SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for “And That’s the Finish of It. There’s Nothing Else,” the Part II finale of “Interview With the Vampire,” now available on AMC+.
“We held each other’s hands and just jumped.”
That’s how Jacob Anderson says he and Sam Reid are ready for the climactic reunion between Louis and Lestat in the second season finale of AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire.”
“I feel very happy with that scene, but actually that’s what I wanted to film,” says Anderson Selection. “It was a nightmare, after which it felt like a little bit of magic for an hour of that 14-hour day.”
The scene has, in fact, been decades in the making for the estranged vampires, who haven’t spoken to each other in 77 years since Louis sentenced Lestat to his own personal hell – only to continue to find out incessantly that Louis is in love with someone else. When they meet again, it is in the middle of a hurricane in New Orleans, inside a dilapidated house that is barely holding itself together against the strong winds outside. A forlorn Lestat isn’t much better inside, until Louis arrives bearing the last thing he expected – gratitude. What changed Louis’ thoughts? We’ll get there.
Jacob Anderson
Courtesy of Larry Horricks/AMC
Instead of an actual hurricane, the production got closer to the chaotic conditions on set, as Reid and Anderson delivered perhaps the most important heart-to-heart of the series so far, which is based on the Anne Rice novels. It will also certainly have major implications for what’s to come after AMC greenlit season three this week.
“It’s bizarre to shoot a scene like that with guys holding leaf blowers that might be going off in the background, and individuals are shaking the set,” Reid says, laughing. Anderson notes that there was also a real blizzard going on outside the set in Prague, where Season 2 was largely filmed.
“That day was crazy,” he says. “We could kind of hear each other, but with the leaf blowers and things banging on the windows, conditions weren’t good at all. But I will back Sam and myself in saying that, for a number of reasons, it was a great day. And the exact physicality of the scene, we only had to do it twice each.”
In these two takes, each depicts more than a century of grief, regret, love, hate and some other emotion a vampire might discover in the span of eternity. “It felt right that two vampires could continue in that moment of forgiveness and contrition in the middle of history and life, and nature working its way through them,” says series creator Rolin Jones, who wrote the ending.
Sam Reid
Courtesy of AMC
This turbulent couple’s hurricane was aptly foreshadowed last week by Claudia (Delainey Hayles), the vampire daughter they’ve always placed at the center. “Another round in your stormy romance,” she laments, as she and Louis are put on trial by the vengeful Théâtre des Vampires in front of a live audience for trying to kill their creator Lestat, who served as the star witness. But only Claudia and her companion Madeleine (Roxane Duran) find the sun through crime, a horrible fate that Lestat watches unfold.
Although Hayles isn’t in the finale, she worked with Reid to ensure that last look of a child begging for his father buried deep within Lestat. “It was the pure pain of this happening and she was looking for the next person in the room that she trusts, which is bizarre to say because she hates him so much,” says Hayles. “But out of everyone in the room, I think she trusts him the most.”
Being the recipient of Claudia’s final gaze is etched in Lestat’s mind forever, and he tells Louis that he has become a prisoner of it.
“That’s going to be a huge boost for this character, because he’s going to be forever haunted by the guilt of Claudia’s death,” Reid says. “He’s going to be carrying that misery around with him. You don’t want him to talk about it again, or shut it down like Louis does. It’s the kind of thing that’s going to continue to drive him crazy.”
While this was happening, Louis was entombed in a stone coffin and left to starve to death after he claimed that Armand had mind-controlled the bloodthirsty audience into condemning him to banishment instead of death. He was eventually freed by Armand and wasted no time in burning down the theater with his night troupe inside, before beheading their smug boss, Santiago (Ben Daniels). He then found Lestat taking refuge in the Parisian residence of his creator, Magnus. As punishment for his part in Claudia’s death, Louis kissed Armand right in front of Lestat, marking him with yet another devastating visual.
But the 70-year union between Louis and Armand that follows is not marked by marital bliss either. Anderson says Louis never forgives Armand for turning him and Claudia over to the coven to be put on trial, even when Armand saved him. “From that point on, Louis and Armand’s relationship is essentially sustained as a spiteful act to punish Lestat,” he says. “There has to be a nugget of something, some affection or sense of security or belief, to keep it alive. But there will always be that aspect of Louis saying, ‘I’m holding you here because I’m mad at you and I’m mad at him. You need to be there when I fall or when I screw up. You need to catch me.’”
Courtesy of AMC
With only spite to bind them together, it’s no surprise that they implode when the final bombshell is dropped by Louis’s interviewer, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), in present-day Dubai: Courtesy of the shadowy Talamasca group, Molloy presents evidence that not only did Lestat save Louis’s life at the trial, but Armand was given credit for the act of mercy after rehearsing and directing the play that entailed killing Louis and Claudia to the audience’s delight.
Reid was aware of the present-day twist about Louis’s true savior, but he wasn’t shocked either. “I don’t think there’s a world where Lestat would let Louis die,” he says.
And so we come to the big reunion, when an overconfident Louis seeks out a completely emaciated Lestat, who is eating rats and barely keeping his sanity while playing a piano made of driftwood. He thanks Lestat for saving him and for the “dark gift” of immortality that Louis has long treated as a curse. Through tears of blood, they admit their guilt for hurting each other and mourn Claudia’s death. The scene ends with the two embracing as the walls of Lestat’s fragile existence truly come crashing down on them. But Jones warns that their tumultuous love story will not be completely resolved by a factor like honesty.
“You can’t really wrap up Claudia’s death and everything that happened all at once,” he says. “It’s just the beginning of determining a path forward for each of them.”
After Molloy’s book is revealed –– and he is turned into a vampire by the vengeful Armand –– Louis becomes the target of vampires everywhere for exposing his existence. In the final scene, instead of hiding from these threats, he calls them out with his speech and a declaration: “I own the night.”
Anderson says the true meaning of that final line, in his eyes, is something he will keep to himself. However, he was clear about what he no needs it to be, and says he and Jones even reworked it during filming.
“I was involved in this last second for Louis, it would be about violence, like an invitation,” he says. “I wanted it to be about peace and a group of him. He discovered some kind of silence in himself. That’s why he can tune into these voices. I wanted it to feel like an inspiration.” It is a sigh for Louis.”
Hayles has a more enthusiastic take on it: “It was so gangster!”
Over the course of two seasons, the sequel exhausted the pages of Rice’s first novel, The Vampire Chronicles, to answer one question: Why did Louis want to do an interview in the first place? In the premiere of the show’s sequel, he tells Molloy it’s about “reality and reconciliation.” Ultimately, though, Jones says Louis was searching for something they called “vampiric grace.”
Anderson says Louis’ acceptance of this grace can be seen in the two artifacts prominently displayed in his Zen garden in the final scene—Claudia’s final dress and a portrait of her brother Paul, whose suicide opened the sequence.
“I really feel content with where he is,” Anderson says. “It felt like the closing of a chapter. This is the end of what began in 1910, and an extremely satisfying place to leave it now. When you never see Louis again, I feel really satisfied with him.”
But in fact, this won’t be the last time Louis is seen: AMC confirms that he, Molloy, Armand and others will be part of Lestat in season three.
Rice’s sprawling “Vampire Chronicles” run spans 13 books full of dense origin tales and wild new character developments, which Jones says he hopes to explore over the course of up to six or seven seasons. (The sequel also serves as the mothership for AMC’s Immortal Universe, which incorporates more of Rice’s diversions with “Mayfair Witches” and a recently commissioned Talamasca sequel.)
But in Season 3, Lestat’s dissatisfaction with Molloy’s portrayal of him in her book will lead him on a path of rediscovery and a new life as a rock star, a story inspired by Rice’s second novel, “The Vampire Lestat.”
“The big difference going forward is that Lestat will be front and center telling the story, so it has to feel like this show has been held hostage by Lestat,” says Jones. “Aesthetically, it’s going to feel totally different. It’s not going to feel like two old men are in a room trying to figure out what brought them together. It’s going to be over the shoulder of Lestat de Lioncourt, who you’ve probably seen an 80 percent accurate version of who he is – earnest and reckless. So it needs to be both delightful and damaging.”
Eagle-eyed fans can catch a glimpse of Lestat’s evolving musical tastes at his tragic New Orleans residence, where Jones says to look closely for a demolished grand piano that shows “the music coming out of it made him so violent that he broke it.” Just think of what he’ll do with a guitar!
For everyone else, what does a story dominated by Lestat imply? For Louis, Jones says the two-week interview with Molloy changed him irrevocably. “If you take a scene from the opening scene in Season 1, Episode 1, which we combined at the end of Season 2, and put them next to each other, he looks like Abe Lincoln. This could be an intelligent vampire who lived quite exhaustively in 14 days.”
For the once-party-loving Molloy, who Jones says treats being a vampire like being at a rumspringa, he may find ample ground to cover with this new Lestat. “The sex, medicine and rock ‘n’ roll part of Eric is a nice place to play,” he says.
Armand, however, can only go up from here. “We wanted to let his betrayal of Louis be big because we hope to be writing six and seven seasons of this, and this gives us time to let Armand have more dimensions.”
However, for fans eager to see what’s in store for season three, look no further than season two’s third episode and the flashbacks of Lestat fully reveling in the spotlight on stage.
“For me, in the future, I realized everything I needed to see him take the stage as Harlequin,” says Jones. “We really just scratched the surface of things Sam has as an artist.”