‘Interview With the Vampire’ showrunner and Sam Reid tease season 3 after finale cliffhanger

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Interview With the Vampire season 2 finale, “And That’s the End of It. There’s Nothing Else.”

It took him 77 years, but Louis (Jacob Anderson) finally got his groove back by the end of Interview With the Vampire season 2. And he didn’t get there on his own.

The intense, emotional finale spanned almost 100 years as Louis and Armand (Assad Zaman) finished telling their story to Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), but the journalist used evidence given to him by the Talamasca to prove that Armand had been lying to Louis ever since the coven’s trial in Paris. Louis believed that Armand had saved him from death, but Daniel revealed that Armand actually directed the entire trial and it was Lestat (Sam Reid) who saved Louis instead. For 77 years, Armand built their entire relationship on a lie. Louis furiously attacked Armand for the betrayal, and ordered him to leave.

Now armed with the truth, Louis traveled to New Orleans to finally reunite with Lestat. The two tearfully opened up to each other about Claudia’s (Delainey Hayles) death and Louis’ suicide attempt, and Louis thanked Lestat for giving him the dark gift. The vampires continued to speak as the camera panned back, but viewers couldn’t hear what they said to each other. However, the hug they shared as a hurricane raged outside spoke volumes.

The finale then jumped ahead in time: Daniel published his “fictional memoir” Interview With the Vampire, even though Louis didn’t want him to, and the book was publicly ridiculed by humans and privately pissed off all vampires. It’s revealed that Daniel was also turned into a vampire by Armand after Louis left them alone, but both Louis and Daniel hadn’t heard from Armand since then. The season ended with Louis challenging all the vampires angry at him for exposing their way of life to come to him.

Suffice to say, a lot went down in the season 2 finale. But Reid’s favorite part of the emotional episode was Louis and Lestat’s long-awaited reunion. “I just thought it was beautiful,” he tells Entertainment Weekly. “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.”

When Louis found Lestat again in New Orleans, it’s a far cry from the Lestat fans have seen throughout the series. He’s been living in a dilapidated house, pretending to play piano on a piece of wood while using Siri to actually broadcast the music, and telling Louis that he’s “going on tour” but needs about 50 more years of practice first. This may be shocking to viewers who haven’t read Anne Rice’s books, but Reid was excited to finally play this version of Lestat.

“He’s definitely not in a good place,” Reid says. “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. I know what he has been doing for that period of time. You can’t always play it, so it’s complex, but it’s very well plotted out.”

Reid wanted to go even more extreme with Lestat’s physical appearance in the finale, but showrunner Rolin Jones had to pull him back. “I always wanted to have the scars, the emaciated, full-blown special effects makeup, and the ropy skin,” the actor says. “I wanted to be a full ghoul, basically. And Rolin, rightfully, I suppose, was like, ‘No, it’s a psychological thing. You’re wounded, but it’s a psychological wound. It is all of the things that you want it to be, but it’s in your mind.'”

While Reid doesn’t want to get into too much detail about what Lestat’s been up to since the trial to bring about such a drastic change, he reveals that Lestat has been “forced to deal with himself more.”

“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 says. “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.”

AMC has officially renewed Interview With the Vampire for season 3, and the show will next adapt Rice’s second book, The Vampire Lestat. “We’re following the order of the books,” Reid confirms. The new season will be centered on Lestat, who is resentful of his portrayal in Molloy’s book and, determined to set his story straight, 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 tells EW. “We’ve just scratched the surface with Sam, who’s an incredible actor.”

The showrunner knows it was “maddening” for Reid to constantly play other characters’ perceptions of Lestat rather than the actual character, but that’s finally come to an end. “We gave him one scene that is objective, the scene in New Orleans,” Jones says. “In that moment, that’s nobody’s point of view. The camera’s over there watching both of them, so there you go, fans. One scene so far of the real Lestat.”

But that scene, and the overall way season 2 ends, went through many changes before it made its way onscreen — first and foremost because the showrunner originally intended for the first book to be adapted into one season. Then, due to budget issues among other reasons, the first book was split into two seasons. Then the showrunner wanted Louis and Lestat’s reunion to take place during Hurricane Katrina, but the timeline didn’t add up. Plus, there were just some aspects to the scene that Jones knew would never “pass muster” at AMC.

“That reunion is wildly nihilistic, so we were going to do something different,” he says. “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. 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.”

It was important to Jones to anchor the finale with Louis and Lestat’s reunion. “It is very clear in the later books that this is not a relationship that gets thrown away,” Jones says. “This is actually a very central relationship, so how can you turn it back and start that journey again? We’re just beginning to see the glimmer of forgiveness and accountability in that last scene between the two of them.”

“But we don’t end with them together as a couple,” Jones adds. “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.”

Jones reveals that they actually turned Anderson and Reid’s microphones off on set while Louis and Lestat finish their conversation. “The whispering that’s going on, there’s two people on earth who know what was said there, and that’s Sam and Jacob,” Jones says.

Reid was honored to see how the showrunner literally wrote that moment into the script. “Nobody knows what Louis and Lestat actually say to each other [besides us], which I think is kind of the point of what happens in this show,” Reid says. “It’s all about point of view. It’s all about perspective. It’s all about who says what about each other. And then now we’ve given it back to these characters, and now these characters get to know what they say to each other and think of each other after all of that, but it’s just for them. They take it back for themselves and no one will ever know. Not even Rolin knows.”

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Jones felt like he owed it to the actors to give them that private moment. “The amount that they put into these characters, the knowledge that they have, and just the s— we put them through, it felt like they had earned a gift,” the showrunner says. “They have a really tight friendship that came from this show, and all these fans have really loved not only the characters, but also loved the friendship that has happened offscreen. So that was a meta celebration of the work they did for two seasons.”

Will Reid ever reveal what he and Anderson said to each other? “Of course not,” the actor says with smile. “I’m sure people who do that mouth-reading stuff can probably get into it.”

“I’m sure someone will try to break the code, but hopefully they don’t,” Jones says. “Hopefully, that’s actually where the audience is respectful of that.”

But as for the final mic drop of the season, when Daniel reveals he’s been turned into a vampire by Armand, Jones teases there’s a lot more to come from that storyline. “One’s a maker and one’s a fledgling,” he says. “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.”