. Season 3 ends with Lestat’s first true act of self-love and “forgiveness of the self” after he begrudgingly reflects on his origins, series creator Rolin Jones tells TV Insider. But Lestat still has a lot of evolving to do. There’s still the second half of The Failures album to play, and those tracks should contain how Akasha (Sheila Atim), the mother of all vampires, rose again and caused global destruction.
The Vampire Lestat title spotlights the vamp most responsible for triggering apocalyptic events that descended upon the world after Lestat’s tour and before he recorded The Failures, which provided this season’s narration. The July 19 finale ended with the reveal of where Lestat was recording these reflective tracks, his “failures” — from his living room and seemingly alone, but the city outside is completely destroyed. How this happened is still a mystery, but we’re led to believe it was the work of Akasha, who will wreak havoc of biblical proportions in Season 4 (should The Vampire Lestat be renewed), which Jones envisions as Part 2 of this story, just like Interview With the Vampire was split in two.
Lestat wanted to rewrite Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) portrayal of him in his memoir with Louis by reclaiming the narrative on tour with his band, but the artistic process, paired with hallucinatory muses from his past, the return of his mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), and some questioning from documentarian Daniel, made Lestat worse before it made him better. His art and narration became more honest when he finally submitted to what the music needed, but his continued exposure of vampire kind resulted in several attempts on his life, and one almost succeeded in the finale. But that’s just the beginning of the story of how he reawakened Akasha.
“There’s a clue into the storytelling that we did this year, which was probably frustrating for some people,” Jones says. “There’s a really, really strict series of points of views in Queen of the Damned [the next book in the show’s source material, Anne Rice‘s The Vampire Chronicles] that I’m pretty sure will be embraced in Season 4. Everyone’s going to get to tell their version of their things. And so in The Vampire Lestat, when we were doing The Failures, there were obviously times when we could have gone deeper into, where was Gabriella? What’s going on with Daniel? There’s a lot of time coming forward to be able to do that.”
“This is a part one,” he continues. “And when a potential Season 4 comes out, everyone will see the puzzle and see the things that we’re missing this year and why. [With] this finale, we were really trying to get into the heart and soul of Lestat. And that was the subject: the vampire Lestat. Queen of the Damned’s coming in, taking all those characters with her. But people should look to the structure of that book. We try to honor every year what Anne was doing. Go back and look at Season 1 and then what we did in Season 2. They’re all complementing each other a little bit.”
After three seasons of drama contained to one microcosm of immortal life, the story has opened up to bring the characters face to face with their ultimate maker. Will they survive judgment day?
The Queen’s Debut Hangs Over Their Heads
Atim debuted as Akasha in The Vampire Lestat Episode 5‘s flashbacks. Her scenes with Reid and Christopher Heyerdahl (Marius de Romanus) showed how Lestat became one of the most powerful vampires alive by drinking Akasha’s blood. Her arrival in the present has been looming since Season 1, but the third season’s final shot revealed the results of her return.
Rice designed Akasha as the original vampire who must be kept alive but under complete control for her species to survive. She’s awoken from her forced slumber by Lestat’s music.
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Akasha believes that male violence is the root of all suffering and wants to eradicate 90% of the male population to establish a matriarchal society, but it’s not an altruistic desire to improve the lives of women. Akasha is the show’s opportunity to bring forth more female rage after three seasons of men wreaking havoc on people’s lives while continuing to subvert gender archetypes.
“[Akasha] puts the characters into perspective,” Reid tells TV Insider. “[The show] is this wonderful slow zoom out from this very, very small living room drama in Season 1 to slightly we start to expand into what the vampire world is and the antics and we’re going into Paris and some history. Then you’re going into the deep depths of the vampire ego and the id and the internal landscape, and then taking that ego space in Season 3. As we go out of that, you put all of it in perspective and you see the bloodline that these creatures are carrying through and what the universe is, what the world is, and what the ancient experience of Akasha is as she wakes up and sees what her children have been doing.”
“For Louis and Lestat to have got to where they’ve got to at the end of the season, and then to throw Akasha into the mix, it’s going to give them a lot of perspective,” Reid adds. “There’s a lot of growth coming.”
Akasha’s life has spanned millennia, and while her body’s been immobilized by her keepers, her mind has been telepathically observing the passage of time. She doesn’t like what she sees. Anderson says that “it’s about time” for feminine energy to come in and shake things up. “They’re just such destroyers,” he says. “It’s time for the real boss, the real destroyer.”
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“This show and these books are so subversive when it comes to gender identities and sexualities and conversations about gender roles,” says Atim. “So, it’s, if anything, a continuation of what the first two seasons have brought but just ramping that up so we can see real examples of female rage, which I’m quite excited by.”
“We see glimpses of it in the other female characters that have already come,” The Woman King star adds, but with Akasha, “we get to just sit in the full force of it.”
“There is something really interesting across storytelling, across cultures of the female archetype or the mother archetype that is both creator and destroyer. Akasha is absolutely that,” Atim adds. “You know sometimes when parents are like, ‘I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it’? That’s very much her energy. That’s just fun.”
Jones puts Akasha’s past and future role in the series into perspective: “In theory, this whole season, and you could argue Seasons 1 and 2/Great Conversion, has always been dipped in this doom and great damage that’s coming. This has been a pretty male-dominated show for a while, and there’s a lot of pent-up female anger of why the world is the way it is. This show wants to do something new every season. There’s a nice exploration [to be had with Akasha]: What happens if we remove you guys and see what happens to the planet?”
“She’s a terrifying figure,” he continues. “There’s not anything level-headed that’s coming. There’s something quite Old Testament that’s coming, the feminine version of it.”
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The AMC drama has been a profound examination of humanity and the violence within it through diverse perspectives. Because we expect vampires to be monstrous, the story can use them to go the distance with emotional extremes. Because these vampires are the most human monsters, we can see ourselves in their complexities. It feels good to see them go in and out of dark places because we need to see that no one is the sum of their worst moments.
Rice made the blueprint for fiction’s humanized monster in The Vampire Chronicles. Fifty years later, Jones’ creative team is using that roadmap to explore generational trauma and abuse in many forms, ask what we owe ourselves and each other in their wake, and to give an unflinching look at flawed characters as they claw through the peaks and valleys of trying to be better. Part of the intrigue is watching why they struggle to do it despite, in theory, having all the time and power in the world.
The Vampire Lestat finale almost ended Louis and Lestat’s endless time. How will they honor their immortality now that it’s been restored and, in Lestat’s case (based on his day walking), amplified?
Reid is still as impressed by the show’s scope now as he was when he was auditioning.
“It’s so amazing that you could just make a genre show and it could just go down one route, but Rolin and Hannah [Moscovitch, executive producer/writer] use it to explore everything and anything,” he says. “It’s really fun to find yourself in interviews discussing the merits of immortality but what that means on a larger social level and where we’ve come to as a species. We could just be talking about — which we have spent a lot of time [doing] — biting people’s necks and what’s that like? But it’s transcended into this other space now.”
The Rock Star in Limbo
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The Vampire Lestat’s tour was supposed to end with the band’s biggest concert to date, with an audience full of bloodsuckers. But the concert is in limbo until further notice, despite mom-ager Gabriella’s efforts to make Lestat perform right after his and Louis’ heads were reattached.
Louis and Lestat were decapitated by Armand (Assad Zaman) and Daniel in Episode 6. What seemed like a scheme to stop the concert and the Great Conversion was a plan to get revenge on Lestat and force Louis to apologize to Armand. (The Talamasca had a vested interest in thwarting their efforts.) Lestat’s head was kept in Daniel’s bowling bag and his body left with Armand. Bogosian says they made a mechanism to make the fake head move in the bag, but it wasn’t seen.
“What really helped my performance was that Sam had so completely created this character who is so patronizing toward my character and always ridiculing me,” says Bogosian. “It gave me plenty of fuel to get into that stuff with him and then to suddenly be curtailed [by Raglan James].”
Daniel was willing to kill Lestat and had no apparent opposition to Louis’ fate, but Zaman says, “I don’t know if Armand would have gone through with it. Armand is the kind of guy that needs Louis and Lestat. I think eventually, [he] would have been like, ‘OK, you’ve had your fun, you’ve bowled. Let’s just put them back together and go.’”
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Because of Akasha’s blood, Louis and Lestat didn’t die immediately upon beheading, but they only had hours before they would.
Lestat’s consciousness was in a fever dream starring nightmare versions Louis, Gabriella, Nicki (Joseph Potter), Antoinette (Maura Grace Athari), and Magnus (Damien Atkins), conjured by his psyche as a manifestation of self-hating thoughts. Claudia (Delainey Hayles) rightly couldn’t be bothered to attend. They sat at the “Long Table” and listed Lestat’s failures as his life ended. Reid says, “It was so joyful to see everybody else play the Lestat nightmare versions of themselves.”
Gabriella was the only one to defend Lestat as his failures were listed, and Lestat welcomed the support initially. But when Magnus, who sexually assaulted Lestat when turning him into a vampire, noted their incestuous relationship and Gabriella called these things irrelevant, something changed. The “it’s different for vampires” fog parted, and Lestat viewed his sexual relationship with his mother in the critical light it’s always needed.
A montage of his life flashed before him to show that he finally understood how he continued the cycle of generational trauma that Claudia fought to break. Lestat started challenging the perspective of the nightmare fledglings, like someone questioning their negative internal monologue for the first time.
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The dream expanded and Lestat performed for a crowd of those he killed or traumatized. As his final minutes ticked away, Lestat processed his performative nature and felt compassion for his victims. Louis and Lestat’s final words pre-beheading played repeatedly before the spirit of Louis’ brother, Paul (Steven G. Norfleet), walked in, his first appearance since the pilot.
This is not confirmation that Lestat killed Paul, Jones says. “Words are slippery in fever dreams. There’s a long table with all these fledglings, and then suddenly Marius is there. It’s like every dream: Things break down.”
“We considered Paul’s entrance there the first act of self-love and forgiveness of the self for Lestat,” he continues. “Lestat could have put Louis there, but the fact that that fragmented brain pulls the thing that Louis loved the most in this world to send that message was very beautiful. Lestat’s on stage. Language gets a little fragmented. If you’re ever looking for direct truths and one-to-one correlations on our show, you’re going to have a really hard time.”
Norfleet was supposed to return in Season 2 as one of Louis’ hallucinations in Dubai, but it didn’t work out, so they moved the cameo to Season 3. The meaning behind the idea didn’t change: “There was nobody else out there to be able to cut through the self-loathing than that figure,” says Jones.
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Lestat spent what could’ve been his final moments thinking that he never heard Louis say, “I love you.” Paul told Lestat that Louis has a hard time saying it, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t. Why is Paul a fitting spokesperson for Louis’ feelings? Anderson says, “There’s a bond that Louis and Paul shared that could exist unspoken. Paul would have access to where Louis’ thoughts are going better than anyone — he and Grace [Kalyne Coleman].”
“Paul’s the last person Louis ever told that he loved them,” Anderson continues. “It’s such a big thing for Lestat, not being told that he’s loved and particularly not hearing the actual words from Louis. But Louis can’t say it because the last time he said it, Paul killed himself. [Louis thinks] that’s what happens when you tell people you love them: They leave you or they can’t handle the enormity of it. Louis needs to be able to be in situations where people can just understand it. But Lestat needs to hear it. Who better to hear it from than the last person Louis said ‘I love you’ to?”
Paul thanked Lestat for loving Louis the way he needs. They looked up at the threads of a heavenly afterlife, and Paul talked to God about sending Lestat back to life with Louis. “We confirmed that God is a woman,” Anderson wants viewers to remember. “I hope people are going to be talking about that.”
While Lestat was trapped in this limbo, Louis was in a living nightmare.
A Story of Love and Butchery
Armand put Louis’ decapitated head on a spike with his body restrained in a butcher’s shop. He used the threat of Lestat and Regina’s (Hayles) deaths to force Louis to make amends for their seven decades of coupled misery or suffer horrific consequences, such as having his head sewn onto Regina’s decapitated body (a sick riff on an Armand and Claudia scene in The Vampire Armand). Dr. Fareed (Gopal Divan) was there to study Louis’ vitals and save him if and when Armand was satisfied.
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Armand owned his role in the trial and revealed he planted Regina in Louis’ life to twist the knife of his grief. It was thrilling to see Armand in full chaotic form instead of performing versions of himself he was convinced he had to be to be loved. “That was a lot of fun,” Zaman says. “It was a long time coming.” But it was still abject horror. Zaman knew that Armand’s amends to Louis had to be different from the others. “I just didn’t know how f**ked up it was going to actually get,” he admits. “That’s a testament to Hannah and Rolin’s sick imagination, but it’s brilliant. It’s exactly how I imagine Armand would have done it.”
“I wanted Louis to wind him up more,” Anderson reveals. “They didn’t go for it, but my idea for that scene was — and I tried to put it in a second time, in ADR — Louis would keep calling him boring while his head was cut off. Every time Armand was trying to goad him to speak, he’d be like, ‘Boring. So boring.’ I recorded it.”
“Release the boring cut,” he jokes.
Regina was rather defenseless against Armand’s influence. Still, Hayles says she willingly cooperated at first and regrets it.
“Regina sees the good in Louis and wants him to do good. Obviously, in the beginning, it was very transactional. Then she sees he has a pure heart and doesn’t mean to inflict [pain],” Hayles explains. “He’s grieving. That was something she exploited. Now he’s a head in front of her, and he’s still trying to save her. It’s like, ‘Oh, I really did mess up a good thing. He was really nice to me.’”
“I’d quite like someone to be nice to Louis,” Anderson says. “Lestat’s pretty nice to Louis [this season], to be fair.”
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The extremity of the circumstances led Louis, on the brink of death, to ask if he should seek any absolution with the man torturing and trying to kill him and those he loves (again). It’s an intentionally horrific question that got a deeply human answer from Louis that Armand didn’t earn that day. It not only made Armand feel seen for the first time ever, but proved Louis has always understood Armand, to an extent. Louis acknowledged the parallel of his history as a pimp and Armand’s history of childhood sexual slavery, and the fact that they fell into a slippery dom-sub dynamic without talking about why each of them needed it to feel safe or in control. It was the last thing Armand expected to hear.
“I almost feel like it was the love or the grace somebody gives somebody that did something while they were in the grips of addiction,” Anderson says, but “[Louis] doesn’t forgive him.”
Armand is a fascinating character because of his contradictions. He’s like a god whose traumatized origins convinced him he’s not as powerful as he is, and yet he’s thrilled by flexing that power. In 500 years, he’s tragically never realized that survival mode is something that can end.
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“There’s a lot of passionate people for and against Armand. The ones who are against Armand are really f**king against Armand,” Zaman says, smiling. “I find those people sometimes don’t recognize where some of his actions have come from. Not to excuse his actions, but there were two people in this relationship who were hurting each other. I think that shows with Louis’ final speech.”
Jones explains why they had Armand go to such brutal extremes: “What we tried to do is get into Armand’s gremlin head and go, ‘He found out what I did, and he had never apologized for the 50 years he put me through.’ [Armand] wasn’t always the easiest guy to live with either, so you let his brain begin to spin. The amount of thoughtfulness and planning he did to put him into this place was a quite elaborate, weird, and very Armand-like way in which to get his event. He thought, ‘I will never get him to apologize to me at all. It will have to take a certain situation.’ We leaned into it.”
“[Armand] was quite hurt” by Louis, Jones notes, “maybe 5 or 10% rightfully so. The beauty in the scene as performed by Jacob is eventually, whether or not he’s doing it to save Regina, he goes to this place where he goes, ‘OK, what if I am [partially responsible]?’ Some of it comes off of the seance, too. ‘Wow, man, I might have had my head up my ass. Do I owe anything to Armand?’”
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After that speech, Armand carved an A in Louis’ chest. Anderson admits that he, Reid, and Zaman struggled to understand Armand’s “weird” move.
“The closest we came to was that it was like a scarlet letter,” Anderson says. “Armand was shaming Louis. He was marking him for Lestat because he knows he’s going to run to Lestat next. I’m not sure what Louis feels about that. I don’t know if he’s even processed it. After having your head cut off, his main focus is getting back to Lestat.”
The finale opens the door for Armand to start a real mission of contrition and forgiveness, should he choose to accept this gift. Lestat will embark on the continuation of his. And we know from the auction that some connective tissue still remains between these characters after the queen arrives.
What do these monsters owe one another? Akasha will force an answer to this existential question, but The Vampire Lestat finale argues that recognizing the humanity within each of them is a good place to start. If Claudia’s lonely hell is awaits them all in oblivion, they’re damned anyway. They might as well try to help each other stay alive (forever).
The Vampire Lestat, Available Now, AMC+
Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson styled by Dolly Pratt Lanvin for Forward Artists
Sheila Atim styled by Abisoye Odugbesan for A-Frame
Grooming for Sam Reid by Melissa DeZarate for A-Frame
Grooming for Jacob Anderson by Jessica Ortiz for Kalpana