‘Interview With the Vampire’ Season 3: Everything We Know About ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Adaptation

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[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 7.]

AMC knows what a TV gem it has with Interview With the Vampire. On June 26, the network announced the series has been renewed for Season 3, and the announcement came with plot details that will thrill any fan of Anne Rice‘s classic gothic novels.

“When you buy the rights to 18 Anne Rice novels that have sold more than 150 million copies, in your wildest dreams you hope there’s a show as good as Interview on the other end,” said Dan McDermott, president of entertainment and AMC Studios for AMC Networks, on June 26. “What Rolin [Jones, showrunner and series creator] has done with these stories and characters, working so closely with Mark [Johnson, executive producer], as the steward of this universe, has exceeded the loftiest version of our expectations. We can’t wait to see where this creative team takes the series from here and know we are walking alongside an incredibly loyal and passionate base of fans who feel as strongly about this material as we do.”

The series was renewed for Season 2 while Season 1 was still airing, and now the same came be said for Season 3. What a thrill! With Interview With the Vampire Season 3 confirmed, here’s all there is to know about what’s in store. And don’t miss the Interview With the Vampire Season 2 finale, airing this Sunday, June 30 at 9/8c on AMC.

What Will Interview With the Vampire Season 3 Be About?

Interview With the Vampire Season 3 will be an adaptation of Rice’s second book in The Vampire Chronicles series, The Vampire Lestat. It features Lestat as a rockstar in the 1980s (it’s great, trust us) in addition to telling Lestat’s origin story and his side of the story Louis recounted to Daniel in San Francisco in 1973.

AMC’s announcement confirms that they’ll be bringing rockstar Lestat to life in the new season. (For those who haven’t read The Vampire Lestat or other novels in the franchise, see below for some general plot information — we won’t spoil the big moments!).

The description for Interview With the Vampire Season 3 reads: “In Season 3, 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.”

While the book begins in the 1980s, the AMC series has changed the setting from the novel in both seasons. Season 1 was set in early 1900s New Orleans, Season 2 in post-World War II Paris. The present-day timelines in both seasons are set in Dubai in 2022. We imagine the show would modernize the 1980s plot as well, but that’s to be revealed at a later time.

No details about Season 3 episode count, or the possibility of it being split into two parts like Interview With the Vampire, were shared.

Interview With the Vampire Season 3 Cast: Will Louis Be Back?

Jacob Anderson as Louis in the Interview With the Vampire Season 2 finale (AMC)

That logline is exciting for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it confirms returning characters from both Season 1 and Season 2. Given that it’s a Lestat-centric season, will Jacob Anderson‘s Louis be back? The quick answer is, yes.

Season 1 focused on Louis and Lestat, Season 2 centered on Louis (as well as his relationships with Armand and Claudia), and Sam Reid‘s Lestat will return as a main presence in Season 3, but the Season 3 description assures that Louis won’t be absent. Armand (Assad Zaman), Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), and Raglan James (Justin Kirk) will all return in Season 3, and in an exciting and perhaps unexpected update, Fareed will also be back! Dr. Fareed Bhansali was the doctor tending to Daniel in Season 1, played by Gopal Divan. He wasn’t in Season 2, but it seems the series is ready to bring back this character from Rice’s Prince Lestat novel. The description also says Sam will return, which we’re assuming must mean the vampire Sam (Chris Geary) from the Théâtre des Vampires, not Reid, given that the name is included among a list of characters.

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One of the novel’s most tragic plot lines came to pass in Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 7: The deaths of Claudia (Delainey Hayles in Season 2, Bailey Bass in Season 1) and her immortal companion Madeleine (Roxane Duran) at the hands of the Théâtre des Vampires coven. The incorporation of Dream-stat in Season 2, however, leaves the door open for Claudia to come back and haunt the narrative. Jones and Reid both teased that possibility to TV Insider in interviews about Season 2 Episode 7.

“Everybody, even folks that are dead in our world now still can, you know, come back,” Jones told TV Insider’s Damian Holbrook.

Reid told me that Lestat “never get over” Claudia’s death. “That was a big thing because we were always trying to work this out with Rolin. I was like, ‘But we’ve got to be putting more in. They were closer.’ And he was like, ‘I think we have to lay in the foundation that Lestat will never recover from the death of Claudia.’ He will always carry that with him as the biggest guilt in his life.” Because of that, “it also means that she can haunt him,” Reid adds.

The showrunner made a cheeky comment about Reid being “possessed” by Lestat (with a performance that good, you’d think he was!) in a statement to fans tied to the renewal.

“Thank you to the brilliant casts and crews of the first two seasons that got us to this day,” Jones said. “Thank you to the rabid, beautifully unwell fandom that scaled the castle walls to get us to this day. Thank you to Dan McDermott, Ben Davis for the funds and tools to continue the great work of dramatizing Anne Rice’s extraordinary novels. And sincere apologies to the family and friends of actor Sam Reid, for the possession that continues to this day. Monsieur L extends his promise to return his body upon cancellation (may that evening never come.)”

New Characters in Interview With the Vampire Season 3

Sam Reid as Lestat and Joseph Potter as Nicki in Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 3 (Larry Horricks / AMC)

The logline for the upcoming season features some very intriguing names, ones we haven’t yet seen onscreen. Viewers met Nicki, Lestat’s first love played by Joseph Potter, in the intentionally brief Vampire Lestat adaptation in Season 2 Episode 3. This tale was told from Armand’s point of view, which Jones told TV Insider was very intentional. Armand left out a key character from Lestat’s early years in Paris: Gabrielle de Lioncourt, Lestat’s mother. The Season 3 description confirms she’ll be a character.

Jones told TV Insider that “in my head, other than Lestat, [Gabrielle is] the central character of Season 3. The most important character.” Whomever they cast in the role will have to be “someone who can do dubious battle with Sam,” Jones added. “Sam is absolutely the biggest instrument.”

Magnus is Lestat’s maker who was once part of Armand’s Parisian coven, but we’ve never seen him in the series. Marius is Armand’s maker, also mentioned in Season 2. “Those Who Must Be Kept” is a reference to Akasha and Enkil, the progenitors of the entire vampire race in Rice’s literary universe. Aaliyah played Akasha in the 2002 film Queen of the Damned, which was an adaptation of the book of the same name (Book 3 of the series). The movie threw in The Vampire Lestat‘s opening scenes as its opener. Lestat was played by Stuart Townsend.

The AMC series will mark the first time The Vampire Lestat novel has gotten a full onscreen adaptation. Given that Season 2 dipped into some future books, like Merrick (Book 7) and Tale of the Body Thief (Book 4), and given the Those Who Must Be Kept mention, it’s entirely possible Season 3 could include some Queen of the Damned plot.

Will it be called Interview With the Vampire Season 3, or The Vampire Lestat?

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Jones has said throughout Seasons 1 and 2 press that one of the main reasons he took on this project was for the chance to adapt The Vampire Lestat.

In the novel, Lestat has been in a deep vampire sleep for decades when his consciousness is kicked back into gear by the sound of rock music in the 1980s. He meets a band, convinces them to let him be their leading man (through his own musical talents, of course), and emboldened by the openness of the era, he tells them he is a vampire. They think he’s pretending to be the vampire Lestat made famous by a book called Interview With the Vampire by Daniel Molloy. Lestat reads the book, and he’s not pleased by how Louis portrayed their life together. He plans to make his band a hit so they can go on a world tour to tell the world the real story, and that’s just the opening scenes…

The rest of The Vampire Lestat tells Lestat’s origin story, from his final years as a human to the night he became a vampire against his will in Paris and the years that followed. He goes on to tell his side of the story Louis recounted to Daniel for their book, revealing new details about the Théâtre des Vampires trial and more.

AMC says the next season will be an adaptation of The Vampire Lestat, but it’s still being billed as Interview With the Vampire Season 3. It could be fun to go with a name like Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, but continuing with the original name is far less confusing.

AMC’s Anne Rice Immortal Universe now includes three series: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, which is currently in production on its second season, and the recently greenlit Anne Rice’s The Talamasca (working title).

Interview With the Vampire is executive produced by award-winning producer Mark Johnson (who oversees AMC’s Anne Rice Immortal Universe), creator, writer and showrunner Rolin Jones, Mark Taylor, along with Christopher Rice and the late Anne Rice. According to AMC, it is the No. 1 series for viewership and acquisition on AMC+ over the last year, with the exception of The Walking Dead universe shows.