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The Interview with the Vampire cast and creative team gathered for a press conference at New York Comic Con 2025 to discuss the upcoming third season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, newly subtitled The Vampire Lestat. The event brought together executive producer Mark Johnson, writer and executive producer Hannah Moscovitch, and stars Sam Reid (Lestat de Lioncourt), Jacob Anderson (Louis de Pointe du Lac), and Eric Bogosian (Daniel Molloy), each offering introspective glimpses into the next evolution of Anne Rice’s immortal saga.
While the team remained carefully tight-lipped about major plot points, the conversation pulsed with emotional depth. Rather than teasing where the story goes, the cast reflected on where these characters have been and how they continue to evolve through centuries of trauma, passion, and self-discovery.
Louis’ Elegance and Endurance
When asked about inspirations for Louis in Season 3, Jacob Anderson said there was “no one new” this time around, but that two icons continue to shape his performance:
“I still love to have Grace Jones in my head, and Eartha Kitt,” Anderson said. “They’re like two big Louis staples in my mind, when I think about how he moves and how he looks at other people. I watched loads of Eartha Kitt interviews for Season 1 and I always go back to those.”
Anderson’s Louis, always marked by quiet ferocity and introspection, remains the emotional core of the series — a man grappling with eternity and the ghosts that refuse to let him rest. When pressed about Louis’ journey this season, Anderson admitted, “It’s really, really fun stuff, and I wouldn’t want to ruin it,” before turning to Moscovitch with a grin: “Can I pass this to Hannah?”
Moscovitch picked up seamlessly:
“Let’s say your daughter dies and you put a yellow dress up on the wall to honor her…that’s not actually going to fix much, right? Like how long will that really work? And you can say you want to ‘own the night’ all you like, but that’s going to come in waves…That’s some of what we did with Louis this season. Like, ‘That’s great that he has that yellow dress up there!’ But his daughter’s dead, and his relationship of seventy-seven years has ended, and he has to figure out a whole pile of shit now…His whole life has been broken open in a hurricane and a hug.”
Anderson continued:
“A hurricane and a hug, yeah. But like, quite often, most people are like, ‘My life is fixed! I found this, and I found that, and I’m doing this, and I’m doing this thing now!’ I’m not being specific because I don’t want to, y’know…Those people quite often, and I can be one of those people as well, crash out. There comes a point where suddenly you lose energy, and the truth comes to light again. It comes to get you.”
Reclaiming the Narrative and Wrestling with Ego
As its title implies, The Vampire Lestat invites audiences to see the world through Lestat’s eyes — beautiful, brutal, and endlessly self-aware. When asked about Lestat reclaiming the narrative, Sam Reid smiled wearily — “We just came from night shoots,” he admitted — before offering a thoughtful answer about ego, love, and perception:
“Reclaiming the narrative…okay, yeah, we can say that. Because he’s read the book, the book is a real thing, and it does exist in our world, and it’s come out. Is he doing it out of, what was the question? Out of love for Louis? I think as a character, in general, I think his love for Louis should be taken as a given, you know, but what that does is going to inform all that he does anyway. And also, the character, his ego is a thing he’s constantly grappling with. I think I’ve said it before, y’know, like in the books there’s a great chapter, I think it’s around the time when he’s…rescued by Marius and the first thing he says is, ‘Vanity.’ So he’s always grappling with ego, and the way that Rolin and Hannah have kind of crafted him is, ‘What do you get when you put a vampire who takes himself very very seriously in a position that is not really taken very seriously in the year 2025, when we’re dealing with everything shocking at any given moment?…So I think his ego is super present. Reclaiming the narrative for his ego. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe.”
Moscovitch expanded on that theme when describing how the storytelling structure shifts in Season 3:
“In Seasons 1 and 2 we had Dubai and we had a vampire who wanted to be interviewed and who wanted to understand which parts of the past he had forgotten…This season we have none of that. We don’t have an interviewer unless it’s Lestat himself interviewing himself. And then Lestat remembers everything, but then there’s a question about what that memory does to him and how it fucks him up. Because if you’ve lived this life for 265 years and you’ve gone relentlessly forward, but there’s been all this horror in your life and you’ve never examined it at all, and suddenly you start to sing songs about yourself, all sorts of fucked up things are going to happen. And that’s what this season is about.”
The Music That Moves Him
If there’s one thing Lestat does best (besides cause chaos and love with his whole self), it’s make music. Reid says this season turns the volume all the way up on that part of who he is.
“He’s kind of got the most eclectic taste that you could possibly imagine, which is quite confronting for the designers,” Reid said. “But in terms of the character, he’s all over the place. He’s lived a couple of centuries and he’s taken something from everywhere.”
When asked what personally inspired his performance, Reid cited David Bowie’s “Cracked Actor” documentary, explaining:
“One thing I always have done, and continue to do, is I’ve found all of these incredible bootleg videos of David Bowie’s “Cracked Actor” [documentary] that somebody has compiled into singular videos. The Internet is so wild…And so yeah that’s really inspired me. I look back at that — I think Lestat moves differently to David Bowie — but just that sense of showmanship and magic and mystery is something I look back to. But Daniel [Hart] presented, and continued to, and is continuing to, just the most extraordinary collection of songs that I have been going over and over and over in my head for close to six months now, so I try not to divert too much.”
Reid also reflected on the collaboration between his performance and the show’s musical direction:
“I’ve been barraged with music in a way I never fathomed when I first got this role four years ago. I’m not looking for inspiration — I’m processing, I’m learning my lines…There’s a huge element of the show where this is new territory for me because I’m working with real musicians. And Jacob said this to me the other day, that with musicians there’s an inherent ego you need, because it’s not like an actor where you’re playing a character. Musicians play themselves…they rip open their soul and go, ‘This is who I am.’ And Lestat has a [stage] persona, but then to be a real musician he has to continue to pull it back. So it’s been a process of dealing with the material and trying to find as much truth in the material as possible.”
He repeated something we’ve heard before, but it still makes my Loustat heart flutter every time:
“Louis is very present in a lot of the songs.”
Mothers, Monsters, and Memory
When asked about Lestat’s mother, Gabriella de Lioncourt, and her influence this season, Moscovitch emphasized her importance:
“She’s central to this season. We thought a lot about her ahead of time, and you know, we thought a lot about what it would have been like to be her as a human. To be married off from Italy to France at the age of fifteen, to be married to a really gross man, and whatever happened in that bedroom was bad. And then to have a bunch of children, some of whom died, and then two who lived who were 3D copies…like she copied her husband with her body two times. And then she’s in this cage. And then Lestat is born, and Lestat is more like her. Lestat is a dreamer, and a hunter, and is restless, and inquisitive, and intelligent. And what that means to get close with Lestat and how complicated that can be. That is my answer.”
“Keep Asking That Question”
During the conference, I asked Sam Reid a question that cut to the heart of Lestat’s ongoing turmoil:
“Lestat wants to be loved so desperately for who he is and what he is — but does he even know who or what that is anymore?”
Reid exhaled, visibly weighing the question:
“Great question. What a great question. And I think if we had an answer, we wouldn’t have a show. Does he know who and what he is? That’s the journey — to try to work that out,” he said, before reflecting further on Lestat’s struggle to understand himself.
Moscovitch, locking eyes with me and nodding emphatically, added:
“That’s the whole season.”
It was a perfectly evasive answer, but in the best possible way. One that leaves plenty to unpack when The Vampire Lestat finally premieres. Reid’s parting advice?
“Keep asking that question.”
Oh, we absolutely will. Consider this a promise to bring it up again when Season 3 press time comes around.
Until The Vampire Lestat rises, revisit Interview with the Vampire on AMC, AMC+, or Netflix, and keep your eyes on iHorror for more from the dark, dazzling world of Anne Rice’s immortals.
