Lestat will be "front and center" in next season of Interview With The Vampire

Interview With The Vampire wrapped up its second the other night in typically spectacular fashion. As far as I'm concerned, this melodramatic vampire romance is currently the best show on television, and it's episodes like this that show why. In the climax of the series so far, former lovers Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid) met up after decades apart, shedding long-held resentments to reach each other for just a moment, hugging while a hurricane raged outside. "The idea of setting that during a storm, we thought a little bit about King Lear where the storm is happening inside and the storm is happening outside," showrunner Rolin Jones told Entertainment Weekly. "It's the idea that their relationship had been like a hurricane, and they're finding this moment of forgiveness and quiet and stillness amongst a hurricane, and that seemed like the way to go."

Sam Reid, who plays the mercurial Lestat, weighed in as well. "I just thought it was beautiful," he said. "It was such a fantastic way to wrap up the season. There's a lot of loose ends, there's a few things you really want to find out about, but there's also a very, very satisfying conclusion. It's this beautiful journey of Louis accepting himself and finding his feet and accepting the dark gift. And also Lestat now sort of accesses his humanity a little bit as well."

Louis, who has been living in comfort with her new partner Armand (Assad Zaman) for nearly a century, finds Lestat living in squalor in New Orleans after he and Armand go through an extremely messy breakup. "He's definitely not in a good place," Reid said of Lestat. "He's in probably one of the worst places he's ever been, but at least he's got Louis back. They're not back together, but at least they're on talking terms."

Jones was also clear that Louis and Lestat, while they've made a breakthrough here, are not back together. "[W]e don't end with them together as a couple," he said. "They had a reconciliation and that, in the novel, is quite bleak, them parting. We went the other way with it, which is we begin to set the journey about how they ultimately, maybe eight seasons down the road, end up together. We just wanted some catharsis. We wanted to earn that hug and earn those quiet words that none of us know. I don't even know what they said to each other."

Louis and Lestat have a long, brutal history together. There was the time Lestat dropped Louis from a mile in the air and left him hobbled for months. Or the time that Louis and Claudia, the fledging vampire daughter Louis and Lestat raised together, very nearly murdered Lestat before fleeing the city. Or the time Lestat tracked down Louis and Claudia and played a role in her execution. There's so much water under the bridge it's basically a flood.

"Claudia is such a huge loss, and Louis and Lestat, for the next century or so, will never be able to spend that much time together without bringing up Claudia," Reid said. "They can't. That reunion scene, they can really only chat for three minutes before they're straight away talking about Claudia, and there's so much left to process there. And she's haunting them both at different times. I think perhaps Lestat would probably quite comfortably walk into the sun the same way Louis did, but this Lestat won't die. He'll just get a tan."

Interview With The Vampire season 3

Why would Lestat merely get "a tan" if he stepped into the sun? It has to do with an ancient vampire named Akasha, whom Lestate name-checked in the season 2 finale. We'll doubtless learn more about her in season 3, which is set to adapt The Vampire Lestat, author Anne Rice's sequel to Interview With The Vampire. In that book, Lestat is irritated by how he's portrayed in journalist Daniel Molloy's vampire expose and is determined to set the record straight. We learn a lot more about Lestat's past in The Vampire Lestat. And also he becomes a rock star.

"Sam worked really hard for two years as a supporting actor, and I think Jacob is very excited to do the same thing for him, and put Sam front and center," Jones said of the upcoming third season. "We've just scratched the surface with Sam, who's an incredible actor."

The show will also follow up a big cliffhanger from the end of season 2: Armand turning Daniel into a vampire, which happens entirely offscreen. "One's a maker and one's a fledgling," Jones said. "We would be very, very poor dramatists if they were never in scenes together again. We just needed to set the stage for a lot of new writing for Louis, and I think that sets him off. There's new writing to be done for that character."

I will inhale a show centered more around Lestat, although it sounds like Louis will remain part of the drama as well. "I’m very excited to see The Vampire Lestat adapted [and] I really enjoy playing Louis in his many guises," Jacob Anderson told Vanity Fair. "This is a sort of insane show and it asks you to do insane things and behave in quite an unhinged way…. This show really asks you to commit to whatever you’re doing, and if you resist committing, it will chew you up and spit you out. As long as you are prepared, then you can have a lot of fun playing the different shades of any given scene. You can really stretch these scenes because the writers are amazing. You can play each thing 30 different ways. That’s a very long-winded way of saying, I have no idea what the future holds."

Neither do I, but I want to find out as soon as possible.

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