The second season takes viewers deeper inside the world of author Anne Rice’s seductive vampire saga
For what feels like an eternity, horror fans have been anticipating the sophomore season of one of 2022’s breakout series of 2022. It’s about bloody time that Interview With the Vampire returns from the undead.
Game of Thrones alum Jacob Anderson is back as 145-year-old vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, who sits down for a revealing interview about his life in this adaptation of author Anne Rice’s acclaimed Vampire Chronicles novels.
Penning Louis’ life story is journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, Billions), who had previously spoken to the vampire in 1973 for an interview that ultimately went unpublished after the sit-down turned disastrous. Daniel, now living with Parkinson’s disease, comes when called to Louis’ cavernous, contemporary condo home in Dubai in 2022 to take another stab at telling the Creole vampire’s tales.
This season, “Louis tells of his adventures in Europe, a quest to discover Old World Vampires and the Theatre Des Vampires in Paris, with Claudia,” per AMC. Claudia, portrayed this season by Delainey Hayles (Holby City), is a fledgling vampire bonded to Louis by their time in New Orleans.
It’s now 1940 in Louis’ story, and he is about to meet the vampire he calls the love of his life. First introduced as Louis’ ever-present servant Rashid (Assad Zaman, Hotel Portofino), it is revealed to Daniel that the vampire’s attendant is a vampire himself, more than 500 years old and named Armand.
The two meet in the city of love, so it is no surprise, given how Louis’ last great love turned out, that, according to AMC, “their courtship and love affair will prove to have devastating consequences both in the past and the future.”
For Zaman, the revelation that he was secretly Armand — a major character in Rice’s saga — came as a surprise.
“I did know that I was playing Rashid in the beginning, but I didn’t know that Rashid was, in fact, Armand,” he said during a panel at the Television Critics Association press tour earlier this year, revealing he found out halfway through the audition process. That knowledge, he explained, completely changed his approach to the audition. “I just spent the rest of the day trying not to lose my composure too much,” he recalled. “Yeah, so it was a surprise for me, too.”
For those familiar with Rice’s novels, executive producer Mark Johnson revealed that the second season covers the second part of her first book, “and we follow it somewhat religiously with the same, I think, same interpretation that [showrunner] Rolin Jones took with the first section,” he said. “But the book spoke to us, and it really dictated where we went with this.”
Taking the story to Paris not only provides a new setting for the second season, it also brings Louis face to face with a very different type of vampire than what he’s been accustomed to in New Orleans. “They’re very alienated in Europe,” said Anderson of the Old World vampires introduced in the new season, citing “the rigidity of the vampire world. It’s a very ancient structure . . . Actually, the European vampire is a different monster altogether.”
Also returning for the new season is Lestat (Sam Reid), the flamboyant vampire who made Louis one of the undead — something that raises questions, given the events of the season finale.
“There is a big difference between Louis and Lestat in season one and in season two, mostly because Lestat is dead,” he said. “But you know, he was dead to begin with, so there’s that.”
Interview with the Vampire airs Sunday, May 12 on AMC