Anne Rice’s classic novel Interview with the Vampire is a brooding gothic romance about the destructive passions of the vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt. But its sequel, The Vampire Lestat, is a far stranger tale involving the eponymous vampire starting a rock band and recounting an origin story that includes godlike beings in ancient Egypt. Replicating that shift was always part of the plan for Interview with the Vampire showrunner Rolin Jones, who spoke to Polygon about his adaptation of The Vampire Lestat for our summer preview.
“There was that initial shock when the first script came in for season three and they’re like, Oh my, you guys were really serious, but I think anybody who loves the series is prepared for this,” Jones says.
Resentful of how Louis (Jacob Anderson) portrayed him in Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) book Interview with the Vampire, Lestat (Sam Reid) asks Daniel to tell his side of the story through a music documentary. The vibe shift is obvious from the opening credits, which have transitioned from Interview with the Vampire’s understated orchestral overture to a maximalist animation-heavy music video. Both are the work of composer Daniel Hart, who is also one of the writers for The Vampire Lestat.
“I mostly tried to get out of Daniel’s way,” Jones says. “In the first three episodes, there were two songs that came in from whatever divine intervention, and they absolutely made us restructure the episodes.”
One of the big rewrites came from a song Hart wrote for Lestat about his maker, the ancient vampire Magnus (Damien Atkins). The tale of obsession turned into fodder for a retro music video, demonstrating how Lestat presents the tale to Daniel.
“It’s a very harrowing, very disturbing section of the book,” Jones says. “Lestat has all this armor up. He wants to be as glib and as cunty as he can with Daniel Molloy, so of course he wrote a little ditty about his transformation. It ended up lending itself to a very elegant structure.”
The Vampire Lestat was filmed in Toronto but follows Lestat and his band on a North American tour as he hopes to satisfy his ego by attracting billions of fans. Jones changed a lot of Rice’s material by bringing her novels into the modern day, but he kept Lestat’s goal of rock stardom the same — even though musical tastes have shifted dramatically since 1985.
“We decided it would be a very exciting obstacle for the ego and the vanity of Lestat,” Jones says. “The organizing thematic principle of a meditation on failure and how you find yourself through failure reveals another way in which you can plumb into a character.”
In Interview with the Vampire season 2, Lestat explains that he is powerful even by vampire standards because he possesses the blood of Magnus and Akasha, the mother of all vampires. Akasha, also known as the Queen of the Damned, plays a big role in Rice’s second novel, and Jones promises another major tone shift when the character (played by Sheila Atim) shows up in The Vampire Lestat episode 5. It’s a quality that he says will be even more pronounced if AMC renews his series for a fourth season, which would cover Rice’s third novel, The Queen of the Damned.
“It’s just a taste of a level of ferocity and intelligent rage that is at a precipice ready to strike into the show and alter it,” Jones says. “You will feel a landscape-changing energy from her.”
Since Interview with the Vampire premiered in 2022, AMC has launched two other series based on Rice’s world, dubbed the Immortal Universe. A third season of Mayfair Witches is in the works while Talamasca: The Secret Order was cancelled after one season. Talamasca agent Raglan James (Justin Kirk) was introduced in Interview with the Vampire, appeared in the spinoff about the secret society for monitoring supernatural beings, and pops up again in The Vampire Lestat. Jones says he sees the opportunity for even more crossovers.
“There’s a lot of successful things in Talamasca that you would want to grab onto and there’s some actors that we really liked from the show,” Jones says. “If our show is lucky enough to have a fourth season, there’s a cataclysmic global event that happens with Akasha that I think other shows could use in exciting ways. Some have been talked through with the other showrunners, and some are just there to be discovered.”
Jones says he’d like to see the series last as long as Reid and Anderson are interested in making it. He’s already borrowing plots from later entries in The Vampire Chronicles, and he’s not afraid to wrestle with some of the series’ more outlandish moments — like Lestat drinking Jesus’ blood in Rice’s fifth book, Memnoch the Devil.
“It’s always a humbling experience to read her books because there’s so much raw gold in there, and there’s so much thoughtful prose, and you can feel what Anne is going through as an individual, as a human, while she’s writing those things,” Jones says. “If you didn’t grab one or two of the totally psychotic, weird, wild things, you’d be missing out on what makes her as an artist, singular.”
The Vampire Lestat premieres on June 7 on AMC and AMC Plus.
