[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 1, “What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned.”]
Interview With the Vampire is back (god, that felt good to type). The Season 2 premiere brought Louis (Jacob Anderson), Claudia (Delainey Hayles), and the ghost of Lestat (Sam Reid) to Europe as they search for more of their kind. The episode ended with a beautiful, heartbreaking monologue from Louis in which he made an important pact with his daughter, one that serves as the jumping off point for the entire season’s arc. In the video above, Anderson, Reid, and Hayles break down that scene, what it was like to film it, and why it’s so important for the plot moving forward.
Louis and Claudia had a harrowing experience in Romania both before and after they found the old world vampires. After four years of searching (notice the time jump from the Season 1 finale!), they finally found their first vampire, and it was a monstrous, unrecognizable creature with an ancient “mother” named Daciana. Claudia hoped to add Daciana to their family, but she killed herself by throwing herself on a fire right in front of them as Claudia offered connection.
Desperate to start anew, Louis gave Claudia a stern but loving talk as they traveled to Paris in the back of a rickety truck. Louis told Claudia “hard words” and “soft words.” Their “life is sh*t” and it’s likely going to be that way for a while, he declared, but as long as Claudia walks the earth, Louis will “never taste the fire.” He promises her that. He told her that all that matters is “you and me, me and you” over and over as if repeating it will make his Lestat hallucination disappear.
The Lestat figment of Louis’ imagination took the form of the night he was killed in the Season 1 finale in this episode, bloody slice in his throat and all. What’s noteworthy is that while Louis imagines “Dream-stat,” as the cast calls him, threatening him, the look he gives Claudia in the truck is heartbreakingly tender. It’s as if this really is the ghost of Lestat and he’s missing his vampire daughter from the other side.
Louis and Claudia arrive in Paris at the end of Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 1 (Larry Horricks / AMC)
Anderson and Reid spend the first several minutes of the video above praising Hayles’ “astonishing” performance in the scene, during which only Louis has dialogue but Hayles and Reid’s silent performances speak volumes.
“When we shot this scene — I don’t know if I told [Hayles] this — as it goes on, Louis’ meant to get very emotional,” Anderson tells Hayles. “And every time I looked at your face while you were in this hard-beaten Claudia stage, it got me floods of tears.”
“It’s a beautiful pact between Louis and Claudia at the very start of the show. It kind of sets up the whole premise of the season,” Reid says, “which is this pact that they make with each other that it’s ‘you and me, you and me, you and me.’ And obviously, Louis’ got a few other people.”
“[Louis is] not lying,” Anderson notes, but “it’s complicated.” Hayles hints that “lines are crossed” moving forward, but this moment is just what the doctor ordered for Claudia.
“If you were the last vampire on Earth, it would be enough,” Louis says in the clip. Hayles says that that’s “all Claudia wants to hear from someone, and I think she’s very happy it’s Louis. They’ve been at odds with each other for so long, that that’s actually all she needed to continue this journey to Paris.”
“That’s so sad,” Anderson whispers. As Reid adds, “It looks like you believe it, but there’s also this seed of like, ‘Don’t do it again.’”
When the camera pans over to Lestat, Reid reveals that they filmed a scene where Lestat smoked a cigarette out of the neck wound “and at other times I even used it as a musical instrument.” Both scenes were left on the cutting room floor because “it just became a bit too weird.” As Anderson admits, “The musical instrument thing was the strangest thing I have ever seen with my two eyes, ever.” Anderson later reveals that he filmed a stunt where he jumped out of the back of the van in Paris that he’s bummed was cut.
Louis’ “you and me, me and you” monologue is “one of my favorite things that Louis says in this season,” Anderson shares, as Reid adds of the “beautiful” performance, “That really does set up the whole season in so many ways. There’s so many beautiful little hints and twists at what’s coming in that entire speech, and it does come back up again and again and again.”
Will this moment come back to haunt Louis and Claudia? You know what they say: memory is the monster.
Interview With the Vampire, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC