Feature Story
For what feels like an eternity, horror fans have been anticipating the sophomore season of one of TV’s breakout series of 2022. It’s about bloody time that “Interview With the Vampire” returns from the undead for its Season 2 premiere Sunday, May 12, on AMC and AMC+. Jacob Anderson (“Game of Thrones”) is back as 145-year-old vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, who sits down for a revealing interview about his life in this adaptation of author Anne Rice’s acclaimed Vampire Chronicles series of novels.
Penning Louis’ life story is journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, “Billions”), who had previously spoken to the vampire in 1973 for an interview that ultimately went unpublished after the sit-down turned disastrous. Daniel, now living with Parkinson’s disease, comes when called to Louis’ cavernous, contemporary condo home in Dubai in 2022 to take another stab at telling the Creole vampire’s tales.
This season, “Louis tells of his adventures in Europe, a quest to discover Old World Vampires and the Theatre Des Vampires in Paris, with Claudia” (per AMC). Claudia, portrayed this season by Delainey Hayles (“Holby City”), is a fledgling vampire bonded to Louis by their time in New Orleans.
It’s now 1940 in Louis’ story, and he is about to meet the vampire he calls the love of his life. First introduced as Louis’ ever-present servant Rashid (Assad Zaman, “Hotel Portofino”), it is revealed to Daniel that the vampire’s attendant is a vampire himself, over 500 years old and named Armand.
The two meet in the city of love, so it is no surprise, given how Louis’ last great love turned out, that, according to AMC, “their courtship and love affair will prove to have devastating consequences both in the past and the future.”
“Their relationship is really interesting, and it’s one of the things that I’m most excited about people seeing this season,” Anderson told Entertainment Weekly in a December 2023 interview about Louis and Armand in the new season of the series.
About their relationship, Anderson added, “Armand would appear to be very different to Lestat, and I think he’s more than a rebound, let’s put it that way. But there’s definitely residual trust issues and perhaps dynamics repeated, but not necessarily in the way that you think.”
In the City of Light, Claudia is immediately taken by the theater — enraptured from her seat in the audience before taking center stage. In a trailer for the upcoming season, Armand enthusiastically tells Louis, “The coven has grand designs for her.”
As Daniel dives deeper into Louis’ past, knowing how the vampire has lied to him, the journalist works to sort fact from fiction and determine why, exactly, he’s been asked back for a followup interview after all these years.
The first season of “Interview With the Vampire” told the story of Louis’ early life as a vampire and the circumstances that led to his turning. Louis met the mysterious, charismatic and very French Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid, “The Newsreader”) at a swanky New Orleans saloon in 1910. He excited and annoyed Louis in equal measure from their very first interaction.
What follows their meeting is a tragic love story for the ages. Louis and Lestat grappled with their identities while trying to survive both the time and place they were living through and their own tumultuous relationship.
Lestat saw right through Louis — in a literal sense, using telepathy — and knew all that he was up against as an ambitious Black business owner and as a closeted man in America at the turn of the century. Lestat promised Louis everything in an impassioned speech before turning him into a vampire, vowing from the pulpit of a church, “I can swap this life of shame, swap it out for a dark gift and a power you can’t begin to imagine.”
Louis was constantly thrown between self-hatred for the things he did to live as a vampire and enjoying his life with Lestat, who embraced all of the trappings of vampiric, everlasting life with gleeful hedonism. For a while, the two vampires lived together in relative harmony.
However, everything changed when Claudia, portrayed in the first season by Bailey Bass (“Avatar: The Way of Water,” 2022), was invited into their home. Louis found the girl near death in a fire and convinced a reluctant Lestat to save her by turning her and granting her immortality. Claudia was a daughter of sorts for the pair of vampires, but they didn’t exactly make a happy family.
Things became incredibly tense in the house as Lestat grew increasingly jealous of Claudia and Louis’ seemingly easy bond. It all came to a head when Claudia planned to kill Lestat, assuming that Louis was with her in the plot to poison their maker. In the end, Louis couldn’t do it, secretly keeping Lestat safe before fleeing a now dangerous New Orleans for Paris, France.
As the tale continues, gather some protective garlic and silver, and tune in to a brand-new season of “Interview With the Vampire,” premiering Sunday, May 12, on AMC and AMC+.