Lestat will take center stage in Interview With The Vampire season 3

Interview With The Vampire is the best show currently on TV. It's sexy, it's scary, it's up to its ears in melodrama, and I badly want more. The most recent episode is a banger. That episode will conclude the show's adaptation of Anne Rice's 1976 book Interview With The Vampire. But what comes after that?

Now we know. AMC has officially renewed the show for a third season, and it sounds like it will cover the events of Rice's 1985 book The Vampire Lestat. "In season three, 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."

Only this show could get away with calling itself "a sexy pilgrimage across space, time and trauma." Gimme gimme gimme.

What will happen in Interview With The Vampire season 3?

Longtime fans of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles books will recognize some important names in that description. Nicholas was Lestat's first love, Magnus was the vampire who made him, Marius is an important and ancient vampire in Rice's mythology, and Those Who Must Be Kept are...also ancient and important vampires in Rice's mythology.

In The Vampire Lestat, we dive into Lestat's past as well as see what he's doing in the present, which does indeed involve starting a rock band. All of it leads up to Rice's 1988 book The Queen of the Damned, which brings together a lot of threads of her story. That book was adapted as a cheesy-but-fun 2002 movie starring Stuart Townsend as Lestat. Considering how bloody good AMC's Interview With The Vampire has been, I shudder to think what this cast and showrunner Rolin Jones could do with the material. Just the prospect of Lestat (Sam Reid) and sarcasm king Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), who writes the trashy bestseller mentioned in the official description, getting a scene together has me salivating.

And remember that there are two other Interview With The Vampire spinoffs in the offing: Mayfair Witches has already aired one season and there's a show about The Talamasca on the way. It's all part of what AMC is calling the "Immortal Universe." That's nice, but right now I only have eyes for Interview:

Sam Reid (Lestat) and Delainey Hayles (Claudia) break down the show trial in Interview With The Vampire

We might be getting ahead of ourselves. My head is still reverberating from the most recent episode of Interview With The Vampire, "I Could Not Prevent It," where Lestat reunites with his fledglings Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia (Delainey Hayles) to put them on trial for trying to kill him back in season 1.

The episode was typically gripping, with Lestat going off script during the show trial orchestrated by the hammy vampire Santiago (Ben Daniels) and expressing actual remorse for how things went down between him and Louis, particularly the bit where he dropped Louis from a mile up in the air. "He's coming out for revenge and then he changes his mind," actor Sam Reid told Entertainment Weekly. "That's the framework of the way that the story is told by Louis and Armand. But they also don't know that he changes his mind. So there's a lot of layers. This is complex. And then there's some points which really feel like it's a dream, when it's in reverse and you see the scene silhouetted, then there's a big sweeping, dramatic kind of camera moves that go into his face, which I think is very clearly not true, where it's a very clear dream-like hyper-, hyper-,hyper-simplification of what happened at that trial."

"I think it's important to acknowledge that Lestat probably did something that he'll never fully get over. It was important for me to know, to learn something that I thought was the truth, and it was good to see it, that this act of violence towards Louis wasn't necessarily something that was commonplace to him. It was incredibly upsetting and he hates himself for it, but also that he feels like he deserved everything that happened to him and continues to deserve everything that happens to him. In that moment when he apologizes to Louis, it's so shocking because I don't think he thinks it's going to be over after that apology. He realizes Louis is never going to forgive him."

During the trial, Lestat hits his marks some of the time, and at other times does his own thing. This kind of chaos is why he's so fun to watch. "He's trying to get the audience eating out of his hand so he can manipulate them. He needs to be constantly going out, touching them, being near them, getting them to laugh," Reid says. "But it's very hard to do that when you've got Louis there, you've got Claudia there. It is very hard to control because he's just like a ball of emotion. He's a tempest of his feelings. He's not very good at controlling himself. He's also not a planner; he just kind of feels it out and wings it. So it's all messy and chaotic. And this is the last place he wants to be. It's a lot of bad feelings, a lot of bad history, a lot bad blood there."

At the end of the trial, Claudia and her companion Madeleine (Roxane Duran) are executed by sunlight, but Armand (Assad Zaman) pulls some strings to make sure that Louis is merely banished...which Santiago and the other vampires of the Paris coven take to mean they should entomb him alive. At least Louis has a chance at escape. Claudia is no more. "I really hope, should we continue, that she haunts him, because I just love Delainey so much," Reid said.

Lestat threatened to steal the show in this episode, as he does, but Claudia held her own. Her reactions were heartbreaking as new facts about Louis came to light, including that Lestat warned him about how dangerous it was to turn a girl as young as Claudia into a vampire, but that Louis begged him to do it anyway. "I don't think her love for Louis is lost, but [her] frustration is at its peak, and she feels betrayed," Hayles told TV Guide.

At least Claudia learns how much Madeleine loves her before the end; the newly minted vampire has a choice to join the Paris coven or die with Claudia, and she picks the latter. "Claudia gives her a look like, 'Choose the coven,'" Hayles said. "And then Madeleine chooses her and puts her first, and she's never had somebody do that for her in these circumstances. I think in a way that she could go happily knowing that somebody put her first."

And of course there's the moment where Claudia tells the audience that she will kill each and every last one of them, whether she's executed or not. The magic of the theater. "If you're gonna do it, then you better do it your worst," Hayles said. "If you're going to bring the sun, bring the hottest sun you have, because I'm not going out without a bang. She's a fighter, and she is Lestat's daughter, so she can't let them win fully."

But in the end, Claudia burns, looking to her father Lestat in her final moments. "The way that she looks is like all hope is lost, like, 'Dad, I need you.'"

The whole episode was emotionally exhausting, and much closer to Anne Rice's book than the 1994 Interview With The Vampire movie, if that means anything to you. This Sunday's season finale (so happy I don't have to call it the series finale) is even better.

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