SPOILER ALERT: This post comprises spoilers from “What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned,” the Season 2 premiere of “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire,” now streaming on AMC+.
On the set of AMC’s “Interview With the Vampire,” showrunner Rolin Jones and star Jacob Anderson had a nickname for Anderson’s character, Louis de Pointe du Lac. “We used to call him Cuddles the Vampire,” Jones tells Variety with fun.
But notice the past tense. “We wanted to interrupt that,” Jones adds, and with the show’s Season 2 premiere, they definitely put it to rest.
The Anne Rice adaptation and anchor of AMC’s burgeoning Immortal Universe returns with Louis and fellow vampire Claudia (Delainey Hayles, replacing Season 1’s Bailey Bass) trekking across post-World War II Europe seeking ancient vampires. They aren’t on good terms. Claudia remains to be livid with Louis for not ending the job in killing Lestat (Sam Reid), their creator and his lover, within the Season 1 finale before they fled Latest Orleans. So that they roam, on the lookout for a brand new place on the planet amongst their very own kind.
Welcomed as guests in a refugee camp in occupied Romania, they’re there just long enough to collect intel on the local lore about vampires. They spot doorways wrapped with garlic, and bullet-ridden bodies intended to stop undead resurrections. For Louis, with a pleasant buzz from somewhat vodka, the camp gives him the primary relaxing evening he’s had in five years. But Claudia, ever the hunter, stalks the night seeking other vampires and finds an emaciated, corpse-like figure feasting on soldiers within the woods. He clearly isn’t getting sustenance from the meal, which Louis and Claudia consider is since the despair of war is tainting the blood.
Jacob Anderson as Louis De Point Du Lac and Delainey Hayles as Claudia.
Courtesy of Larry Horricks/AMC
The subsequent evening, they awaken to the hysterics of a mob within the camp. Their kind host has been bitten, and the gang fears she is going to turn right into a vampire, despite her partner’s pleas for mercy and help from Louis. But Louis just watches, uncharacteristically devoid of compassion for the girl, whose head is chopped off while he turns his back and leaves with Claudia.
“In Episode 3 of Season 1, [Louis] says he’s a vampire –– but probably not,” Jones says. “Not until this moment. It was really cold. It was within the book, and it is admittedly effective and stunning. And there was a round of notes with AMC about why that was necessary, and we stuck with it.”
Jones says the network was wary about forsaking cuddly Louis, but Anderson was able to shed that a part of the character.
“He definitely leaves behind one other a part of his humanity in that moment,” Anderson says. “It might be since it is sort of a facsimile of humanity to him now anyway. Like the pictures he takes [in upcoming episodes]. He’s becoming a parody of himself, and he won’t embrace it. I feel Louis is at war with himself all season.”
Louis and Claudia’s walkabout to search out other vampires is a pivotal a part of Rice’s 1976 novel, but it surely was omitted of the 1994 film adaptation with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Across Seasons 1 and a pair of’s 15 episodes, the series makes time to cover Rice’s entire book –– after which some.
“We at all times thought this may be a beautiful little gift for fans, and it is precisely where it ought to be,” Jones says. “But we also knew it was going to must function as a pilot for the remaining of Season 2. So we actually focused on the connection between Louis and Claudia, and the mending of how and the way we foreshadow an inevitable ending but do it with a moment of grace.”
The moment he’s referencing is the climactic exchange between the unorthodox siblings, when Louis reinforces his devotion to Claudia as they leave Romania behind and head for a brand new start in Paris. He’s resolute that it’s the two of them against the world. “If you happen to were the last vampire on Earth, it could be enough,” he tells her. But lingering just out of frame for Louis is the spectral presence of Lestat, who has been haunting him as an embodiment of his guilty conscience since they parted ways. So who’s Louis really talking to in that moment? He shoots a fleeting have a look at Lestat, but Anderson seems to consider Louis is locked in on Claudia when it counts.
“I feel like a part of the purpose of it’s that we don’t really know,” he says. “But if you happen to were to observe Episode 1 again after watching [the end of the season], that may go some approach to answering that query. In that moment, he’s definitely talking to Claudia.”
Hayles says she believes Claudia takes his declaration to heart, partly because they witnessed a horrifying reminder that their immortality still has limits. Before leaving for Paris, they meet an aged vampire named Daciana, the mother of the primordial creature that Claudia had previously seen feeding and later blinds in a fight. Daciana kills her now-disabled child because he won’t give you the chance to hunt anymore. As she muses about loss and her withering life, Claudia desperately tries to get her to come back back to America with them and heal herself. Daciana seems tempted by the offer, until she throws herself into the fireplace –– taking her own life.
“When she meets Daciana, it’s a wake-up call that she will be able to live a pleased life in a way and meet others,” Hayles says. “But I do think there’s a looming feeling in her. Watching her jump in the fireplace, I feel she knows at the back of her head, in a way, it is vitally hard to be pleased.”
Anderson admits that scene was difficult to shoot due to what it means for Claudia’s outlook on life, and the selfish needs it exposes in Louis.
“It was so heartbreaking, for me, to see Delainey playing that moment and see the heartbreak in Claudia,” he says. “I feel Louis wants her to be a version of pleased. He wants her to be pleased, and be what he needs her to be for himself.”
Courtesy of Larry Horricks/AMC
All of the while, Louis can be batting away the persistent phantom of Lestat. He first appears during Louis and Claudia’s nomadic journey across Europe, delivering a chillingly affectionate threat about his plan for revenge on Louis –– “I’m merely waiting until you’re pleased. So hurry up.”
But Reid, who has been quite limited in what he can say about Lestat’s role in the brand new season after his supposed death, acknowledges the Lestat audiences see within the premiere is merely the version that lives in Louis’ head and he played him as such.
“So I used to be curious to take into consideration how, if Louis is haunted by him, what version of Lestat is he haunted by?” Reid says “What a part of Lestat is he remembering? And possibly it’s the parts he doesn’t wish to discuss. Perhaps it’s the bits he can’t forget. When you’re watching Lestat on this episode, you’re watching Louis have a conversation with himself. And it’s hearing his internal dialogue reflected back by the person he potentially loves probably the most, but in addition feels probably the most guilt and self-hatred through.”
After fun, Anderson jumps in. “He’s my Jiminy Cricket. It was quite funny on set, because in that scene, I’d turn around to take a look at what Sam was doing, and it was like having a parrot on my shoulder.”
While the march toward Nineteen Forties Paris occupies a lot of the premiere, Jones warns audiences to not underestimate the importance of the titular interview happening in modern-day Dubai between Louis, Molloy (Eric Bogosian) and the newly unmasked Armand (Assad Zaman).
“This concept that Louis was going to regulate this interview and harness this with somewhat little bit of self-reflection, that’s out the window,” he says. “The interview in Season 2, what happens between these three characters, is as necessary, if no more necessary, than what happens up to now.”
Within the Season 1 finale, Armand revealed himself to be a 512-year-old vampire and the love of Louis’ life, a revelation that definitely shifted the dynamic of the room. Now, Armand not has to cover the influence he holds over Louis, who remains to be piecing together his own recollection of events from the last century. Within the premiere, Armand begins sitting in on the interviews, offering up snide remarks and real-time amendments to Louis’ remarks, all of which Molloy adamantly disregards as off the record. Zaman says the verbal sparring with Molloy is Armand’s failed attempt at wrestling him into submission.
“At the top of the primary episode, Armand sees it isn’t working anymore,” Zaman says. “He thought his presence as a vampire sitting at this table, who could kill Molloy any moment, was enough to scare him off or do what Armand wanted. But he’s resilient.”
By the top of the premiere, Armand agrees to be an on-the-record participant within the interview, if only, Zaman teases, to exert control in latest ways in the approaching episodes. On the opposite end of the tape recorder, Bogosian says he drew from personal experience to clarify why Molloy doesn’t bow to this latest pressure on his interview.
“There are some uncanny parallels between me and this character,” he says. “I don’t wish to be bullied. I used to be bullied as a child, and now once I get bullied, I give what I get. Nothing sets me off greater than getting bullied, and I can sense that Armand is trying to provide me somewhat push and that isn’t going to get me to shut up. It’ll set Molloy off, and be much more tenacious as they get into this.”
Whether up to now or present, fans of Rice’s book might see the season as a march to inevitable doom for these characters, who’ve been dancing around some very tragic events on the horizon. But because the season gets underway, Jones doesn’t consider it like that.
“This season is ultimately about contrition,” he says. “I don’t think it’s about doom. We aren’t constructing to that. We’re constructing a bunch of vampires with a whole lot of baggage who’re starting to show inward and ask, ‘What am I accountable for?’ Louis thinks he had idea about why he had to do that interview, and I feel he’ll come out of it this season with a really different understanding.”
