‘Interview With the Vampire’ Stars Break Down That Game-Changing Season 2 Finale
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[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Interview With the Vampire Season 2 finale, “And That’s the End of It. There’s Nothing Else.”]
Just before Interview With the Vampire Season 2 began airing on AMC, showrunner Rolin Jones told TV Insider that “[Episodes] 7 and 8 feel like cathartic culminations of a very, very large swing. I think it delivers.” Indeed, few shows deliver an ending as transcendent as this. AMC’s Interview With the Vampire is a symphony of excellence from Episode 1 to Episode 15. TV Insider spoke with Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, Assad Zaman, and Eric Bogosian for a full breakdown of the Season 2 finale.
The finale began with Louis (Anderson in an Emmy-worthy performance) on a rampage. Rage gave way to madness after Armand (Zaman, also fantastic this season) exhumed Louis from his rocky grave in the walls of the Théâtre des Vampires. Seeking revenge for the murders of Claudia (Delainey Hayles) and Madeleine (Roxane Duran), Louis put his telepathic gift of fire-starting to the test by dousing the theater in gasoline and igniting a massive blaze as the coven laid trapped in their coffins. (Guess they should’ve made sure the coffins locked from the inside!)
This culminated in the decapitation of Santiago (Ben Daniels) in a film-noir style sequence that Reid tells TV Insider was his favorite part of the finale. “Rolin’s reference for that for me was Die Hard,” Anderson tells me in a separate interview, specifically the walkie talkie call between Bruce Willis‘ John McClane and Alan Rickman‘s Hans Gruber. Splendid.
What came after the Paris story ended changes the series forever and serves as a thrilling setup for Season 3 (AMC renewed the series just days before the finale aired, thank god). Here are the staggering events of the finale’s second half: Daniel Molloy (Bogosian) exposed Armand for directing the trial play; Lestat is who saved Louis in the trial; Louis left Armand over this “seismic lie” and his role in Claudia’s death; and Louis and Lestat reunited in 2022 New Orleans in a scene that showed us the real Lestat for the first time ever. In the most thrilling twist, Armand turned Daniel into a vampire, fulfilling Bogosian’s lifelong dream of playing a bloodsucker (our wholehearted congratulations to both Bogosian and every single “Devil’s Minion” fan).
We’re desperate to see this transformation play out in Season 3, but that’s a long ways away. Here’s what the cast revealed to us about each of these game-changing moments of the Season 2 finale to tide us over in the drought.
What Louis and Lestat said in their reunion is Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid’s secret
Larry Horricks / AMC
Louis and Lestat’s reunion is arguably the series’ most superbly acted scene (to not nominate this cast for Emmys next year would be criminal). Anderson and Reid each tell TV Insider that Louis and Lestat’s reunion wasn’t about them getting back together. It was about grieving Claudia together for the first time.
“[Lestat’s] pretty f**ked up,” Reid says with a big laugh, so the scene didn’t necessarily feel good to film. “But I think it was very satisfying. I think it’s very sad and also lovely that you could put this chapter behind them.”
Here comes the most romantic part. The wide shot of Louis and Lestat’s embrace as the hurricane’s winds burst through the house featured dialogue that was seen and not heard. It was written into the script that no one will ever know what was said except for Anderson and Reid.
“Very specifically in the script, it’s written that Louis and Lestat, but really, Louis speaks to Lestat and nobody knows apart from me and Jacob what was said, not even Rolin,” Reid reveals (Jones wrote the episode). It’s a beautiful thing that these co-stars and best friends, who share the best chemistry on TV and it’s not even close, have this private memory of their beloved characters. Will they ever tell? “Oh, no. Never, never,” Reid guarantees.
Anderson graciously shares details of how he decided what to say. Was it planned, or was it spur of the moment? “It was a bit of both,” Anderson says, “because also I wanted to not get a reaction out of Sam, but I wanted to say something to him that he wouldn’t expect. Actually not even Sam. I wanted Lestat to hear something from Louis that he wouldn’t expect to hear. So we talked about it a little bit, but no, not all of it.”
Where do Louis and Lestat stand after their reunion?
Louis offered Daniel “truth and reconciliation” in the very first episode of the series. He then gave that to Lestat in the Season 2 finale. They’re not back together, but Anderson and Reid say Louis and Lestat are still in love and always will be.
“The way they feel about each other is the scene,” Anderson explains. “That is them being really raw and real with each other. I don’t think there’s any game being played. They’re basically grieving their child together. It’s an apology, and it’s on both sides. It’s a thank you, and it’s a reconciliation. There’s a few words at the end that are exchanged, but the body of the scene is where they are at with each other. They just need to hold each other and grieve. That’s hugely cathartic for both of them, even after all of the s**t.”
“It was very beautiful to have a reunion between Louis and Lestat, but they’re always going to burn each other’s worlds down,” Reid says. “They’re always going to destroy each other and love each other deeply, but that’s their dynamic.” Louis and Lestat aren’t the calm in the storm. They are the storm.
“I can’t imagine going forward there’s any sense of buddies going on picnics,” Reid teases. “It’s still always going to be a fire-and-brimstone level of passion. But it was lovely to be able to put this chapter behind, this 77 years of what the f**k has been going on and not speaking to each other and Lestat, for all intents and purposes, thinking Louis was dead.” On top of grieving Claudia (who could possibly come back to haunt him in Season 3), Lestat has assumed Louis was dead since the “call” in 1973.
“[Lestat] really genuinely thinks, ‘Well, that was it. He’s dead now. He died, and I left him with Armand, and Armand was involved with Nicki’s [Joseph Potter] death, and I did it to him.’ So there’s a lot of guilt between [Louis and Lestat], and they’re both very stubborn. It’s very painful,” Reid says with a laugh. Lestat can now let go of some of that guilt.
Will Season 3 address how Lestat got involved in the trial?
AMC
Viewers now know that Armand was more deeply involved in the trial than Louis ever knew. But The Vampire Lestat exposes even more about Lestat’s return to Paris and Armand’s connection to it. Season 3 will be based on this book, but will it dive into this plot? Reid says “we’re still debating certain things about whether certain events happened, but seeds are placed.” (This is also connected to why Lestat was acting weird at the trial.)
“When you find [Lestat] in Episode 8, where is he?” Reid asks. “Has he come back to his own maker’s prison by his own choice, or is he put there? We’ve left space for that to be explored. I think it’s more interesting — and Rolin probably does as well, and it probably took me a longer time to get around this — to continue to give each individual character their own agency rather than saying, this person is the victim of this person, or this is the baddie and this is the goodie … Therefore we continue to give Louis agency over his own life rather than being constantly dominated by his specific abuse done by his boyfriends.”
Lestat thought Louis knew he saved him in the trial and concealed his surprise when he learned otherwise in his maker’s lair. Lestat could’ve exposed Armand’s involvement right then and there, and this very well might’ve been Lestat’s ticket to getting Louis back sooner. But he respected Louis’ choice and accepted the punishment instead. It was clear to Lestat that this was not the time for reconciliation between them, Reid says.
“Louis pushes [Lestat] off the metaphorical tower and says, ‘This is your death. This is me pushing you off the tower. I’m going to be with Armand for the rest of our lives and I’m going to love him and you’re going to die because of it,'” he explains. “You’re like, ‘Oh my god, is this what it is?’ Some petty” thing. He cuts himself off and says, “Obviously, it’s not petty because they really do love each other, but they need some space now.”
Why did Louis stage the interview?
AMC
Louis shook Daniel’s hand, promised him $10 million, and set his laptop on fire after the Armand reveal, giving the feeling that he always planned to destroy whatever evidence Daniel uncovered. It begs the question: Did Louis stage the Dubai interview because he had a hunch about Armand’s lie? Anderson says, “Yeah, I do,” in response to that question, and he’s been theorizing this since filming the Season 1 finale. Louis has never seen this interview as the chronicling of a suicide like Armand (as Rashid) described it, according to Anderson.
“The burning of the laptop, Louis doesn’t really have a good understanding of how the cloud works,” Anderson says, making us both laugh. “It’s a dramatic flourish. It’s more symbolic than anything.” Suspecting Armand “was something that I started to get a sense of when we did that Season 1 Episode 7 moment of ‘the love of my life,’ because Rolin always talks about that as the end of The Graduate,” Anderson continues. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a cry for help.’ He found the person that he knew could draw the truth out of everyone, including himself.”
Essentially, Daniel has been Louis’ failsafe ever since San Francisco. “He has this real connection with [Daniel], and we learn that he’s given him this apology/gift of ‘you are a bright young reporter.’ If all else goes to s**t, you will always have this,” says Anderson. “He brings him back because he needs help. He’s not quite sure what it is, but he just has this little thing in the back of his mind that’s telling him, ‘This isn’t right, something’s wrong here.'”
“Truth and reconciliation” is “what it comes down to in the end. There is a poetic thing in that final moment. It was fun to shake [Bogosian’s] hand because they don’t touch each other really the whole time. It was quite nice to do that. Eric didn’t know I was going to do it, and he genuinely flinched,” he adds with a laugh. “There was a conversation about whether or not I should do it, but I would’ve fought back” had they told him not to.
Did Armand really want to kill Louis?
AMC
Oh, Armand. Why did you do this?! If you’ve been questioning the Armand twist, namely why he would help the coven murder Louis as well as Claudia, Zaman tells TV Insider’s Damian Holbrook that Armand was “forced” to direct the trial and that all of his subsequent punishment from the coven was “absolutely true.”
“He directed it, but it wasn’t his choice to do it,” Zaman says. “The f**king nugget of the complexity of the show is that he’s not a mustache-swirling evil guy all along. He has just thrown himself, well, been thrown into a situation and he has done despicable things to survive, granted despicable things and a despicable lie to hold for so many years.”
Everything Armand shares in the Dubai interview is “all true,” Zaman notes, “except for what he admits” about the trial, meaning that the only lies were his involvement in the play and in Louis’ sentence. However, we do know from Jones and Reid that Armand intentionally left out details from his and Lestat’s backstory shown in Episode 203, namely a major character. This will be addressed when Lestat tells his side of the story next season.
“I don’t think he planned to” lie for this long, Zaman explains. “I was a little bit confused when I went into this final episode,” he says, “because if Louis and Armand go to see Lestat post-burning, how does Armand know that Lestat is not going to reveal that?” The answer can be found in what Reid previously told me about the trial.
“When he apologizes to Louis and he realizes that Louis’s never going to forgive him, he realizes in that moment, ‘I’m never going to get him back. I have to leave him now,’” Reid said. And as mentioned above, this scene was about preserving Louis’ agency. Lestat preserved Louis while Armand preserved himself.
“What’s tragic about this whole situation is that I don’t think Armand planned to hold this massive bit of information and lie all this time,” Zaman explains. “It was like fight or flight. Louis kissed him in that scene and declared his love in this fake thing where it was [meant] to hurt Lestat. But for Armand, he was like, ‘But if Lestat doesn’t say anything, I can have him. I don’t have anything left. Everyone’s gone.'”
How could he let Claudia die? Did he secretly hate her all along? “I can’t answer that,” Zaman says. “But he always understood Claudia because of her age, because of where she came from. There were similarities between their pasts. He was never ever going to love her in the same way that Louis did.” Zaman admits Armand probably could have prevented her death but chose not to. “I don’t think he wanted to burn her, but he knew that he wasn’t going to prevent it. And Louis was always his main priority.”
“How does Armand come back from that?” Zaman asks. “It’s such a betrayal.” He says the worst part about that scene in Dubai is “the gloating” and thinking “everything’s fine now.”
“He does that one bit at the end of the interview when everything’s done. He doesn’t have to say anything else, but he decides to f**king open his mouth and go, ‘You know what? He loved you. I can say that now.’ It’s Armand thinking that he’s got away with it,” Zaman explains. “It’s just so hard to watch that.”
How did Daniel become a vampire?
AMC
Bogosian tells Holbrook that when Daniel started his follow-up questions, he knew it was “checkmate,” game over for Armand. Daniel withholds his natural anger throughout the interview, Bogosian says, but he dialed up the anger per director Levan Akin’s request.
“He said, ‘Look, I know you’re a very mellow guy, but could you get angry in the scene? Could you get really angry?’ And I thought, ‘OK, you want angry? Here it comes,'” Bogosian shares. “I dialed it up to nine. I still can’t even go to 10 because it’s too much. But it was very satisfying.” Daniel and Armand have “been giving each other these looks for the entire season, and I’ve finally got him cornered and he can’t get away” in that moment, Bogosian adds. It unfortunately came at the expense of his human life. Or was it unfortunate? “In the same way after Season 1, we were like, what happened in San Francisco? Now we’re going to have to know what the f**k happened in Dubai,” he says.
Bogosian is hoping to dive further into Vampire Daniel’s backstory now that his angry side has been revealed. “The funny thing about my character is, I haven’t really done anything wrong so far that you’ve been seeing me,” he says. So true, king. “As I turn into another person at the end there, I’m wondering, and I don’t have the answer to this, is there another side of me? I’d love to find other aspects as they all have their evil side.”
There are questions left unanswered on purpose, like when did Armand turn Daniel and was it consensual or not? Plus, is this the beginning of the Daniel and Armand romance from the books? (Yes, non-book readers, you read that correctly.) Exploring the answers to these burning questions, Zaman says, is something “I’m f**king excited about.”
“I have no idea what’s coming,” Bogosian adds in their joint interview. “No one does. It’s all locked in the minds of Rolin and Hannah [Moscovitch, writer]. I’d love to see the two of us after everybody’s gone, just getting really s**tfaced someplace, and then all of a sudden, he’s biting me.” We would, too. Daniel is Armand’s first fledgling now, after all. We need to know why Armand chose him.
“He’s been waiting to get my clothes off for two years now,” Bogosian teases, with a laugh. “And we’ll get there.”
Speaking of taking clothes off, what about the lack of Louis and Armand sex scenes in Season 2? Anderson says, “I reasoned it this way: Because of [Armand’s] history, it feels like a thing that’s being protected.” He goes on: “The sexuality in their relationship is being protected partly because it has this BDSM dynamic. It’s like, they’re not going to talk about that in this interview, which is strange because Louis was talking about his and Lestat’s sex life. Because they’re both there, there’s perhaps a little bit more of a coy thing.”
Reader, my jaw dropped at what Anderson said next, unprompted. “But I will say, I think that Louis and Daniel, maybe there was more there. I’m going to get in so much trouble,” he giggles. “I’m going to start talking about it all.”
Interview With the Vampire Season 3 can’t come soon enough.
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