Interview With The Vampire “breaks open” in season 2

The first season of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire managed to stay true to Anne Rice’s iconic 1976 horror novel while adding enough that long-time fans didn’t get bored. The show felt very fresh and immediate, in no small part thanks to Sam Reid’s performance as the amoral vampire Lestat.

Season 1 left Lestat either dead by the hand of his lover Louis (Jacob Anderson) and adopted daughter Claudia (Bailey Bass) or slowly recovering in a dump; the ending left things unclear. This show plays around a lot with memory and narrative, since it’s framed as Louis telling the story of what happened many years before to a third party. An interview with the vampire, if you will.

That said, since Sam Reid is talking to Entertainment Weekly about what Lestat will get up to in season 2, we can assume he survived. “I’m excited to see Lestat learn some hard lessons, but he’s an incredibly resilient, enduring character who’s had to put his own desires first for a number of reasons,” Reid said. “And what are you left with when you’re left to deal with yourself, when you’re killed by the person you love the most? Obviously a vampire dying is exceptionally difficult, but when you live an immortal life, you go through certain stages, so I am most interested in learning and discovering about Lestat’s process of accepting that. And I’m not sure if he accepts it entirely. I’m not sure if he feels great about it.”

Knowing Lestat, he will be resistant to learning any lesson that isn’t “Do what’s best for Lestat.” And he’ll probably want revenge. “[H]e’s a man of action,” Reid said. “Now, the action might be completely insane and diabolical and verging on … well, I don’t want to say evil, but verging on bad, because he does love to be bad. But he is not an idle guy, he doesn’t really sit around. And if he is sitting around, he’s staring at the details in the wallpaper. He’s always doing something, he’s always busy.”

Lestat will appear to Louis as “a haunting” in Interview With The Vampire season 2

In the book as well as the 1994 movie, Lestat exits the picture at this point and we follow Louis and Claudia as they travel to Europe. They’ll be doing that, but Reid hints that Louis will be unable to forget his maker. “We play a lot with memory in the show, and we see Lestat more potentially as a haunting, whether that’s a real threat or it’s a psychological threat, and how Louis processes that relationship and the way that he’s dealing with the repercussions of murdering your, albeit probably rightly so, lover, maker, and mentor,” he said. “Those who have read the books or even seen the film know that there is a journey yet to discover, but I don’t want to give too much about that away yet.”

So maybe Reid will appear in Europe not so much as the literal Lestat, but as a projection of Louis’ fears. That said, Reid says that “there will be a return to New Orleans” in season 2, so we can expect him to show up in the flesh, as well.

“What I think is going to be exciting for people to see is that this season really breaks open. It was sort of like a little domestic drama between three vampires in the first season, and we’re now meeting a lot more vampires and the world begins to expand,” Reid said. “It is a lot bigger than just that drawing room in New Orleans. They have found a way to weave in lots of little Easter eggs about where we’re going in the future, and that’s exciting.”

"What is really exciting about this season is seeing the vampire theater, the Théâtre des Vampires. It’s been very, very fun creating that world, and we’ve been very lucky to play in it. It’s integral to the overarching world, the idea that for creatures that have to hide in the shadows, that have to stay away from public knowledge, they have found a way to be themselves and present themselves as vampires on stage for an unwitting audience, or unbeknownst to the audience, and there’s a lot of fun to be had with that. I cannot wait for people to see that. We have eight hours to expand the second half of the book, so you’re going to see a lot of vampire theater. A lot."

Louis and Armand have a “very different” relationship than Louis and Lestat

But it’s not all about Lestat, however much he wishes it were. The first season introduced us to the vampire Armand, played by Assad Zaman. Louis and Armand are together in the framing story, but we don’t see how they meet. Season 2 will change that.

“They are apart, and Louis has a new partner, Armand, played by Assad Zaman,” Reid said. “We’ll find out a lot more about Armand and his backstory and who he is as a character, because Assad didn’t really get the chance to play Armand last season. Armand is a really awesome character that has a lot of connections to a lot of the vampires. He’s very old. Finding out more about Armand, and Louis and Armand’s relationship and their dynamic, which is very different to Louis and Lestat, it’s exciting. It’s a wild ride. I get tingles when I see Assad as Armand — it’s very spine-tinglingly good. As is Ben Daniels, who plays Santiago. People are in for a real treat.”

We don’t have a release date for Interview With The Vampire season 2 as of yet, and with both actors and writers on strike in Hollywood, it could be a while (Reid gave this interview before the actors strike was called). I’m hoping it comes out sooner rather than later, because the first season was a surprising delight.

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