Everything You Forgot About Interview With the Vampire

The old Interview With the Vampire is dead, but AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels marches ever forward, growing stronger and more powerful with time. In its third season, TV’s most maximalist drama has been rechristened The Vampire Lestat, shifting its focus to Sam Reid’s French-by-way-of-Sydney-by-way-of-psych-ward portrayal of Lestat de Lioncourt, reintroduced as a rock star on the road when his first single dropped mere weeks after the season-two finale.

It’s a radical shift from the first two installments in the series, but just because the show has a new protagonist and a new name doesn’t mean that this season is a fresh start or a good entry point for the show. If anything, this season is the densest and least penetrable of all, constantly referring back to past relationships and lore, with important plot details (i.e. talk of a “Great Conversion”) sprinkled through Lestat’s colorful, never-ending narration. Interview With the Vampire was already one of the most balls-to-the-wall, out-there shows on TV, and The Vampire Lestat requires full attention and both sides of your brain to reap the most pleasure. Before the season premiere on June 7, here is a spoiler-heavy recap to pore over in preparation.

1. 
The series makes very important changes to Anne Rice’s source text.

Interview With the Vampire is deeply faithful and reverent toward Anne Rice’s novels, often directly lifting lines from the book and placing them into the mouths of Louis and Lestat, but there are some major departures from the source text and from the 1994 Tom Cruise–Brad Pitt adaptation, and they are entirely for the better. Louis is no longer the son of a slave-owning family in the 1700s but the scion of a prominent Black Creole family in the early 20th century, running a brothel full of beards and dealing with racism among New Orleans’s elites when he meets Lestat. Claudia is not a vampirically turned 5-year-old, a concept that is too creepy even for a show that teems with gore and incest; she’s aged up to a teen, and her bond with Louis runs deep and familial. Daniel is no longer a cub reporter with a tape deck in the ’70s but a man in his 70s who is picking up where he left off with Louis decades prior. Most crucially, and unlike the film, Louis and Lestat’s relationship snaps beyond subtext and suggestion and is immediately sexual. They eye-fuck at the opera. They make love midair in coffins and near corpses.

2. 
That interview? The one with the vampire? Oh, honey, it’s over.

Our favorite gothy gay telemelodramarama began in 2023 with fading journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) interviewing the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) in his chilly Dubai penthouse citadel while his personal assistant/manservant Rashid (Assad Zaman) circles the table like a goshawk. In season one, Louis narrated the story of his transformation into a vampire at the hands of Lestat de Lioncourt, whom he met in New Orleans in 1910, with posthumous archival assistance from their vampire daughter Claudia’s (Bailey Bass) journals. These seven episodes chronicle Louis’s seduction, his tumultuous affair with Lestat, Claudia’s turning, and Louis and Claudia’s attempt to murder their maker and escape a violent home life by fleeing to Europe. From Louis’s perspective, Lestat is his savior, demon, star-crossed lover, and abuser, capable of driving Louis mad with lust or pushing him into a violent rage at the turn of a heel. In the present day, Rashid is revealed to be not human but the 500-year-old vampire Armand, Louis’s boyfriend and a master manipulator far more skilled than Lestat.

In season two, Armand joins Louis at the interview table, and Louis and Claudia (recast as Delainey Hayles) restart their afterlife in bohemian postwar Paris, where they are free from Lestat and the Jim Crow South. There, they fall in with a vampiric Grand Guignol theater troupe, overseen by Armand and the preening, crazed thespian Santiago (Ben Daniels); when the vampire clan learns that Claudia was responsible for Lestat’s death, thereby breaking the ultimate law of vampires, they put on a show trial and destroy her and her lover, Madeleine Eparvier. In the present day, Daniel learns why his initial interview with Louis went south (a jealous and domineering Armand put young Daniel through a fucked-up torture gauntlet), and he’s later approached in Dubai by the mysterious Raglan James (Justin Kirk), an agent of a shadowy organization tracking vampires around the world as they rise in numbers. Raglan feeds Daniel the information that Armand, not Santiago, is the one who directed the Theatre des Vampires show-trial that resulted in the death of Claudia. Daniel tells Louis, thus driving a stake through the heart of Armand and Louis’s relationship. The interview now done and dusted, Armand turns Daniel into a vampire as revenge, Louis and Lestat tearfully reunite, and the interview becomes a best-selling book.

Even though Daniel is now a vampire, best-selling author, and wearer of cool old-man leather jackets, he is choosing to spend his immortal life in season three conducting another interview, rock-tour-documentary-style, with the vampire Lestat, meaning much of what we’ve learned about these characters over the past two seasons will be upended by the brat prince.

3. 
Vamps are incestuous. Everyone is in a relationship with everyone. And if they’re not kissing each other, they’re killing each other.

Here follows a Simple Satanic Sunday School refresher of how all the major players relate to one another from a vampire-creation perspective.

Magnus begat Lestat. Lestat begat his first love, Nicolas de Lenfent, as well as Louis, Claudia, and another lover, Antoinette. Louis begat Madeleine Eparvier for Claudia. Separately, Armand was created by Marius, and Armand later created Daniel. 

Now, Lestat was in love with Nicky, and Armand tortured Nicky because Armand was in love with Lestat (that torture required Lestat to turn Nicky into a vampire lest he die). After Lestat turned Louis, he and Louis were essentially married, and Antoinette was Lestat’s mistress. Louis begged Lestat to turn a dying, human Claudia into a vampire, and the two then adopted her as a sort of daughter. Once Louis and Claudia tried to kill and flee Lestat, Louis and Armand formed a relationship in Paris while Claudia and Madeleine fell in love. 

In his human life, Daniel nearly broke up Louis and Armand in the ’70s and did so successfully at the end of season two; Armand turned him into a vampire in revenge. At the end of season two, Lestat and Louis have reunited as lovers. 

Now, the only way to kill one of Anne Rice’s vampires is to completely destroy the body, and even then, it’s not a sure thing. To quote the opening lines of the novel The Vampire Lestat, “The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire — these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.” Decapitation works too. Louis and Claudia killed Antoinette from jealousy. Under Armand’s direction, the theater troupe killed Claudia for attempting to kill Lestat, then Louis killed most of the theater troupe. And Lestat, despite it all, is a lover, not a killer, notwithstanding his human-body count of hundreds, in both senses of the phrase.

4. 
This show is not second-screen viewing.

Interview With the Vampire started out in its very first episode with whorehouses, tap dancing, an aerial make-out, passionate monologuing, and Lestat punching a hole through the back of a priest’s head in a burning church. Blunt-force trauma to the head happens not infrequently in the world of IWTV; we’ve seen Lestat use a severed train-conductor head as a puppet and Louis kick a severed noggin directly at the camera lens. It is no wonder that watching the show feels like having one’s brain cracked open. On IWTV, festering rats are sucked dry, messages are scribed in blood, vamps form motorcycle gangs and argue over script notes in their original musicals, and the playwright Samuel Beckett is an immortal working in regional theater. The cast commits to the mounting insanity with every fiber of their being, bringing pathos and passion to these creatures of the night. Rolin Jones’s writers’ room gives them delicious and ludicrous things to say, lines like, “It was both random and unfortunate that he picked that night to dabble in fuckery,” or “Now I know what two blood-fat cocks slapping hands feels like,” and they perform their lines not only without a wink but staring dead-on and unblinking with colored contact lenses in their eyes.

Lestat-as-narrator will be far less buttoned up and even less reliable than Louis. A Lestat season set in the present day promises glitter, sex, and the berating of Quebecois book clerks. By adapting the second book in the Vampire Chronicles series, The Vampire Lestat will find its new titular vampire battling wolves, killing groupies, and engaging in relations beyond George R.R. Martin’s most depraved dreams. To borrow a phrase from a different rock-mockumentary, The Vampire Lestat will dial IWTV’s wildest impulses up to 11. The first two seasons were just Lestat’s opener.