Inside the ‘Interview with the Vampire’ Season 3 Finale, Where the Series Loses Its Head and Finds Lestat’s Truth

Editor’s Note: This piece contains spoilers for Season 3 of “Interview with the Vampire,” aka “The Vampire Lestat.”

Film and television shows are big, collaborative efforts — which means a lot of meetings. Season 3 of “Interview with the Vampire,” aka “The Vampire Lestat,” has had what have to be some of the more surreal departmental summits about how to take something off the page and make it visual. 

In Episode 7, “The Failures” — seriously, spoilers — a lot of time and care and attention went into making sure that Jacob Anderson and Assad Zaman could have as natural an interaction as possible in their final scene together. It was a tall (or, really, perhaps a very complicated short) order, considering Anderson’s Louis de Pointe du Lac has been beheaded and served up, still vampirically undead, on a platter in the back of a butcher shop for Zaman’s Armand to torment and/or use to sabotage the Great Conversion plans of Lestat’s mother Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) and/or wrest closure out of his former lover. It is Armand, after all. 

The scene of Louis’ head, dripping residual blood and hooked up to all sorts of monitors, required an Armand-level conspiracy of practical effects, visual effects, and the right production design setup to pull off the effect and give Anderson space to act what is, dramatically, a very fraught and knotty scene. The key question for showrunner Rolin James and his team was how to make sure Anderson wasn’t a prop, as a performer. 

“Most of the conversation was [about] trying that off: How the table worked, how the green scene would work. It’s not the greatest [puppet] head in the world, but it’s not supposed to double. There was a lot of post-work that went into it — but it was a very functional head, too. We had an articulated jaw, and it was able to do a lot of great things,” Jones told IndieWire on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. 

A key for “Interview with the Vampire” across all its run has been its ability to indulge in the fangs and the blood and the phantasmagorical world of Anne Rice without getting lost in that roux. Those production meetings, according to Jones, really honed in on figuring out when the camera would be on the head, how do they get the audience to buy it just enough, and then get back to the actors again. The process was designed and optimized so that most of the time, Anderson and Zaman could just be playing off each other. “That’s what people are paying the money to see,” Jones said. 

“The Failures” is, in a lot of ways, a set of mini-plays, culminating in the reveal of Lestat (Sam Reid) delivering the monologue over tape that he’s been narrating all season long. The sequence between Louis, Armand — and eventually Regina (Delainey Hayles), revealed to have been working for Armand to entrap Louis because of her resemblance to his long-lost (and, as of the seance with her Episode 6, extremely pissed) vampiric sister Claudia (also Hayles) — is one of them. Jones cites its importance as an example of how “Interview with the Vampire” can make a sequence confined to a single room expansive and cinematic. 

“The first third of it, [we’re experiencing] it as if you were Louis, and then it opens up into this two-hander, and this three-hander, with the reveal [of Regina having been working for Armand],” Jones said. “You know, if you’re an Armand fan, for a lot of the season, you’ve been wondering where the hell he is. Now you know he’s in every frame of it. If Regina [is there], it’s him. If Alex [Seamus Patterson] is there, it’s him. He’s been creeping through this whole goddamn show.” 

‘Interview with the Vampire’ ©AMC/courtesy Everett Collection

Through some canny editing cutaways, but also through the way that the camera subtly opens inside of the space, and through the lighting on Zaman’s face, the reveal invites the viewer to re-evaluate everything they’ve seen across all seven episodes of Season 3. But “Interview with the Vampire” isn’t done with that sequence, because it refuses to make moments about pure plot reveals. A character has to change, too. Here, it is the head of Louis that, literally free of his body, finally stops metaphorically looking up his own ass. 

“The real beauty of Jacob’s performance here is the moment that he switches from ‘I’m gonna do this to save Regina’ to, ‘What do I owe this guy?’” Jones said. “You know, Armand’s past, Louis’ very particular perspective on his past, there was stuff left on the table and for Armand to have forced him to see him? It’s an odd scene, but I think it’s an odd beauty.” 

Finding the odd beauty in its characters’ tortured relationships is what “Interview with the Vampire” is trying to do at every stage of storytelling, and especially with its edit. “It’s built for a rewatch and a third watch and our editors are always trying to turn TV into a painting, if you can do it, so that multiple viewings reveal stuff. And I’m not ashamed of that. I think it’s the right way to do it,” Jones said. 

‘Interview with the Vampire’©AMC/courtesy Everett Collection

Certainly, Lestat’s final “concert” of the season, imagined inside his own (decapitated) head to a crowd of his victims as his time runs out — as hilariously and also viscerally tracked on an iPhone timer  — required a painterly approach to everything on the show that’s come before. In pulling together the montage of events that Lestat remembers, Jones encouraged editor Mike Phillips and his team to pull from alternate takes in Seasons 1 and 2 and to manipulate shots so that we see what we’ve seen before from a different point of view: Lestat’s. 

“I just started just really freeing the editors to start painting, start manipulating, go back and remold the clay, knock something off, fuck with it. Go, go, go. This is Lestat,” Jones said. “The most exciting example, I don’t think anybody’s cracked it online, but when he has a breakdown for the first time on stage in Episode 1, when he drops to his knees, if you freeze frame it, there’s a very interesting freeze frame there that so perfectly matches his face,” Jones said. 

It’s in part worth the effort because the next season of “Interview with the Vampire” will not perfectly match Lestat’s face. There’s a wider, more broken world the show is going to explore, and what is exciting to Jones is that they can reevaluate, somewhat, the way that they tell it. “The next book coming up, called ‘Queen of the Damned,’ has very strict point-of-view chapters, and that should be a clue to how we might be considering the next season,” Jones said. 

“Interview with the Vampire” Season 3 is now streaming on AMC+.