Sam Reid Looked to Anne Rice for ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Season 2 Inspiration: “Louis is Always Haunted By Lestat”

Interview With the Vampire Season 2 kicks off with something of a conundrum: how do you keep a main character who was “killed” in the Season 1 finale alive and part of the drama going forward? The first season of the AMC Anne Rice adaptation leaned heavily on the intoxicating relationship shared between vampire Louis de Point du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and his maker/lover/tormentor Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid). Lestat’s tumultuous temper and controlling nature eventually pushes Louis and the couple’s “daughter” Claudia (Bailey Bass in Season 1, Delainey Hayles in Season 2) to hatch a daring scheme to murder the immortal Lestat. And although journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) points out to Louis that their plan probably didn’t work, the story that the vampire is spinning in the titular interview is heading into a very Lestat-less phase in post-World War II Europe.

So what did Interview With the Vampire Season 2 do? Did the show officially cut Sam Reid out of the AMC cult hit? Or does a new version of Lestat emerge fully formed within Louis’s tortured psyche?

**Spoilers for Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 1 “What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned,” now streaming on AMC+**

Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 1 “What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned” reveals that even after poisoning Lestat, leaving him in a landfill, and crossing a whole ocean, Louis can’t stop thinking of his bratty maker. Lestat haunts Louis’s thoughts.

But doesn’t mean that Interview With the Vampire star Sam Reid approached this Season 2 version of Lestat in the same way he tackled his Season 1 performance. During AMC’s panel for Interview With the Vampire Season 2 at Winter 2024 TCA, Reid told journalists, “There is a big difference between Louis and Lestat in Season 1 and in Season 2, mostly because Lestat is dead.”

Later, he cryptically clarified, “Lestat potentially is more Louis than he is himself in Season 2.”

When Decider sat down with the stars of Interview With the Vampire Season 2 after the panel, we asked Reid to elaborate on how his approach to Lestat changed considering he was now a specter in Louis’s mind.

“Okay, if you’re being haunted by someone and if people have read the books — you know, like this is maybe speaking to them specifically — there’s a beautiful passage in Part 2 of the book where Louis was like, ‘The nights were made for thinking of him,’ and all this kind of stuff,” Reid said. “Louis is, like, always haunted by Lestat.”

“But I was curious to be like, ‘Well, if he’s haunted by him, like, what part of him is he haunted by?’ Like, what is the memory that he’s remembering? Like, what is the relationship that Louis can’t forget? And maybe it’s the one that he doesn’t want to talk about. Maybe it’s the one that he doesn’t present. Maybe it’s the one that, you know, you don’t ever really get to see.”

What part of Louis and Lestat did Interview With the Vampire hitherto hold back on showing us? How about what the two are “chill” or “hanging out,” as Reid put it. “So there was a sense of like, ‘Okay, well, maybe let’s explore a softer side of what they are like.'”

“That’s what I was more interested in exploring,” Reid said. “Like, that’s the haunting. It’s the thing that you want to forget, that you have to forget.”

Reid also said he pulled very specific inspiration from the dialogue on the page and the “dynamic” Interview With the Vampire showrunner Rolin Jones created between Louis and “the ghost”

“The dialogue, I think, was interesting because it’s also a reflection of Louis. It’s like, what is Louis thinking in this moment and what does Louis need to hear himself say? And who’s the person that he possibly needs to hear it from the most or trusts to hear it from?” Reid said. “The relationship is very intense but they’re able to kind of create like a blippity-blippity-blip, you know?”

Jacob Anderson had been listening to this whole exchange and began to laugh. “I can’t wait for you to try to write that ‘blip-blipblip-blip,'” he told Decider.

“Blippity-blippity-blip.” That’s what Louis and Lestat share in Interview With the Vampire Season 2.