THE VAMPIRE LESTAT, currently debuting new episodes on AMC Sunday nights and thereafter available on AMC+, is actually Season 3 of the network’s INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, which premiered in 2022.

Adapted by executive producer/showrunner Rolin Jones from the late author Anne Rice’s line of VAMPIRE CHRONICLES novels, the first published in 1976, the initial two seasons of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE were largely told from the point of view of vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, played by Jacob Anderson.

In the TV version (brought forward in time so that the present day is our present, rather than the novel’s 1986), Louis is made into a vampire in his native New Orleans by his vampire lover, Lestat de Lioncourt, played by Sam Reid. The two have a passionate if extremely tumultuous relationship over the ensuing century, sometimes deeply bonded and sometimes trying to kill each other. (Right now, they’re in a good place).

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT holds a virtual Q&A panel for the Television Critics Association (TCA) with Jones, Anderson, Reid, and cast members Eric Bogosian, who plays now-vampire journalist Daniel Molloy, Assad Zaman, who plays ancient vampire (and former lover of both Lestat and Louis) Armand, Jennifer Ehle, who portrays Lestat’s mother/fledgling/lover (vampires are complicated!) Gabriella, Delainey Hayles, reprising her role as much-mourned young vampire Claudia and taking on the new character of Claudia’s human doppelganger Regina, and Sheila Atim, who plays Akasha, the oldest vampire, aka Queen of the Damned.

Jacob Anderson as Louis De Pointe Du Lac and Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt in Anne Rice’s THE VAMPIRE LESTAT – Season 1 | ©2026 AMC / Sophie Giraud

The tone of the first two seasons of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE was, like Louis, reflective and elegiac. This season, THE VAMPIRE LESTAT, based on Rice’s 1985 follow-up novel to INTERVIEW, is shown through Lestat’s more mercurial perspective as he embarks on a career as a rock ‘n’ roll star. In fact, Lestat is narrating the season for us via an up-for-auction set of his autobiographical recordings, titled THE FAILURES, which are being auctioned off in a flash-forward as THE VAMPIRE LESTAT opens.

Reid goes all out when Lestat is singing as frontman for his band. What were some inspirations for his performance style?

As Lestat began his onstage career in eighteenth-century France, Reid observes that it makes sense for the character’s onstage persona to be built in that eighteenth century. It is the French iteration of the commedia dell’arte. That’s where I place him as a performer. And then, anything that goes beyond that is an extension of that character. Because I feel like that’s where he built his stage presence in his space.

“So, I did look at David Bowie, particularly at recordings of the live ‘Cracked Actor’ concerts, mostly to remind myself that he’s not human, that he’s supernatural. You’ve got to make sure that you don’t forget that sometimes, because there is a lot more vulnerability in him this season than we’ve had before. So, I just wanted to make sure we maintain he is a kind of other thing, which I thought David Bowie just does extraordinarily.

“But in terms of his stage presence, I wanted to make sure it still felt theatrical in a way. Because he’s still performing the idea of a rock star, at least in the beginning. As the show progresses, the performance starts to disappear. And then I just really focus on the books and Rolin’s work and the songs that [series composer/songwriter] Daniel Hart wrote, and try and hone in on that, and pull the guy out of those things.”

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT – Season 1 Key Art | ©2026 AMC

Hayles and Reid both take on two characters each this season. Hayles plays both the vampire Claudia from the past and her present-day human lookalike, coffeeshop waitress Regina; Reid portrays not only Lestat but also the Eastern European worker Jarda Klapka, hired to be rock star Lestat’s double to keep audiences confuses about whether or not Lestat is really a vampire.

Hayles explains, “I wanted to make Regina extremely different than Claudia, but still have that youthful lust for life and antagonization that I feel like they have enjoy. But the way I did it is, I was just living in the moment of the scene and seeing what came out.

“It was nice to be on location in an actual diner. And it was funny, because I remember being a waitress, and I thought, ‘Oh, God, this is so stressful. I need to get these people their coffee. No, wait, sorry.’ So, being on location helped, and it was a lot of fun to get the opportunity to do that.”

Reid relates that his experience with Jarda Klapka “was mostly physical, because we had a very short period of time to change him around. So, how are we going to make him look different to Lestat? I worked with the makeup artist Tami Lane, and we gave him a monobrow.

“We used my teeth from Season 1, one of the test teeth pieces, and filed the fangs off. They were slightly too big, so the fit gave him a bit of a buck tooth, and Tami painted a gap in the tooth.

“And obviously, we had double wigs going on, which was a really fun thing to do – a wig on a wig on a wig, which kind of felt like what we were doing with the show.”

As for Jarda’s accent, Reid reveals, “Originally, Rolin wanted him to be Swedish. And then I went down working with the dialect coach and doing research. A man of that age from Sweden would probably have gone through military training, would have spoken very good English, and I was like, ‘So, this is the accent.’ And Rolin was like, ‘Oh, no, that’s too clean. I want a thicker accent. So, very last minute, we changed him. He became from the Czech Republic. It was always just trying to bring him down a bit, make sure that he was grounded.”

Reid cites Season 3’s third episode, “Toronto,” as his favorite where Jarda is concerned. “Claudia Llosa, the director, really let me go off on this whole Jarda Klapka [portrayal]. And I’m very grateful to Rolin for bringing it right back.”

We see nearly all the characters as both their human selves and their vampire selves. What is the difference in playing the two?

Bogosian, for one, is happy his character Daniel got turned by Armand at the end of Season 2. “I guess I’ve loved vampires all the way back to Bela Lugosi doing DRACULA, which scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. But it was [from] Frank Langella playing Dracula on Broadway in 1977 that I understood the power in a vampire role.

“And then,” Bogosian continues, “let’s just skip forward to Anne Rice. She asks big questions in her books about immortality, about relationships, about what a person is. I mean, just what makes up a personality? That’s going to be a big part of this season, for sure. I wanted to play classic vampire, guy with fangs, bites people, sucks blood, and that was all I really needed.

“And instead, I ended up being thrown into the seven circles of Hell with this show and all the craziness that comes with it. It’s wonderfully challenging. I never really know what’s going to happen with the scripts that get sent our way, and I’m learning.

“I’m playing this guy who vibrates very close to me, and now he’s a vampire. Even if he wasn’t good at life, he’s a very rational guy and he’s led a rational life. And now, he’s in this very chaotic vampire universe where normal logic does not apply.

“Also, this season, I’m not interviewing Louis anymore, which had a sort of step-by-step, solve-the-mystery thing to it, and [Louis] was trying to help me with it. Now Daniel is interviewing Lestat, who is doing everything he can to throw things in the way of the interview, and it becomes a much more head-banging experience.

“Obviously, consequences work very differently in your life when you’re immortal.” In Daniel’s universe now, though, “Everybody else has been turned into a vampire, so I guess everyone has the same traumas.”

Anderson agrees. “Yeah. I feel like part of what is so inviting about Anne Rice’s vampires, but also the way that Rolin and [executive producer/writer] Hannah [Moscovitch] and the writers have put it through this prism [where] they’re the most human once they’re vampires. It’s almost like these characters in their human existence didn’t ever quite do the processing, and now they just have to live with themselves forever.”

Reid elaborates, “I always get this wrong, but there’s a quote from one of the books where Rice does say, ‘We never really change over time. We just become more of what we really are.’ So, I think that is the essence – the show does it and the books do it – where we explore who these people were as human beings. There is a lot of unanswered complexity. And then, when you add on an immortal layer, all of the humanity and the issues that surrounded their life, that drove their life to certain points, are amplified. And then that’s their great challenge, to unpick and resolve in some way, on top of dealing with being these supernatural creatures.

“The vampire gives us an artifice to explore humanity, and you can do it on this very large, operatic scale. But actually, it’s just a metaphor. We’re really exploring human things, but we do have a framework of monsters, which allows us to be much more extreme with our actions. So, when they have a fight, they’ll rip each other apart physically, but then get back together again.”

Louis started out as a fairly private individual, but once he gave Daniel the interview, he became a public figure. How does Anderson think Louis feels about how he is perceived?

“I feel like, for Louis, it’s a ‘be careful what you wish for’-type thing. He obviously solicited Molloy into the interview.” Additionally, Louis has become the 566^th richest person on Earth by running a string of businesses that cater to vampires. “He’s not a private person, because he’s turning vampires into an industry. He’s a big capitalist guy.”

On the other hand, Anderson notes, “He does it under a pseudonym and an alias, so Louis is fittingly contradictory about his relationship to his public life, I think. He sort of wants to get all the glory, but it’s ‘look at me, don’t look at me’ classic Louis stuff.”

We see Gabriella almost entirely through Lestat’s eyes, and Ehle states that’s how she plays the character. “What’s important is the story that Lestat’s telling. I think you get a sense of who she is when you see the entire thing. But I think it was just realizing his vision of her. I think who she is [apart from that] is not important for the storytelling.”

Armand is antagonistic to both Louis and Lestat, yet he is beloved by a lot of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE/THE VAMPIRE LESTAT fans. Can actor Zaman address this?

Zaman says, “I think what Rolin and Hannah have done brilliantly from Season 1 to now with Armand’s story is that the vampire Armand has been alive from the beginning and sprinkled in, in a really interesting way that I feel almost is better than going, ‘Let’s really hit an Armand season or episode hard.’”

THE VAMPIRE ARMAND was, in fact, the first book in Rice’s series that Zaman read, “And I was traumatized for weeks after. I was like, ‘This is just too intense, too much.’ I feel like it’s so difficult to navigate how you tell that story sensitively, especially in this day and age.”

Jones describes how the creative team works on the stories. “We’ve been taking a biography for all these characters. If it was written in the later books, we go ahead and read it. A lot of decisions we made about Gabriella are based on some quite later books.”

This season is based primarily on the VAMPIRE LESTAT novel, but Armand is much more present onscreen than he is in the book. Jones says, “We were given circumstances for characters. We’re playing a lot of this as biography written into how Armand would respond to a number of scenes. Anne gave us all these books and we’re looking at them all the time to try to take relevant material and put it here and now.”

Zaman previews, “There are big things from THE VAMPIRE ARMAND that are sprinkled into this season, which is going to be really exciting. But that’s what I love about the sprinkle-ness of it, from Season 1 to 3, is that I feel like, with Armand particularly, there’s so much discourse that I am fascinated by, how the audience – in every camp of Armand, there are really passionate thinkers analyzing what he means to them or what he means to the other characters and all that stuff. I love that discourse. I love that we haven’t definitively given …”

Zaman opts not to finish that sentence and concludes instead, “There’s always room to change and explore him in different directions.”

Should the series continue, will it get as far as Rice’s novel THE VAMPIRE ARMAND, which is set largely in Italy?

Jones says that Moscovitch has particular affection for that book, but “there’s a challenge there. It’s really hard to shoot in Venice.”

“That’s not the only challenge,” Anderson points out.

“That’s true,” Jones replies. “There are a lot of things about that book that some might think are problematic. We think of them as opportunities.”

The mood starts off lighter this year, although we’re warned by all that it won’t stay that way.

Reid asks, “How much have you seen? It gets pretty miserable.”

Jones concurs. “You’re being seduced. It’s going to get about as dark as we’ve ever gone by the end of this [season].”

That said, Jones says the tonal shift is also because this season “is structured around how Lestat wants to tell his story. I think he comes in very confident, thinking he can be glib and fun and keep it at bay. And as he gets deeper and deeper into recording that thing and things are coming up, it begins to change how the story is being told, how you’ll feel about it. It’s just part of an emotional landscape.

For Anderson, even the temporary buoyancy was an acting challenge. “I didn’t really know how to be happy in this show. It was like, the ‘divorce settlement’ scene [where Louis and Lestat face each other with their respective legal counsels-with-benefits] is supposed to be playful. And I was like, ‘Ahh,’ having a meltdown over playing a sort of confident Louis.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Zaman warns. “You can’t wait for it to get miserable.”

Reid opines, “What Lestat wants is people to have a good time. He doesn’t want to engage in any sort of trauma or trauma porn or any sort of capacity in which he may have been interpreted in the past. And so, his m.o. is kind of from the books. I think Rolin and Hannah and the team have done an amazing job of replicating that experience when you first go from one book to the other.

“And,” Reid continues, “you get that very extreme whiplash, where you feel like you’ve gone into a much more irreverent, playful space. But then the darkness creeps in very slowly and then takes over. And [Lestat] can’t escape it, either. It’s like he’s constantly crawling out of the grave while it’s being shoveled full of dirt.”

“I’m just going to say one last thing,” Jones contributes regarding the season’s tone. “It is structured around how Lestat wants to tell his story. I think he comes in very confident, thinking he can be glib and fun and keep it at bay. And as he gets deeper and deeper into recording that thing and things are coming up, it begins to change how the story is being told, how you’ll feel about it. It’s part of an emotional landscape. Jacob had a great word for how to describe this season – ‘The Id-yssey.’ It’s very accurate.”

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