What You Need to Know About ‘Interview with the Vampire’ to Prepare for ‘The Vampire Lestat’

[Editor’s Note: This piece contains spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 of “Interview with the Vampire.”]

It’s totally fine if you treat this tangent as skeptically as renowned journalist — with his own masterclass — Daniel Malloy (Eric Bagosian), but I promise you there is a connection between AMC‘s adaptation of Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire” series and HBO’s recently concluded “Hacks.” Sure, yes, Lestat (Sam Reid) and Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) could rock a shared wardrobe, but there’s another connection, and it is this: These are both TV shows that like to blow themselves up at the end of every season. Each year, they are reborn into something slightly different.

Whether it’s Ava (Hannah Einbinder) leveraging studio blackmail to force Deborah to make her the head writer of her late-night show or Louis (Jacob Anderson) slitting Lestat’s throat and leaving him in a garbage dump, both shows mark the end of each season by altering the nature of the dynamic between their core duo.

The power dynamic shifts, the goals change, sometimes events conspire to keep them together; but somehow the connection between them is altered such that the two can’t go back to the way things were before, but also cannot stop caring about each other.

Enter Season 3 of “Interview with the Vampire,” which has rechristened itself as “The Vampire Lestat” but is still very much Season 3 of an ongoing series created by Rolin Jones, starring Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson — and, more crucially than ever, scored by Daniel Hart, who joined the writers’ room for Season 3 to better integrate Lestat’s own taste for music and songs into the story.

If you are not caught up on the first two seasons, really all you have to know going into the next season is that the Vampire Lestat made Louis de Pointe du Lac a vampire in 1910s New Orleans, and they’ve had a bloody situationship ever since.

‘Interview with the Vampire’ Alfonso Bresciani/AMC

Season 3, which premieres June 7, is all about Lestat spinning out following the publication of Louis’ tell-all book, in which Louis told his life’s secrets to Malloy (who, spoilers, is now a vampire himself, so it really should be called “Interview Between Vampires,” but never mind). Said secrets included a lot of less-than-glowing anecdotes about Lestat, so he’s eager to set the record straight (in his own way) at the start of “The Vampire Lestat.” It may even be a fun experience to get Lestat’s take on Louis’ perspective first, before watching “IWTV,” but perhaps you do want to have more context, or a refresher of the key hinge points in Louis and Lestat’s relationship without going back through all 15 or so hours of “Interview with the Vampire.”

It really just depends on how much you like theater.

People I know are going to yell at me, Sarah Shachat, if I don’t mention somewhere in this piece that I am from New Orleans, which is the setting for Season 1 of “Interview with the Vampire” as well as Anne Rice’s novels. But the show’s relationship to the novels is a refreshingly flexible one, as are its links to the 1994 Neil Jordan film.

The AMC series updates Louis’ origin story; instead of making him a Plantation owner in the late 18th Century, he is a Creole man in the early 20th, and the series not only makes the gay subtext of the books and the film very textual, but engages frankly with the racial, social, and power dynamics of the time as a way to help audiences relate to (and heighten) the twisted dynamics between Louis and Lestat.

Now, aside from all of that, the beats of Season 1 do line up pretty well with the novel. Louis rescues a young girl and brings her back to Lestat to make her into a vampire. Claudia (Bailey Bass in Season 1 and Delainey Hayles in Season 2) is then forever a 14-year-old girl, partly Lestat and Louis’ child, partly Louis’ sister, and completely unsatisfied with the kind of life that Lestat wants them all to lead. She wants answers about their kind.

‘Interview with the Vampire’ ©AMC/courtesy Everett Collection

Eventually, the conflicts among the twisted little family and Louis’ struggles to reconcile his emotions for Lestat — which, please don’t come at me “IWTV” fans, but wow all of these people are abusive, predatory, and manipulative toward one another — boil over. Over a Mardi Gras ball (the most vampiric thing in our real world is the public access telecast of the Rex/Comus Ball, to be fair), Louis and Claudia poison Lestat by tricking him into drinking tainted human blood, and then Louis slits his throat.

Season 2 sees Louis and Claudia in Europe — just in time for World War II — and both novel and show expand outward to include things like vampire covens and AMC tie-in series to the further reaches of Rice’s lore. The main setting is the vampire coven of the Théâtre des Vampires, which wasn’t intended as a wonderful excuse for Ben Miles to do wild things on a stage in a wild amount of eyeliner when Anne Rice wrote it, but let me assure you, it is a huge bonus.

Louis becomes romantically entangled with an ancient vampire named Armand (Assad Zaman), who leads the coven, but via a set of machinations, lies, egos, and the fact that the theater was partly founded by Lestat (because of course), Claudia, Louis, and Claudia’s newly-made vampire companion Madeleine (Roxane Duran) are all arrested by the coven for Lestat’s murder. Of course, he isn’t dead (or un-undead, if you will), and he shows up at the trial where… so many fucked up things happen, y’all. Watch Episode 7 of Season 2. Jesus.

But the most important takeaways are that Claudia and Madeline are killed for their role in Lestat’s almost-offing, while Louis is only banished. He and Lestat watch as Claudia is turned to dust by the sun in front of them, before Louis gets revenge by burning down everyone else in the coven except for Armand, who goes with him to confront Lestat. Louis chooses to be with Armand instead of Lestat. Then, for 77 years, Louis believed that Armand saved his life by messing with the vamp/jury/audience to spare him, but Malloy helps him realize it was Lestat, controlling the minds of the vamps who meant to damn Louis, too.

‘Interview with the Vampire’ Sophie Giraud/AMC

In a welcome shift from the novel, instead of Louis and Armand being consumed by ennui — in the book, they don’t even turn the 20-year-old Malloy, bless him — Louis reconciles with Lestat in New Orleans as hurricanes batter down the dilapidated house in which Lestat’s been sulking away in the French Quarter. Some months later, Louis and Malloy check in telepathically, and Louis challenges all the vampires who are talking shit about the release of the book to come at him if they are. He owns the night.

OK. There you have it. That’s what you missed on “Glee.”

Except, for my money, the really important things to keep in mind as you either catch up on “Interview with the Vampire,” or dive straight into “The Vampire Lestat,” don’t have to do with the plot, necessarily. Seasons 1 and 2 of the AMC show have a mastery of an elevated, almost operatic tone. They have a lush visual style that manages to be as sensuous and brooding as the goths desire, but still, you know, visually clear in a world where digital cinematography can often get fucked over and look extremely dark. Lestat and Louis do not hunt in cowardly, flexibly lit medium shots.

There’s real intention and depth to how the series looks and how it explores its characters. Malloy is much more interesting (they even make fun of the fact that the novel version is in his 20s and doesn’t know how to ask good questions) and “Interview with the Vampire” doesn’t just cast characters with different ethnicities from the novels, but engages with those changes; it makes the world richer and Louis and Armand more interesting. “Interview with the Vampire” also has one of the best TV scores of the decade, if not the century.

And what’s so exciting about Season 3 is that Rolin Jones and his team are going to blow all of that up. It’s all going to change. New music, new visual language, new Lestat. You can know everything there is to know about the show, the world, the novels, the Neil Jordan film, but “Interview with the Vampire” wants to surprise you, too.

“The Vampire Lestat” premieres on June 7.