Showrunner Rolin Jones on that explosive Interview With The Vampire finale

Whether you’ve read Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire or not, Part II of Rolin Jones’ adaptation for AMC has been an exquisite season of storytelling. Readers and viewers alike have been reeling from the onslaught of revelations burbling up from journalist Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) dogged questions about the past directed at Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and his longtime lover Armand (Assad Zaman).

Season two’s narrative has been split between post-WWII Paris and contemporary Dubai, with Jones and his writers using the unreliable nature of memory to peel back the tortured truths Louis and Armand have been running away from for 80 years. And in the finale, there’s a reckoning for many characters while the door is left open for future chapters.

The A.V. Club got into a lively with Jones to dissect the twists and turns of the last three episodes and to get a sense of where the story might go in season three.

Rolin Jones: It’s so hard to go back to all the permutations because we really were building 15 episodes instead of a regular season. Season two has its own structural issues. I’m trying to think of what was surprising…. The destination for Molloy [Eric Bogosian] I knew at the beginning. I kind of always knew that the first 20 minutes would be a Liam Neeson movie and the structure of the trial.

Before the timeline took over, in my first read, I was like, “What if [Louis and Lestat’s] reunion happens during [Hurricane] Katrina?” Then I was like, “Well, it doesn’t have to be Katrina. It can still be a hurricane. It’s New Orleans.” I thought a little bit about [King] Lear when [Lestat’s] in these rags and there’s a storm out there. It’s so beautifully done in the book, but it’s so wildly different. There was no way I was ever going to be able to sell that level of nihilism to AMC. And also, it’s not the story that we were ultimately telling anyway. And that was the pressure of knowing where [Anne] put those two later on in the books. It’s like, “What’s the event that really needs to happen there?”

AVC: There’s so much vulnerability and truth between Louis and Lestat [Sam Reid] in that moment, especially in their shared grief over Claudia.

RJ: It’s such a hard thing to do to a core audience, to take a year and a half break in the middle of a movie. I’m hoping that people will—now knowing the end—go back and see what we were doing in season one. There’s a lot of evidence to support love. We were never going to be fearful that they were predators and that if you imagine your worst human fight, things can get out of control. [We] had to deal with vampiric rage and vampiric love in all its forms. We fell on the idea, ultimately, that the season and maybe the show so far has been about this journey towards contrition and forgiveness and accountability. It’s not about pointing fingers and [going,] “Who did this to whom?” Now we’re like, “What can you control amongst yourself? What part did you play in that?” And that’s what we were doing with Louis for these first two seasons. Chipping away, chipping away.

I would also say on this show that [Claudia] is not closed. We have not tied a ribbon around that. So that’s actually just beginning, the accountability of that. To think that that will be swept under the rug…I don’t think you can. There’s still a lot there.

AVC: How much debate was there in the writers’ room about the right episode to bring Lestat to Paris?

RJ: Yeah, there was the issue that we weren’t going to have a real Lestat problem until [Louis] had told the whole story. Then it opened up and ultimately, the dream/ghost Lestat just became this nether layer to dig into Louis. It made it very fun, if a little frustrating for Sam because there’s so much to play in there. What is the projection of Lestat through Louis? All that stuff was probably very heavy and challenging. It’s not anything that Sam didn’t have in season one.

Louis is telling you this version of the trial, and it’s getting closer to reality. But you could say that actually—and it might be different if you talk to Sam—for me, Lestat Lestat, the first time you’re seeing him is in New Orleans. That’s an objective camera that’s happening for the first time. You’re catching him in a very vulnerable, fragile place, so don’t think that that is Lestat, right? That’s just a moment in time.

AVC: Did you conceive of and write the last two episodes as a two-part season finale?

RJ: I think the gift of having the book in two parts, especially for this ending, we had a little bit more time than a normal show would have to structure things and to think about it. But I would say the structure of season two was the first five is act one and six, seven, and eight were a freight train. I would say that six, seven, and eight are their own thing.

AVC: The last three episodes are a roller coaster ride of unreliable narrators, with so many reveals about who has been hiding what. How difficult was it to make each turn land?

RJ: The truth is it wasn’t set up so much as a series of misdirection and turns. What we were really trying to figure out throughout the whole thing is that arc for Armand. I think mostly, maybe I didn’t convince everybody in the room, but a number of us landed that Armand legitimately had two cowardly moments. Two really, really weak moments that shouldn’t discount all the other stuff that he did. The intimacy that he had, the courting is all legitimate, and the cleaning up after [Louis]. I think Louis got very messy for a couple of decades there. That’s all work that should be considered.

Everybody’s free to judge the rest of it. If all goes right, we’ll have six or seven more seasons to work on you coming around to that, or the redemption of that. [In season one,] the audience wants to kill Lestat along with Louis and Claudia. But we had to sit on it for a year and a half. So it’s okay for people to think that we made a supervillain out of Lestat and then to come around to a fuller portrait. In season three, [Lestat is] front and center, and Jacob takes a supporting role. And it’s not all about point of view. We got 80 to 85-percent of Lestat pretty solid. Retribution is easy, right? It’s being contrite. [There’s] the idea that forgiveness should be part of this cycle, too. That’s something I think we’re trying to sell.

AVC: You remixed many events from Interview With The Vampire and plucked moments from other Rice books, like Molloy’s turning which is from The Queen Of The Damned. Does that free you to depart from any one book in season three?

RJ: You make some changes from the book because you [know] that’s not going to be dramatic for actors sitting there talking for 30 pages about good or evil. But again, the advantage we have over Anne herself is we have a bunch of [her] books. Anne was dealing with one book there, and she radically rewrote it a number of times. I guess slowly and surely, [the show] becomes its own. Like, the TV show will eventually, maybe, be its own thing? But we would be foolish to not keep trying to do the same thing we do, which is to jackhammer the books and see what we can grab. Ultimately, I think it’s honoring the thing even if we didn’t get to the same place. We’re using some of the ideas and some of the thoughts and some of the places, and we just rejigger it.

One thing I like to do is make sure that the audience is still on its back foot and that we’re ahead of the people that know it really well. If season three is The Vampire Lestat, aesthetically, it’s not gonna feel like two old guys sitting in a room trying to figure shit out. The Vampire Lestat will take the show hostage. It should feel like that and will probably tell you how a story should unfold, or move in a way that feels organic to itself and be surprising.

AVC: The Easter egg of Lestat playing the wood keyboard alludes to rock star Lestat in The Vampire Lestat book. From that hurricane reunion onwards, what are you interested in exploring next?

RJ: I wouldn’t approach it any differently than we did. You have people who know the books really well and people who don’t know the books very well. It needs to be thrilling for both of them. The challenge will be that we’re gonna suddenly write the 112th scene that Sam Reid has to play. I’m not giving him the same old. We’ve got to be able to deliver for him. So, what am I interested in? I’ll be less interested in point of view and memory as much. The challenge of the books is that there’s not a lot of forward story. I don’t think that you can probably mine the arcs of those for origin story after origin story after origin story. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take the same material and in very inventive, exciting ways move it forward.

AVC: Is Daniel still a player in your future story?

RJ: Oh, don’t you worry about it. Eric is still top five on our call sheet. For season three, if you know [the book] well, there’s probably two major pieces of casting we have not cast yet.

AVC: The Talamasca series has been greenlit by AMC. You introduced Raglan James from the Talamasca this season. How integrated of a universe do you now have to consider when crafting a season?

RJ: Literally, they’re talking about it two rooms away from me. I can hear them pitching right now. That is their show. Mark Johnson oversees everything. But there is some stuff that we built in that is there for the picking. I’ve sat in their room for a couple of days and discussed where we’re at. They asked a lot of questions, so the shows are beginning to talk to each other a little bit. I’ve made the promise to them that whatever they come up with, that will be given circumstances in our show going forward. So if they come up with a fucking great actor that comes out of there, I’m gonna grab them, and we’re gonna start pulling those things together.

AVC: Lastly, as the architect of this adaptation, what scenes really achieved what you hoped they could be this season?

RJ: When the gun was to our head about getting these scripts in in a timely manner, there was a lot of work that had me and Hannah Moscovitch writing scenes together. Like literally writing, then taking a pass and going back and forth. There are some scenes in episode six that I could not have written alone, or Hannah could not have written alone, that we think are some of the best scenes in the show. I think the transformation of Madeline is quite lovely. There’s things that are said, there’s things that are shown that I think were surprising. I think there are things in episode three that are structurally super weird but if you were to stand back, there’s some really clever things that are done there.

And I just look at Jacob and Sam, Assad and Eric, and Delainey. And then Ben and Roxane come in. The fact that no one is stealing real estate from each other…it’s really hard to have eight characters that are not fighting each other. They found their own lane and their own space. I commend [casting director] Kate Rhodes James in London for that. And then I commend all our actors for not only knowing their roles intimately but understanding what they’re doing within scenes and the generosity they have for each other. I was totally floored. There’s no reason Madeline and Claudia should work if you look at their number of scenes. It shouldn’t work. And that’s why they’re just killing it left and right. I’m hoping for the T-shirts: “Claudia is my coven.” I hope that finds its way onto the floor at Comic-Con.