‘The Vampire Lestat’s Creator Answers All Our Burning Questions About the Finale
Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for The Vampire Lestat finale.
The Vampire Lestat wrapped up its tour this week — not with a raucous, rousing concert for immortals, but with a quieter reflection on death, love, and personal failures. While it might have felt like a calmer coda compared to the chaotic run viewers have already gone on with Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), series creator Rolin Jones now confirms that the surrealist, dreamlike review of Lestat’s most memorable moments at the long table was built into the bones of the story from the very beginning.
Between surprising cameos and callbacks to the past — all while Lestat’s head is being hauled around in a bowling bag by Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) in a bowling bag — Louis (Jacob Anderson) is confronted by Armand’s (Assad Zaman) twisted efforts to clear the air between them, including a surprise appearance from someone (Delainey Hayles) who recontextualizes Louis’s entire arc this season. Despite Lestat and Louis ultimately being put back together again by the closing moments of “The Failures,” a fast-forward to Lestat looking out at a city in ruins confirms the arrival of, as Jones ominously teases, “a new sheriff in town,” which will impact everything for a potential Season 4. Below, the series creator discusses Lestat and Louis’ respective reckonings, the Talamasca’s role in the bigger picture (and why they’re so invested in the Great Conversion), why there might be another title change in the show’s future, and more.
COLLIDER: When did the idea to structure Lestat’s portion of the finale around the long table and the “failure finders,” as it’s referred to at one point, really come up in the plotting?
ROLIN JONES: Pretty early on, I gotta say. When we first were doing the Auvergne scenes, we were like, “Hey, we’re doing the monastery scene. Hey, we’re doing the scene where he’s with the players. Hey, here’s the wolf killing and snow.” Then, reality set in, and “Hey, you’re going to be shooting in April in Toronto. There’s going to be some greenery all around.” You’re like, “Huh. Oh boy, what are we going to do?” So when we consolidated all that onto the table and tried to tell the story of Auvergne as time passing, we started grabbing on to that.
We started building the opening credits to it. We talked about it in [Season] 3, but there are actually a lot of references to tables. The table has been there in all seven episodes. In my initial dreaming stages — everybody has them, every show goes through this — we were in a real Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind world by the finale. At some point, you’ve just got to get all the people that represent all of your self-loathing and put them around the table, and have a review of your goddamn three seasons of television life.
The long table concept has been seeded throughout the season. Similarly, there have been breadcrumbs dropped about how long a vampire can survive after their head is cut off. Obviously, Lestat is an older vampire than Louis, so it stands to reason he’s going to be able to survive that experience longer. Is the reason that Louis survives as long as he does because he drank a little of Lestat’s blood in the beer before their decapitation?
JONES: The more immediate thing is there’s somebody that, even in the most screwed-up way, is sitting across from him that he cares about: Regina. Then, I think the beauty of Jacob’s performance is that there is a movement when he gets into that telepathic conversation that goes from, “I’m saving Regina,” to, “Despite the weirdness of what’s going on around me, the barbaric scene around me, what do I owe this person who I iced out for 77 years?” So, some of that comes back to even Lestat, to himself at the altar in the pilot episode. “What am I accountable for? What were the conversations I didn’t have with [Armand]? Where am I culpable for having brought him to this level of extremity?” There’s a real beauty I can see.
I wonder, for all viewers, where the moment is when they can see that. I know the moment I see it in Jacob’s performance, when it moves. It’s so elegant. You could make such a giant landscape painting off of Jacob Anderson’s small choices, minute choices. They’re just infinite.
Rolin Jones Explains the Significance of Paul’s Cameo in ‘The Vampire Lestat’s Finale
“It’s not confirmation that Lestat killed Paul or anything like that.”
Image via AMCGoing back to the Lestat of it all, you just said it yourself: let’s rehash three seasons and however many decades of failures. One of the ways the episode does that is by bringing back the tenor singer from Season 1 to do a review of Lestat’s performance from a random show in Fort Wayne. What really struck me, though, was Paul showing up. Does his appearance answer the long-standing question about Lestat’s role in his death in one way or another?
JONES: People can go ahead and go, “Oh,” when he describes why everyone is all there. By the way, Lestat murdered, blah, blah, blah. Who’s to say that Lestat’s even right when he says that? In all of our dreams, these things are fragmented. He’s got a full table full of fledglings, and then Marius pops up. Why is that? This is when the breakdown begins. There’s a guy named Enzo, for Christ’s sake, that comes in. We’re trying to replicate what a fever-dream life experience would be there.
For us, Paul was in an hour-long episode and arguably the entire season of manifesting failure and self-loathing. Was this a manifestation of self-love, or giving yourself a break? The fact that he chose not for Louis to say it, but the thing that Louis loved the most in the world seemed to be… of all the things, of all the people that could have shown up in his head, that he had housed that kindness, and saved that. It’ll always depend. If you hate Lestat, you’re going to really hate the fact that that’s Paul there. But if you love Lestat, I think you will understand. I remember when Jacob first heard that that’s who it was going to be, and I think it got Jacob very still and like, “Wow.”
It’s not confirmation that Lestat killed Paul or anything like that. No, no. He says, “I’ve traumatized you.” You probably did traumatize Paul! Paul’s last moments are, “You’re not seeing that guy, right? Grace is married off. She’s going to love it. Everything’s okay. It’s never going to be better than this day. I want the birds to stop. Go.”
I do love the show acknowledging Paul’s feelings briefly when he says to Lestat, “I still wish you were a woman,” and then Sam [Reid] has that little teary, “Me too, sometimes.”
JONES: It’s always like that in dreams, right? There is a character that you have experienced, that you are writing, but they’re also writing in that voice that you experienced them in. So everybody gets a little say. It’s a liminal space, the brain.
One thing that this episode confirms from a worldbuilding standpoint is the Talamasca’s plan. Even in their own spin-off, they were literally making more vampires in secret. What is their driving goal behind making sure that the Great Conversion ends up happening?
JONES: Like everything, you could say that Raglan is the messenger, right? He says it pretty boldly, “There are too many people on the planet. The giant governments of the world have used us to say, ‘Let this go. If you can manage this, if you can herd this, help us along.’” That’s one way. But with Raglan, and if you know the books, there is a personal journey he’s already on, so this idea of the evidence of the soul, he’s quite interested in that. Knowing where it’s going later on, I think that that’s important.
Our Talamasca in our show is, generally, Raglan and James, and that’s already a complex, weird thing. There was some talk when Talamasca was still going. There was some mutual plotting together on that. But they’re always just middle. They’re not the puppet masters. They’re just grease on the wheels, you know? That’s all.
The very last scene of the finale closes the loop on the Failures, with Lestat finishing a recording.
JONES: Album 55. That’s halfway there.
‘The Vampire Lestat’s Rolin Jones Teases an Even Bigger Future — and Potential Title Change
“In a show that is, generally speaking, dominated by male voices, there’s a new sheriff in town, and that will affect everything.”
Image via AMCWhat did you want to set up in terms of that last shot of the city in ruins? How does that set a specific tone heading into, potentially, Season 4?
JONES: Doom’s been there the whole time. There’s reference to it in the narration, the rubble. Shit has happened out there. The currency is currently not being run by the dollar anymore. A lot of things happened out there.
Look, the concert wasn’t there. There’s a bunch of stuff that happened off-screen this year that wasn’t there. People who know these books know The Queen of the Damned has chapters full of strict points of view, and that should be very clear. There were some things that were left out of Season 1 because there was a man on a microphone talking about his experience, and those tangential things that helped get you to that last image. But there are a bunch of things that were, for this year and going forward, about the laissez-faire of living here and now as vampires and having awoken something. The show’s about to get pretty big. In a show that is, generally speaking, dominated by male voices, there’s a new sheriff in town, and that will affect everything.
I would say the biggest clue about what’s coming up is: That is what’s happened — how do we get there? Because it won’t be called The Vampire Lestat, if we get it. My guess is we’re going to be doing the books’ titles. You’re going to be hearing a lot of people’s versions of how this happened, too, coming forward.
I’m talking to Daniel [Hart] soon, and we’re going to do a deep dive into the music, but when did you all decide that “Butterscotch Bitch” would be the song to close out the season?
JONES: Very late. Very late in the game. I had that riff for the production of the dream concert, but the lyrics, for a while, he was in his car and he was in hotel rooms putting it together. It’s so artfully done. “Butterscotch Bitch” is like when you walk into a church and you see the Stations of the Cross. It tells this biographical story.
There’s an interior journey story song that he wrote where we had to have made it to the 50,000 [vampires]. I’m basically sitting on the best song that he wrote for this season. You haven’t heard it yet. But until I had it, I think I was playing The Libertines’ “Horror Show” at the end of the credits. After a year with all these songs, Daniel was like, “We’re not going out on the fucking Libertines. Nope, I got it. Don’t worry about it.”
I think the scoring on Episode 7 is the best work he’s ever done on our show. It’s incredible. It’s unbelievable what he managed to do, and we don’t wallpaper a lot on our show. We have a lot of music, but we are borderline 82% of the time scored. That’s impossible. The number of motifs over the three seasons that are being manipulated and played, and the music under the Witches’ Place is just the largest thing you’ve ever heard in your life. I admire the shit out of him. I can’t believe it.
All episodes of The Vampire Lestat are now streaming on AMC+.
