After eight dull months, the showrunners of AMC’s critically acclaimed series Interview with the Vampire finally gave fans a behind-the-scenes sneak peek at the writer’s room, meaning they can hopefully expect Season 3 to begin production soon. In a video posted to Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire Instagram account, fans were given a tour of the writers’ office, where they saw a glimpse of the writers working on the scripts, Daniel Hart composing the music, and a certain someone warming up his vocal cords to bring Rockstar Lestat to life. The video also showed a brief glimpse at a board with storyline ideas written on post-its, which already has fans speculating on which ideas will come to fruition in the highly anticipated third season.
AMC’s Interview with the Vampire Season 1 and Season 2 are an adaptation of Anne Rice’s first novel of the same name, and are centered around Louis du Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) as he recounts his life story to Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) involving his relationship with Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) and Claudia (Bailey Bass and Delainey Hayles) and their years living in New Orleans as the unholy family, leading to their family’s demise in the heartwrenching second season.
The showrunners confirmed that Season 3 will adapt The Vampire Lestat, the second book in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which tells Lestat’s story from his abusive childhood living in France, his horrific transformation into a vampire, and eventually meeting Louis. The showrunners know they’re under immense pressure to adapt Lestat’s story as the second novel holds a special place in the fans’ hearts and that they’re expecting certain scenes from the novel to be adapted as accurately as possible.
There’s also the fact that this isn’t the first time The Vampire Lestat has been adapted; although it shares a name with the third novel in Rice’s series, the 2002 film Queen of the Damned, a sort of quasi-sequel to Interview With the Vampire, borrows most of its plot from The Vampire Lestat. While Queen of the Damned was a critical and commercial failure, it did feature an incredible performance from late R&B star Aaliyah as Akasha, the titular queen. One of our biggest questions heading into Interview with the Vampire Season 3 is whether Akasha will make an appearance, and if so, who is playing her? Will the showrunners hold off on introducing Akasha until Season 4? While we wait for answers to that question, here are the things we’re dying to see in Season 3.
Fans Want to See Lestat Become the Wolfkiller in ‘Interview with the Vampire’
The Vampire Lestat novel delves into Lestat’s origins and everything in his life that led him to New Orleans and Louis. The book, which many fans know, is a drastic change from the tone of the Interview with the Vampire novel as it’s told from Lestat’s perspective as opposed to Louis’s in the first book. Lestat recounts his story of growing up in 18th-century France as a man of noble birth. He’s the youngest of seven children and one of the three that survived into adulthood.
He reveals that he suffered physical, mental, and emotional abuse at the hands of his father and brothers and was neglected and ignored by his mother, Gabrielle de Lioncourt, a fan-favorite character. He was forced to become the provider for the family because his father was blind and his brothers were incompetent. Despite being an aristocratic family, they didn’t have money, as France was in turmoil then.
He takes on the role of provider and ensures that they have everything they need, despite the abuse he’s endured by those closest to him. A scene from the book that fans absolutely need to see adapted from page to screen is what’s known as the wolfkiller scene. Early on in the book, Lestat describes going out to hunt down a pack of wolves that’s disturbing his home village in Auvergne, France, and it’s a scene where fans get to meet the real Lestat and understand who he is as a character. He faces eight wolves by himself and kills all of them, demonstrating his resilience and “capacity for enduring,” as he says himself in Interview with the Vampire Season 1. This scene speaks volumes about Lestat and is essentially the catalyst for everything that occurs in his life.
Lestat’s Vampiric Transformation Needs to Be Horrific
Recalling Interview with the Vampire Season 1, Lestat briefly told Claudia (Bass) and Louis about his vampire transformation and who his maker was. He didn’t go into much detail other than that Magnus, his maker, took him from his room in Paris and kept him in a room full of corpses that resembled his likeness and fed on him until he inevitably turned him. Fans of the novels know that he barely scratched the surface of how terrifying Magnus was and the horrendous way he was born into darkness. In The Vampire Lestat, Magnus is described as essentially a monster with black hair and black eyes. Everything about him is harrowing, and whenever Lestat felt his presence as he watched him, he felt unsettled.
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Without going into the graphic details of the scene and the implications of it in the book, Magnus forcibly drinks Lestat’s blood until an unwilling Lestat is turned into a vampire. Shortly after his transformation is complete, Magnus informs Lestat that he is inheriting his wealth and vampiric power before he throws himself into the fire, leaving Lestat to learn about vampirism all on his own.
This is another significant part of Lestat’s story. Therefore, fans have high expectations that this scene will be adapted with the utmost care and accuracy. However, given what Rolin Jones, one of the showrunners, has done with the story thus far, fans know that he will dial the scene in the series up 10 times and bring the disturbing undertones of sexual abuse to the forefront. Lestat’s turning is arguably the most horrifying transformation in all of the Vampire Chronicles series, so viewers need to prepare mentally for what they’re about to see.
The Incestuous Relationship Between Lestat and His Mother
Yes, you read that right. Longtime fans of Rice’s lore noticed an important character missing in Armand’s misconstrued story about meeting Lestat in Paris: Lestat’s mother, Gabrielle. In the second novel, Gabrielle journeys to Paris to see her son one last time before she dies, and by this point, Lestat is already a vampire. He turns his mother into a vampire to save her from death, and upon the completion of her transformation, their maker-fledgling bond transcends their mother-son relationship. They become lovers after their relationship is altered by vampirism, but Gabrielle maintains a level of distance. She’s a complex character that fans either love or hate because of her neglectful parenting, but they still sympathize with her struggle with her gender and her rejection of femininity.
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The adaptation of Lestat’s complicated relationship with his mother is something fans are excited to see and eagerly await. They expect the writers to go all in with their romantic connection and are ecstatic to see this character finally adapted from the page to the screen. There’s a lot that fans are anticipating in Interview with the Vampire Season 3, and the fact alone that they will see an accurate Rockstar Lestat portrayed by the incredible Sam Reid just heightens the pressure surrounding the new season. Interview with the Vampire is streaming on AMC+ and Netflix.