Interview With the Vampire EP Talks Finale Deaths, Betrayals and Twists, Teases Lestat-Centric Season 3
Well, that was one of the most thrilling hours of television we’ve seen in a while.
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Interview With the Vampire wrapped its second season on Sunday with a sublime hour that included the death of another key character, the reveal of a game-changing betrayal, the long-overdue reunion of a beloved couple and, finally, a transformation we’ll be thinking about until the AMC drama finally returns for its just-ordered third season.
The unforgettable finale began with Louis’ liberation from the crypt in which the coven imprisoned him, setting the stage for a satisfying revenge sequence against the vampires who killed his precious Claudia.
“When we originally pitched [the finale], we said the first 20 minutes of it is going to be a Liam Neeson movie,” showrunner Rolin Jones tells TVLine. “We’re just going to Liam Neeson the s–t out of it, then do the rest of it.”
Much of Jacob Anderson’s captivating performance was scripted, but Jones says that a lot of the credit should go to the actor, who was encouraged to “get weird and wild” with the explosive sequence. “He went full hog here,” Jones says. “The man is spent right now. We gassed him, God bless him.”
Read on for more of Jones’ insight on the finale’s biggest developments, including a minor tease about what we can expect when Interview With the Vampire returns for Season 3…
1. Santiago’s Death
He wasn’t a “good” guy by any means, but we need to start by pouring one out for Santiago, who quite literally lost his head during Louis’ rampage of madness at the top of the hour. While few could argue that Santiago didn’t deserve his punishment, Jones wishes it didn’t also mean losing Ben Daniels as an actor. In fact…
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t already start thinking about repertory theater casting in our show,” Jones tells TVLine. “[Daniels] is an incredible actor. Santiago dies in this episode, but never say never in our universe, or forget how malleable that actor is. I could write a housewife and put [Daniels] in there and I think you would forget that he was Santiago. He’s such an extraordinary instrument.”
Jones served as showrunner on Fox’s The Exorcist, which co-starred Daniels, so there was never a question of who Jones wanted to play Santiago when the time came to cast him.
“We needed the most fun cartoon villain in the world, because we weren’t doing cartoon villains for anybody else,” Jones explains. “We were like, let’s have as much fun as we can with good old Ben.”
2. Armand’s Betrayal
Arguably the biggest game-changing reveal from the finale was that Lestat (not Armand!) was the vampire responsible for saving Louis at the trial. To make things even worse, Armand had greatly downplayed his involvement in the trial; he directed the entire production.
“I was really vigilant with the writers’ room about finding an empathetic path into Armand,” Jones tells TVLine. “Between the four or five books that we read that he appeared in, we tried to find our own path for him. I come out of it thinking that Armand really lied twice. He was a coward twice. He did lie on top of those lies, but that was just to cover up the essential ones.”
There’s no question that Louis now despises Armand, but Jones doesn’t foresee the character being framed as a “full-blown antagonist” in Season 3. In fact, he wouldn’t do that to anyone in this universe. “If any vampire endures, I think it’s heroic,” he says. “I can’t believe they can have conversations and sit around talking to each other when they have to kill somebody every night. I think it’s incredible.”
The show’s third season will focus on Lestat’s journey, so Armand “probably isn’t going to have the same amount of screen time,” but he remains “a significant vampire,” so we’ll still see plenty of him.
“It’s very easy to try to say that Armand is a villain, but he carried a lot of s–t for Louis for a lot of years,” Jones reminds us. “I think he sincerely loved him. If you reduce the reveal of that to ‘everything was bulls–t,’ that’s not how the writers’ room felt about that.”
3. Louis and Lestat’s Reunion
One of the most beautiful, satisfying sequences from the finale came when Louis and Lestat finally reunited in New Orleans, with the former finally knowing what the latter had done for him. In crafting both the tone and setting of the scene, Jones says the writers talked a lot about King Lear — the idea of the literal storm outside mirroring the metaphorical storm within.
“Very early on, before the timeline sort of took over, the idea of setting that scene during Katrina was something that I thought might be kind of interesting,” Jones says. “That’s a hug that’s 77 years in the making. It’s so much about contrition, and you could even say it’s about baptizing that relationship one more time — soaking it, giving it a bath. And, of course, a vampire bath isn’t like going to the corner spa and getting your foot rubbed. S–t’s going to fly and break apart!”
4. Daniel’s Transformation
Viewers unfamiliar with the events of Anne Rice’s source material were also probably stunned by the season’s final reveal — that Daniel Molloy has been turned into vampire, an event from the books that “happens a little differently in our timeline,” Jones explains.
“The circumstances of this one are a little bit different, and we get to play with it,” he tells TVLine. “But mostly, I just want Eric Bogosian as a f–ing vampire. He’s only had two scenes as a vampire, but I talked a little about Rumspringa with him, when the Amish get a year to go wild before they can really join the community. That’s sort of what we’ve been thinking about with Daniel as a vampire.”
As for whether Season 3 will turn back the clock and show how Daniel became a vampire via flashbacks, Jones is far from confident.
“I don’t know, man, that’s a really f–ing heavy set to lug,” he says. “It’s very large, and we have destroyed that set. I’m not sure if we want to rebuild that a third time. I have 90 percent playwrights in my room, so there’s always a way to playwright it. So we could, but I don’t know if we’re going to visually see that.”
5. What’s Next?
Jones can’t say too much about Interview With the Vampire‘s third season — largely because it hadn’t officially been ordered at the time of this interview — but he assures us that “Lestat [will be] front and center, which means the show should feel like it was hijacked by Lestat. Aesthetically, you should be ready for what a Lestat version of the show feels like and looks like.
Officially, here’s what AMC tells us we can expect from the third installment: “Resentful of the perfunctory portrayal in the trashy bestseller Interview With The Vampire, the Vampire Lestat sets his story straight in a way only the Vampire Lestat can — by starting a band and going on tour. Gabrielle. Nicholas. Magnus. Marius. Those Who Must Be Kept. They join Louis, Armand, Molloy, Sam, Raglan, Fareed and others we can’t tell you about yet on a sexy pilgrimage across space, time and trauma. No auto-tuning. No trigger warnings. All feels amplified.”
6. Grade It!
And just like that, another stunning, stirring season of Interview With the Vampire is now behind us. We’ve got a hell of a wait until Season 3 eventually arrives on our screens — whenever that may be — so let’s take a moment to reflect on all that we were blessed with this time around.
Grade both the finale and the season overall in our pair of polls below, then drop a comment with your full review. What did you love? Or in the interest of keeping your list shorter, was there anything you didn’t love? However you’re feeling right now, we want to hear about it.
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