[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of Interview with the Vampire.]

The Big Picture

‘Interview with the Vampire’ Season 2 expands the Immortal Universe, pulling from multiple books in Anne Rice’s vast collection of material.
The collaborative relationship between the cast and creative team leads to profound and unscripted moments on the show.
Season 2 navigates a balance of tragedy and comedy while exploring character growth and thematic complexities.

In Season 2 of the AMC series Interview with the Vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) continues to recount his vampire journey to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) in 2022. While Molloy continues to dig as deeply into the truth as he can get, which has varying success when it comes to dealing with rather secretive and guarded vampires, Louis relives life with Claudia (Delainey Hayles) at the Théâtre des Vampires. Being haunted by Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) is contributing to Louis’ spiral in the past and learning more about Louis’ relationship with Armand (Assad Zaman), how they met, and what is going on in the present isn’t giving Molloy the clarity that he was hoping for.

Since the debut of Interview with the Vampire, the Immortal Universe has continued to expand, with Mayfair Witches and most recently the announcement of The Talamasca, about the organization responsible for tracking and containing witches, vampires, werewolves and other creatures around the world. The work of Anne Rice is vast and contains so much material to pull from, ensuring its TV life will continue to grow.

During this interview with Collider, executive producers Mark Johnson and Rolin Jones, who is also the showrunner on Interview, talked about the collaborative relationship between the cast and the creative team, how each actor has found their own place in the series, being inspired by An American Werewolf in London when it came to Lestat’s presence this season, keeping a mixture of tragedy and comedy, the evolution of Claudia, developing and expanding the Immortal Universe, whether we might see Justin Kirk again, and what a third season of Interview could be.

Interview with the Vampire Based on Anne Rice’s iconic novel, follow Louis de Pointe’s epic story of love, blood and the perils of immortality, as told to the journalist Daniel Molloy.Release Date 2022-00-00 Creator Rolin Jones Cast Sam Reid , Jacob Anderson , Eric Bogosian , Bailey Bass , Assad Zaman Seasons 2

‘Interview with the Vampire’s Showrunner is Always Impressed with the Cast’s Talent
Image via AMC

Collider: You guys have a whole bunch of actors on the show that can say so much with just their eyes and no words at all. There are so many times that there’s just a close up on somebody’s face and I feel like it’s saying so many things. When did you realize just how gifted they all were? Was it something that you immediately saw as they all started inhabiting these characters, or were there things that you saw over the course of doing Season 1 that you felt you could dig deeper into or lean more heavily into in Season 2?

ROLIN JONES: If you think that there’s any writing adjustment made because your actors are great, I don’t know. You just cast great actors from the beginning and you battle test them. You do a lot of auditions and you do a lot of teamwork. You do teamwork that seems crazy out of control because you wanna test the range. On our show, we have a lot of playwrights in our room and their creative process is always about actors and actors’ data and what’s in their bodies. We have a really fluid back and forth between our actors and the first thing we almost always ask when actors get drafts is, “Is there anything that’s tumbling out of your mouth weird?” That’s the first time that we go back and make adjustments. We hire a lot of theater actors that have theater training, and we have a really exceptionally snobby casting director out of London, Kate Rhodes James, who has exquisite taste. On our show, there are more quiet moments this year, but we generally get actors who have a facility for language because we have a heightened text. That’s what we’re attracted to. If you see the top seven on our cast list, which is Eric [Bogosian], Sam [Reid], Jacob [Anderson], Assad [Zaman], and Delainey [Hayles], and then add Ben Daniels and Roxane Duran, you have seven actors who are not interfering with it. Nobody is doing the same thing, at all. They all have their own little slot. And to be able to balance that over a very small number of episodes, like eight, when you’re editing this, you’re just constantly going, “I’m never getting this ever again. It’s never going to happen again.”

MARK JOHNSON: It doesn’t hurt that they all like one another, too.

JONES: We have a no asshole, no diva policy. They’re very generous actors to each other, and they’re very generous with us. They give us a lot of wildly different takes and trust us, when we get into the editing room, to be able to sculpt it a little bit. The show is better than it probably has a right to be because of our actors.

Related ‘Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire’ Season 2 Review: A Gloriously Tangled and Compelling Part Two Season 2 premieres May 12 on AMC and AMC+.

The scene with Lestat eating one of Louis’ photos is something that shouldn’t work, but was just so brilliant. How did that moment come about? What’s it like to shape a moment like that?

JONES: The dirty secret about it is, when we started out, we were like, “What are we gonna do with this giant part of the book where Lestat doesn’t exist?” And you have Sam Reid as your actor, so you better figure out a way. The initial thing was, “Oh, we’ll start at the place of An American Werewolf in London and he’ll just be Griffin Dunne haunting him.” You just start developing it. There are actually very romantic ideas with Lestat. When Lestat is on the bench disappearing in rain, it’s crazy that Louis is putting those as his last words. You’re like, “Wow, Louis, you are unwell, man.” So, in that moment with the photographs, he’s like, “I think I fucking suck. I’m burning them down. If I could eat ‘em, I would eat ‘em.” He’s the general Id for Louis there. You can write it on the page, but you need a particular actor to be able to pull that off. Clearly, that is one of those things that could have gone on the editing room floor immediately. You’re just back to really great actors having no fear to go that big, and we’ll pull them back, if we have to.

Rashid seems like he would have been a total throwaway character, but he’s somehow become the funniest thing running throughout the season. Do you ever worry that the humor like that won’t work?

JONES: It’s in Anne Rice’s books. There’s a lot of humor in Anne’s books, so you wanna figure out how to do that. I hire writers that have a lot of humorous stuff in there. The flip side of tragedy is always a little bit of comedy. It’s a way to get there. Sometimes it’s a palette cleanser. Sometimes it’s just the absurdity of this world. We don’t fear it. We know we have actors who can turn on a dime and that there is room for that. This book can fall into 30 pages of nihilistic gloom. It’s beautifully rendered, but that can be quite assaulting after a while in a television show, so you’re trying to find some balance there. You cast the right actors that know it’s not a joke, but that it’s a truth that you’re playing. Bally [Gill], the actor who’s playing Real Rashid, has got a really great theater resume. He’s done a lot of stuff and he can do a lot with a little. He’s sitting on some knowledge. It’s pretty simple, if you cast really good actors, they’ll make your weird writing seem way better than it is.

JOHNSON: First of all, they’re all very funny on their own. But as professional as they are and as serious as they are, they don’t approach it in any kind of precious way. They’re game for any number of things. If you give them a line that they can play humorously, they will.

JONES: We’re always about trying to recapture the spontaneity that happens. In episode six, he’s eating at the sushi restaurant and one of the beans falls out. We are constantly doing that. The first time Louis comes to Paris, he threw his keys and they fell, and they immediately removed it, but I was like, “No, vampires can fuck up, too.” We’re constantly trying to find things that are off just a little bit, to keep it feeling fresh and feeling alive.

It’s Important that Claudia Be Held Accountable for Her Behavior
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When you decided to steer away from the Claudia in the book and change her age, it made things more wide open in her story. Have you always known what you wanted the eventual fate of this Claudia to be? Was that something you wanted to stay a little more open with until you had to pin it down?

JONES: On aging things up, generally speaking, we probably aged up every single actor on the show from what is in the book, and some of that is just me wanting a more mature actor. I’d love to be able to give you a five-year-old Claudia. It’s one of the most disturbing things you could imagine. It’s why it’s wildly successful in the book. But where we’re going, if you’re gonna do 50 years of human sexuality in a character, you can’t cast a five-year-old actor. It’s not gonna happen. So, what you do is you make a decision about what you can do and you try to find the right actor for that. Some of these things are not pie-in-the-sky things we wanted to do. They were pragmatic decisions, and then you work forward after that. The thing that was really important for us for Claudia was to figure out, for the character that we wrote, who would be somebody she would be satisfied with or interested in, and who would be worthy of her as a companion. As we talked around the room, we didn’t think the character that we had written at that point would settle for a doll maker pretending she was her mom. That wasn’t what we were writing. There are always different reasons for why we end up making the choices we do. The other thing that was really exciting for us was to have her turn inward and think about where she was. It’s so easy to turn her into a saint and go, “Oh, she never wanted to be a vampire.” But her being accountable for some of her behavior is really important for this. It’s essentially something for every one of the vampires this season. She’s a thrilling character, and we’ve had two wonderful actors play her.

There’s something so interesting about Claudia this season because you do have this growth in her finding her own relationship, but also her being drawn back into this infantilization with the way she’s portrayed on stage. The way she has to deal with that is very complicated.

JONES: A lot of that is the achievement of the actor, (costume designer) Carol Cutshall’s design of the clothes that she was wearing, and our scene partners with the new actor. We always knew that would be the emotional center of the show for Season 2, just invariably by what the plot was. So, how that actively weighs on our lead character Louis, and actively weighs on Armand in Dubai, is really important. Claudia has ripples for every character.

Related ‘Interview with the Vampire’s Jacob Anderson & Sam Reid on the Sad but Satisfying Season 2 Delainey Hayles also talks about Claudia’s Théâtre des Vampires blue dress and why her sister ended up wearing it.

What was the biggest production challenge you had this season?

JONES: The biggest challenge overall is, when you go as big as we did, there’s always a danger that you’ve just thrown a lot of stuff out there. You dazzle them with design and with timelines, and stuff like that, but is there an emotional throughline for all the actors. You have to keep everybody in check, especially when you have to shoot out of order. The actors did such a wonderful job. We had a lot of pragmatic difficulties. There were a couple of strikes. We were strangers in a strange land in Prague. We had a shoot in New Orleans, a shoot in Paris, post in London, and the home office was in Santa Monica. There was just a lot of stuff. We wanted to avoid the sophomore slump of, “Hey, we’re gonna go bigger.” We always kept our heads wrapped around the idea that we were making a 15-episode movie, and that it had to organically get bigger and richer and more difficult. The Dubai scenes this year begin to pay off more. The interview matters more and more. By episode eight, you’ll see how true that is and where we ended up and why there was a second interview. You know why there was a second interview for one of the characters in episode five, but you don’t know why it was important for the other character. It was mostly about making sure it would it be a moving story and not just a bunch of wonderful things to look at. Is it gonna haunt you? Is it gonna stay in your bones? After you [finish watching the season], go back and look at the last scene that every actor is in, and you’ll see how depleted they all are. It’s because they were all doing something that they cared a great deal about, and you’ll see the evidence of it. Go back and look at the first shot of episode one of Louis, and then look at the last shot of Louis, and wait until you see the difference in that guy’s face. That’ll chart what these actors did and what they gave of themselves for these last three and a half years.

Mark, as somebody who’s overseeing everything and you’re watching how all of these chess pieces are coming together on the board, between the different shows, the different actors and what they do with the characters, is it anything like you thought it would be when you started out on this journey of all of them? How do you feel about where they all are right now and what the future for them could be?

JOHNSON: It’s a really good question. I assumed going into this that it truly was a franchise, and that the Immortal universe and the Anne Rice world was somehow more connected. But in a strange way, with the shows that we’re making and developing, they aren’t directly connected. You can look at them and say, “Oh, that’s Anne Rice, but I don’t know why that is.” There was a point when maybe it was a little bit too schematic that we were trying to insert one character from one story into another and it wasn’t necessarily working. With that said, we’re discovering that there are some characters that it does work with. There’s somebody from Interview that’s going to appear in Mayfair Witches, but she’s much more complicated than I thought she was. In the feature world, I did the three Chronicles of Narnia and it was very easy to figure out different characters you could interlace. That’s not the case here. I think that actually speaks to the strength of Anne’s writing and her creation.

Related ‘Interview with the Vampire’ Pays Off Two Years of Secrets in the Messiest Way That tangled relationship web just got messier — and unexpectedly satisfying.

It must be cool to see it all come to life and to see how it’s all playing out, especially since you can never truly know if it’s all going to work until you actually put it all in motion in front of the camera.

JOHNSON: That’s exactly right.

JONES: Every day, I wonder if it’s gonna work. I’ve never come out of the process as satisfied as I have this time. It’s been very exciting.

Will Fans See Justin Kirk’s Raglan James in the Immortal Universe Again?
Image via AMC

Mark, should we expect to see more of Raglan James, especially knowing there’s an upcoming Talamasca spinoff? Was Justin Kirk cast in that role with the idea that we would see him again?

JOHNSON: We are developing a show called Talamasca. Given that he’s a Talamasca agent, who knows?

JONES: I have no power over the Talamasca show, but I knew that there was a book coming up down the road that would need an actor that could play with Jacob and Sam at their level. Very few actors are gonna sign up for something where you’ve obligatorily gotta be there three or four years later, so I called in a favor. I’m a very good friend of Justin’s. He’s been in a play of mine and a couple of TV shows that I’ve worked on, and he’s a great, wonderful actor. I said, “Hey, I’ve got a couple of scenes. There might be a sprinkling coming up. It’s gonna be a while before you are front and center of the lead on this show.” And he said, “Let’s do it, man. Let’s fucking play.” So, that’s why he’s in the show. He’s another incredible actor. We got very, very lucky to get him.

Rolin, since Season 2 is being billed as Part 2, is there a plan to title a potential Season 3 differently or base it on a different Vampire Chronicles book? Have you thought about that?

JONES: There’s no green light. I can’t talk about it. I can only talk about this: The next book I would do would be The Vampire Lestat. I have no idea who makes the decisions about why things are titled what they are. I think it’s called The Vampire Lestat. That’s what I think it’s called, so that’s what I would like to make. We’re already pulling from other books. We’ve pulled from The Vampire Lestat. We’ve pulled from The Queen of the Damned. We’ve pulled from The Vampire Armand. We’ve pulled a little bit or at least some seeds from The Body Thief. There’s some stuff from Prince Lestat. We’ve read them. We’re building these things as if they’re all one giant thing.

Interview with the Vampire airs on AMC and is available to stream on AMC+. Check out the Season 2 trailer:

Watch on AMC