During San Diego Comic-Con, io9 was invited to a press conference for The Vampire Lestat, the latest Anne Rice Immortal Universe series for AMC. And don’t get it twisted, this is not Interview With The Vampire season three; this is officially the Lestat show, as he takes the mic to tell his story and put some misconceptions about himself and his past to rest—that is, until they rise from the dead or awaken…
Star Sam Reid (Lestat de Lioncourt) was joined by Jacob Anderson (Louis de Pointe du Lac), Eric Bogosian (Daniel Molloy), and the show’s creative team to break down the slew of announcements and teases hot off the SDCC panel. Fans of the show will recall that season two of Interview With the Vampire ended with a seeming reconciliation between Lestat and Louis, but their honeymoon phase was likely short-lived once Daniel Molloy actually published his book, if the teaser screened at the convention is any indication.
It cold-opens on Louis and Lestat in separation proceedings with their lawyers. “We’re in a divorce era.” Reid smiled. “The [Interview With The Vampire] book is still quite a large hurdle to have gotten over. At the end of season two, neither of them had read the book, and so there’s obviously the fallout of that.”
Anderson jumped in, “That scene that you see in the teaser was mad. I won’t talk too much about the whole scene, but I was a bit shaken after it… I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ I feel like we had to do a different thing in that scene than we’ve done before.”
Reid continued, “Yeah, well, you kind of have the history of two seasons and a lot of previous experience and a lot of weight like that that exists now between the two characters that we get to carry on to every scene, so it’s really fun that the layers just become deeper and deeper. It’s really fun. There’s endless possibilities that you can do with these two characters [who] kind of really burn each other’s houses down and rebuild them back together block by block, only for somebody to come in with a demolition crew and do it all over again.”
And that someone was Danny Boy Molloy with his book. Molloy returns as he’s recruited to document Lestat’s musical side of the story in a visual medium through the Brat Prince’s words and music. And yes, there will be a lot of songs about Louis and the fallout of their break-up.
“It’s the love of his life. How could he not be influenced by Louis in his songwriting?” revealed composer and music supervisor Daniel Hart, who said he pulled musical influences from Led Zeppelin to Robert Plant, to classical to jazz, to even modern music. “I think it’s fair to say, and I think I’m allowed to say, he’s written songs in season three specifically about Louis. You will know that they are songs about Louis. There are other songs about many other subjects. Lestat has many thoughts and feelings. But when we were working on the songs at the beginning, I think the thing we found was the most helpful in trying to find music that would embody the spirit of Lestat, was to try and avoid doing what most musicals are required to do, which is to further the plot in their lyrics.”
Showrunner Rolin Jones elaborated that it all comes to a head as Lestat is living through quite an identity crisis between “the performative vampire and actual vampire,” and explained that after an event in episode one, Lestat begins questioning everything.
“There’s a little bit of the portrait of the artist and throwing yourself out there, right? And you put this music out there; you put, like, ‘This is how I’m going to tell my story. I’m gonna tell it this way’ This music is putting himself out there as an artist [and] opens him up to a level of introspection that is dangerous, thrilling, very, very terrifying, and that he’s not prepared for, and so you know we’re in a real Hamlet situation here. I think that he’s going after the really, really big things, and I think he’s charging forward with abandon, and does that mean trying to end it? Don’t know. Does that mean he’s trying to get to the other side of this? What is all this acting out? What is this longing for extremity? This thing that’s within him cracks it all open.”
And since it’s been confirmed that Akasha’s blood is within him, it begs the question if this thirst for the unknown is what could be driving him. We don’t know yet who’s playing the Queen of the Damned, the first of their vampire kind; Jones has said an offer was made to an actress, but she has yet to be revealed. Reid, however, played it coy on whether or not Akasha’s influence plays a part in how Lestat takes to fame.
“With the blood of Akasha, does he feel like he’s invincible? Basically, yes, I would say so, yeah, and to [a] fault. I think he’s blindsided by how much power that he has. I think like an important key [about Lestat] when you have that much power, he doesn’t really feel lovable because it feels like, ‘If I showed all of the power, people would just be scared of me.’ That’s a big dynamic between [him and Louis] and [he] hides so much of himself from Louis so that he feels like he can’t be truly loved, and then it ends up being catastrophic in his own right. And if you feel invincible, why not dive headfirst into the concrete and see what happens? And carrying along the effects of that, it’s his crux, I suppose. It’s where we begin the season.”
The Vampire Lestat returns in 2026 on AMC.
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