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There’s a moment so brief and so achingly fleeting, a moment when everything in Louis and Lestat’s world feels right. It happens a little less than halfway through Season 1 Episode 4 (“…The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child’s Demanding”), and it’s one of the most luminous sequences in the entire series. With Claudia newly turned, she seems the missing piece in their volatile marriage, a daughter who settles the storm between them. For a heartbeat, their little family looks whole.

The show gifts us two minutes of pure happiness, anchored by Claudia’s diaries and stitched together in a montage that radiates with joy. We see Claudia’s freshly renovated bedroom, her pink coffin tucked behind a revolving wall, bed on the other side like the perfect teenage compromise. There’s a birthday party, candles flickering on a cake, paper hats perched absurdly on vampire heads. A necklace with a bloody history (literally — its last owner lost theirs) is given as a treasure, and the party gifts? Three bodies, wrapped up for dinner, later burned in their incinerator. The grotesque and the tender hold hands seamlessly here.

Then, a dance: Lestat twirls Louis in a dance out in their courtyard, the two of them smiling in a way we almost never see, soft and unguarded. Claudia, watching with the same awe we feel, joins in, and the three become a laughing ring of dancers under the night sky. Later, they sit together at the movies, cackling in a public theater at Nosferatu’s absurd vampire lore, delighting in their own private joke as the audience around them squirms.

It’s domesticity, it’s intimacy, it’s pure. And it’s utterly unbearable. Because the brilliance of the sequence isn’t just in the happiness it captures, but in the shadow that hangs over it all. We know, even as we watch, that this is the peak. That they will never again be this close, this safe, this human. For two minutes, immortality looks like bliss. And the tragedy is knowing it will never be like this again.

6. “We want to throw a Mardi Gras ball.”

How else could a season set in New Orleans end but with the most unhinged, operatic Mardi Gras imaginable? Season 1’s finale gives us a sequence that’s not just spectacle, but a whole story, a beautiful mix of writing, performance, costuming, and design that work in perfect, dreadful harmony.

By now, New Orleans has grown suspicious of the never-aging family at 1132 Rue Royale, and the vampires know their exit is overdue. But the audience knows what Lestat doesn’t: Louis and Claudia have already decided the only way forward is to kill him. Mardi Gras becomes their honey trap. Claudia plots, Louis distracts — except Louis’ distraction is doomed to fail. Because the closer he gets to Lestat, the more he finds himself falling in love all over again.

The family starves themselves for days beforehand, saving their hunger for a final euphoric feast. By the time the party arrives, they’re lightheaded, vibrating with anticipation. And then Mardi Gras explodes onscreen: a ball of excess and menace, climaxing in Lestat’s grotesque, unforgettable entrance as Raj, King of Mardi Gras. His devouring of a baby (hello, Saturn Devouring His Son) shocks the crowd into silence and solidifies his role as both host and monster.

Every beat of the sequence deserves attention, but two moments tower above the rest. The first was almost lost, a quiet balcony scene between Louis and Lestat nearly scrapped due to a sound issue, miraculously reconstructed by the post-production team. And I’m eternally thankful it was saved, because what Sam Reid delivers here is nothing short of extraordinary. In a single unbroken take, he gives us the most vulnerable, human Lestat of the season: eyes shining with longing, voice breaking with memory, pauses weighted with regret. You can watch entire emotional monologues flicker behind his gaze before he even speaks. It’s a masterclass in restraint and intensity, the kind of performance that elevates the scene from “memorable” to “indelible.”

And then comes the scandal of scandals. Not murder, not agelessness, but a dance. Louis and Lestat take each other’s hands and move as lovers across the floor, twirling, smiling softly, unguarded. It’s a callback to their courtyard dance with Claudia, but now it’s public, undeniable, and impossible to ignore. Over this, Louis’ present-day narration laces through the scene, delivering one of the most romantic lines of the series: “I was his, and he was mine.”

It all crescendos in a kiss, both a declaration and a farewell. In front of the city they’ve haunted for decades, Louis and Lestat bare themselves completely, for one perfect, damning moment.

5. “I’ll let you reload.”

Louis de Pointe du Lac endures more than his share of humiliation at the hands of New Orleans society. From the very first episode, despite his wealth, hard work, and sharp business sense, he’s treated as lesser by the white men he’s forced to deal with — underpaid, dismissed, and targeted simply for being Black and successful. He swallows it again and again, until Season 1 Episode 3 (“Is My Very Nature That of the Devil?”) pushes him past breaking point.

The Azalea — the brothel Louis bought from Tom Anderson and turned into a thriving business — suddenly finds itself besieged by laws that white-owned establishments never face. And Louis, recognizing the game is rigged, decides to stop playing. He takes the one power his turning has given him and turns it outward: terror.

The sequence begins with Louis arriving at Alderman Fenwick’s home, a smarmy politician who has long been a condescending presence in Louis’ life. Louis is silent, unsettling, and, once choosing to, moving with predatory speed. Fenwick postures, sneering about Louis’ place in the world, but it all unravels the moment Louis stands and softly asks, “Why’s your heart beating so fast?” The question lands like a strike, exposing Fenwick’s fear even as he scrambles for his gun.

Two bullets slam into Louis’ chest. He barely looks down at the holes torn in his blood-red suit before goading the man on with a  bored, unphased, tone to his voice. What follows is a scene of utter brutality. Louis digs into the man’s thoughts, the sound of Fenwick’s racing heartbeat pounding in our ears. Then, with meticulous precision, he unleashes: ripping an ear from Fenwick’s head, dragging claws across his face, plunging a fist into his chest cavity so hard blood spatters across Louis’ own face.

And then comes the declaration, an unforgettable moment for all of us that have been watching Louis’ battle with his own nature: “I’m a vampire.” His fangs descend, and Louis lunges, the camera catching the sharp, terrifying silhouette of his mouth in motion.

What follows is abject horror as we see Fenwick’s body displayed in Jackson Square, entrails strewn like grotesque confetti, a mocking sign draped across him reading “Whites Only.”

Jacob Anderson is remarkable across both seasons of Interview with the Vampire, but this scene is a crown jewel. Louis is often tightly coiled, repressing his fury and grief, but here, we see what happens when that repression shatters. Anderson plays it with icy precision, unleashing terror with calm, unhurried menace. It’s horrifying, it’s cathartic, and it’s a reminder that Anderson’s Louis isn’t just a victim of the world around him. He is also capable of being its nightmare.

4. “Do you think two pair will win the hour?”

The poker match in Season 1 Episode 1 (“…In Throes of Increasing Wonder”) was the very first full scene AMC released ahead of the show’s premiere and with good reason. It’s magnetic from start to finish.

After their tense first meeting at Tom Anderson’s Fairplay Saloon (we really need to have a separate conversation about how smooth Lestat was in that scene), Louis and Lestat cross paths again, this time at a poker match hosted by Tom. Louis, invited as a respected businessman, is there on legitimate business. Lestat, on the other hand, has clearly inserted himself into the game the moment he caught wind of the gathering because where Louis is, Lestat will be.

The scene opens with Louis’ arrival — devastatingly gorgeous and all quiet charisma — as we catch snippets of the men already seated, gossiping about a mysterious new disease sweeping the city (a chilling bit of foreshadowing, given the story to come). Lestat, ever the provocateur, tosses out a joke about the deaths, and just as the table laughs, Louis steps inside. Their eyes meet, and from that moment on, Lestat doesn’t look away.

Tom Anderson introduces them, but Louis’ soft, pointed, “We’ve already met,” hangs in the air like a challenge. Even without those words, it’s obvious something is already sparking between them because the chemistry is electric. This is the moment you know, without a doubt, that Louis and Lestat are going to become the most intoxicating, destructive, magnetic couple imaginable. Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid lock eyes and suddenly the entire room feels too small to hold them.

Then the scene turns. The conversation shifts to business, and Louis, the only Black man at the table, is subjected to the casual racism and disrespect that has marked his entire existence. He swallows it, silent but visibly angry, and it’s here that Lestat makes his move.

Instead of defending Louis aloud, Lestat shows him something more intimate, more staggering: his vampire nature. While the other men blather about business, Louis hears Lestat’s voice in his head telling him what really matters: that Lestat sees him, values him, and knows his worth in a way these men never will.

And just when the moment couldn’t become more extraordinary, Lestat stops time itself. The poker table freezes — cards suspended midair, drinks paused mid-pour — in a stunning display of practical effects that feels like pure magic. He steals a card from Tom Anderson’s hand, slipping it to Louis so that he wins the game.

This is the moment their relationship truly begins, not as lovers yet, but as co-conspirators, friends, and equals in a way Louis has never experienced with another person. It’s romantic, thrilling, eerie, and charged with so much possibility that you can practically feel the ground shift under Louis’ feet. It’s the first time he sees what life with Lestat could be like, a life that’s  dangerous, yes, but also liberating, and you can see Louis’ walls start to crack.

3. “I had a daughter.”

There’s so much devastation woven into the present-day interview, and so much we still don’t know by the end of Season 1, but one truth stands above all: Claudia is gone. And she’s been gone for a very, very long time.

Season 1 Episode 4 (“…The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child’s Demanding”) is our first real glimpse at the family Claudia became with Louis and Lestat, and our first taste of the grief left behind in her absence. For most of the episode, Daniel serves as our surrogate, reading Claudia’s diaries and guiding us through the rise and fall of their little family. And then, near the end, as Daniel reaches the turning point in Claudia’s story — the death of her first love, the moment Lestat’s cruelty becomes undeniable — modern-day Louis finally rejoins the interview.

What follows is one of the quietest but most devastating moments of the season. This older Louis, colder and more controlled than the Louis we’ve come to know, sits down with an almost surgical precision. And then, for just a flicker of a moment, we see his composure slip. His expression softens, becomes wistful and haunted, and in a voice that sounds like grief given shape, he says:

“Claudia was…everything. I loved her unconditionally. All the noise, the chaos, the crisis of my former existence, silenced. The simple joy of her hand in mine.”

And then comes the gut-punch. Daniel, also older now, sharper, more willing to call Louis out than he was in 1973, says something so simple, so direct, it knocks the air out of you:

“You had a daughter.”

Louis repeats it, softly, almost reverently:

“I had a daughter.”

It’s a moment that stops you cold. This isn’t about vampiric bonds or gothic melodrama; this is a father speaking about the child he loved and lost. Jacob Anderson’s performance here is breathtaking, so restrained, so precise, and yet so achingly human that you can feel the centuries of grief pressing down on him. It’s a rare crack in Louis’ carefully maintained armor, and it reminds us, and Daniel, that this interview is not just about getting answers. It’s about opening old wounds, wounds that have never fully healed.

2. “You spared him out of some fucked-up idea you had about love!”

The finale of Season 1, Episode 7 (“The Thing Lay Still”) delivers the (sort of) success of Louis and Claudia’s plan: the death of Lestat. It’s something we’ve known was coming, something we’ve watched slowly build step by step with mounting dread, and something we’ve watched Louis want less and less the closer it gets.

When it finally happens, it feels like watching a car crash in slow motion. Even when Lestat appears to have outsmarted them, to have been three steps ahead all along, Claudia reveals that she was four steps ahead.

The lynchpin of the plan was simple but chilling: get Lestat to drink poisoned blood. Both Louis and Lestat believed that blood would come from a random victim Claudia had trussed up as a gift. But Claudia knows her father’s heart too well. She poisoned Tom Anderson, a man who had mocked Lestat’s Mardi Gras ambitions and who had long been a thorn in their side.

This reveal comes on the heels of a harrowing series of events which include the family’s twisted bonding massacre at the Mardi Gras afterparty, the chilling reveal that Antoinette (Lestat’s mistress) has been turned and spying for Lestat, and the brutal near-altercation where Lestat pins Louis back as Antoinette tries to force Claudia to drink the poisoned blood herself.

And then the trap snaps shut. Lestat vomits blood, the poison already burning through him. Louis looks wrecked.

Lestat collapses, Louis clings to the wall as though he could melt into it, and Claudia, ever the pragmatist, incapacitates Antoinette and delivers the coldest of mercies: “Have your goodbyes.”

And suddenly, it’s just the two of them again.

Lestat calls Louis’ name, guilt and grief and poison all mixing together in a cocktail of pain, and Louis — who clearly does not want this, who has never truly wanted this — finally takes up the blade he’s carried since his human days and kneels beside the man he loves.

What follows is one of the most agonizingly beautiful sequences in the entire series. What should be murder becomes intimacy. Louis gathers Lestat into his arms as though he could hold him together, and Lestat, still utterly devoted to him, leans into this last embrace.

His words are a quiet dagger of their own:

“We are joined by a cord, by a cord that you cannot see, but it is real. It is real… I have loved you with all myself. I’m happy it was you here with me…at the end.”

Louis’ face says everything: the grief, the horror, the unbearable love that still lives in him even as he takes Lestat’s life.

And though our modern-day Louis tries to shrug this off as just another part of the story, Daniel sees right through him, and his pointed observation breaks something open.

We get one last glimpse of the real aftermath, the smallest look of Louis clutching Lestat’s body, screaming in raw, wordless despair. It lasts only a second, but it is shattering.

Once again, Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid prove there is simply no one doing it like them on television. In this scene alone, they deliver more talent in a single glance, a single waver of a lip, than some actors could dream of capturing across an entire career.

Separately, they are both powerhouses; Anderson’s Louis is a masterclass in interiority, every movement a study in restraint, every flicker of his expression revealing a storm of love, grief, and guilt barely contained beneath the surface. Reid’s Lestat, by contrast, is all magnetism and chaos, an electric storm of charm, danger, and raw vulnerability.

But together? Together they are something volcanic. They are magnetic, devastating, impossible to look away from, and not just as acting partners but scene partners who seem to rewrite the air around them when they share a frame. Every look, every touch, every pause between them is freighted with history, desire, rage, and devotion. It feels less like watching two actors perform and more like watching two souls collide over and over again.

1. “…and we sat there for some time, in throes of increasing wonder.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about this scene since the moment I first saw it on September 29, 2022.

This is The Moment. It is, as Louis says after recalling it, “The end. The beginning.” It’s everything that makes Interview with the Vampire what it is.

There are two monologues in this scene — one from Jacob Anderson’s Louis and the other from Sam Reid’s Lestat — and both are nothing short of transcendent.

The scene begins after Louis has suffered the greatest loss of his human life: the death of his brother Paul. The grief itself is immeasurable, but paired with his mother’s blame, his fear of his own desire for Lestat (which wars with his Catholic upbringing), and the endless strain of keeping his family afloat as a Black man in Jim Crow New Orleans, Louis is at his lowest. And where else does one go when lost, if not to a church?

Stumbling through the storm, Louis enters St. Augustine’s, the church of his youth and of Paul’s peace. The priest takes him in, and soon Louis is in the confessional, pouring out his shame, his guilt, his suicidal despair.

Jacob Anderson delivers this monologue with such raw vulnerability that every tremor of his voice feels like it shatters inside you. The way he builds from quiet shame to breaking desperation is unforgettable and is the kind of performance that deserves every award in existence. What makes Anderson’s performance so striking is how restrained yet devastating it is. He doesn’t overplay Louis’ anguish. He embodies not only Louis’ suffering, but also his humanity, his fragility, and the sheer weight of a life lived under impossible pressures. It’s the kind of layered acting that makes Louis feel less like a character and more like a living, breathing person unraveling before our eyes.

And then, in the middle of the storm, the walls rattle. The priest screams. A shadow tears him away.

Sam Reid storms onto the screen in this moment as if he’s been waiting an eternity for it. His Lestat is terrifying — feral, blood-soaked, larger than life — and yet within minutes, he transforms seamlessly into something else entirely, the world’s most desperate lover. It’s a whiplash performance in the best way possible, capturing Lestat’s danger, his arrogance, his recklessness, and finally his aching, earnest need for Louis.

And it isn’t only his voice that sells it, it’s his physicality. Reid uses his body with the precision of a dancer: the way he looms, all predator and menace, then softens his shoulders when he approaches Louis; the near-reverent way his hands reach, hesitant and trembling, as if he’s afraid this fragile moment might break; even the slight tilt of his head as he delivers his declaration, like he’s both begging and commanding at once. Reid embodies Lestat not just with words, but with every inch of himself.

“Be my companion, Louis. Be all the beautiful things you are, and be them without apology. For all eternity.”

Delivered in Reid’s voice, paired with that piercing physical stillness, those words aren’t just a line of dialogue, but the words that surround the entirety of the story we watch for the next two seasons.

And what makes this even more powerful is the contrast between the two men. Jacob Anderson plays Louis inward, shoulders drawn in, voice breaking, body language locked in grief. Sam Reid plays Lestat outward, expansive, magnetic, reaching, pulling everything in his orbit. And when they finally kiss at the altar, those two opposing physicalities collide. Louis’ inwardness meets Lestat’s outwardness, and the result is electric.

The kiss is not just blood and horror. It is relief. It is desire. It is Lestat’s shoulders finally dropping, Louis’ trembling acceptance, and love above anything else.

Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, together in this scene, achieve something extraordinary, bringing to the screen the perfect balance of eroticism, horror, romance, and fear. Any one element could have tipped too far and ruined it, but instead, they make it one of the greatest love scenes in television history.

This scene will change you. It’s a duet of performances so perfectly in sync that it becomes impossible to imagine this series existing without the alchemy of these two actors at its center.

These ten moments are only the beginning. Interview with the Vampire is overflowing with scenes that haunt, seduce, horrify, and move you in equal measure, and it would be impossible to capture them all in a single list (seriously, narrowing this down was torture). If you haven’t yet given this series a chance, consider this your invitation, consider this my plea. It’s a show that doesn’t just entertain but transforms, lingering long after the credits roll. And if you have watched it, I hope this reads like a love letter to a first season that changed television, a note of kinship from one obsessed soul to another, bound together by the wonder (and ruin) of Louis and Lestat’s story.

And the best part? This is only where their story begins. Season 2 promises higher stakes, deeper heartbreak, and the kind of writing that continues to prove why this adaptation is already hailed as one of the most stunning on television. Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid remain nothing short of extraordinary, two actors at the peak of their powers, perfectly attuned to the nuance, danger, and aching romance at the heart of Anne Rice’s world. Their chemistry, coupled with a script that balances horror and beauty, gives us a love story so devastatingly perfect that it will haunt and thrill you long after you step away from the screen.

So mark your calendars: Interview with the Vampire Season 2 comes to Netflix on September 30th. Whether you’re watching for the whole show for the first time or revisiting with familiarity, prepare to fall into a world of obsession, desire, and immortality all over again.

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