Several years on from the debuts of Interview with the Vampire (2022) and Mayfair Witches (2023), AMC’s Immortal Universe needs little to no introduction. Although the third series introduced to the franchise, Talamasca: The Secret Order (2025), was canceled after one season with no clear explanation, AMC has continued to invest time and resources in developing the flagship Interview beyond its first two seasons (and has even continued to expand Mayfair). Interview’s third season, retitled The Vampire Lestat, debuted via AMC’s linear and streaming services on 7 June 2026. The name-change falls in line with the title of the second novel in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles; the first two seasons covered the first book, Interview (1976), and one can infer that with the third season covering Lestat (1985), future seasons will also be retitled to make obvious which book is being adapted (in fact, AMC has confirmed that the upcoming fourth season shares the title of the third novel in the series, The Queen of the Damned [1988]). The Vampire Chronicles are a fifteen-book series spanning fifty years of publication (1976 - 2026), and it’s fitting that this third entry should commemorate Rice’s half-century of looming large over the landscape of contemporary vampire fiction.
Viewers should embark upon TVL with the following warning, lest they suffer from tonal whiplash: the melancholy, meandering, yet mostly linear storytelling of Interview Parts 1 and 2 is gone. Lestat is a narrator whose approach, leaping from point to point in his personal history without regard for cognitive dissonance, is by turns joyful, maudlin, manic, and depraved. However, further complicating matters is the fact that the first scene of the first episode is set post-events of The Queen of the Damned, as a collection of recordings is being sold at an exclusive auction. These are all of Lestat’s songs from his cataclysm-triggering tour as a rock star, plus a set of narrative recordings that has been titled “The Failures.” From that point, the audience is pitched backward in time as the first record begins to play, and Lestat (Sam Reid) emerges as a voice-over. Although the journalist of Interview fame, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), is now a vampire himself and has joined Lestat and his band on tour as a documentarian, the story is coming from Lestat, unfiltered, no interview required.
Alongside the band themselves—Larry (Noah Reid), Alex (Seamus Patterson), Salamander (Ryan Kattner), and TC (Sarah Swire)—also along for this ride in the grimiest tour bus since Spinal Tap are several other members of Lestat’s entourage. Dr. Fareed Bhansali (Gopal Divan) returns, now serving—instead of attending to Lestat’s ex-companion, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), in Dubai—as Lestat’s and the band’s private physician. Lestat’s lawyer, Christine Claire (Jeanine Serralles), is a newcomer; she takes very seriously her job of shielding the band from the potentially catastrophic legal fallout caused by Lestat’s unwise predations. Finally, Lestat’s social media coordinator, Dee Pharma (Amaka Umeh), also has the job of consuming illicit substances so that any vampires present—which sometimes include the mysterious Sofia, revealed in the first episode to be Lestat’s biological mother and fledgling, Gabriella Vecce de Lioncourt (Jennifer Ehle)—can drink her blood and get high. Even Samuel Barclay (Christopher Geary), former Playwright-in-Residence of the season two Paris coven belonging to Armand (Assad Zaman), returns in modern-day guise as “a vampire DJ of some renown.”
If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, it is, and to gloriously chaotic effect. Lestat’s becoming a rock star is an unabashedly direct reaction to how he feels about Louis having slandered him in Daniel Molloy’s book, which itself is the direct result of Daniel’s interview with Louis and Armand, the event depicted in seasons one and two. Lestat tells his story through a dazzling lineup of songs written by returning composer Daniel Hart. Sam Reid’s vocals on these numbers, as well as his physical stage presence during the season’s concert scenes, are electrifying. Rarely has a single actor needed to become a double threat in such short order. If there aren’t a number of awards in Reid’s future owing to the musical performances alone, then it will be a shocking state of affairs. Lestat’s autobiographical songs range from tender to terrifying, particularly in the case of “Your Biggest Fan,” written from the perspective of Magnus (Damien Atkins)—Lestat’s medieval alchemist maker, rendered here with terrifying precision as the abuser and stalker that he is. The picture that emerges is one of Lestat’s undealt-with trauma around not just his maker but also his mother, with whom he’s had a two-hundred-odd year incestuous relationship (when not romantically involved with the likes of Armand or Louis, but sometimes with awkward overlaps; it’s an ongoing situation, and her presence in this season only complicates the emotional experience that Lestat is having on the road).
In the background, other turmoil first seeded in the show’s first two seasons simmers. Raglan James (Justin Kirk) and Rashid (Bally Gill) return as everyone’s favorite Talamasca agents, keeping close tabs on not just Lestat’s risky antics, but also the Great Conversion—a movement in the vampire world wherein fledglings are being created at an alarming rate (the worldwide vampire population has spiked from around 1,600 in 2022 to 290,000 in 2025, which is … beyond a problem, given that the average rate of the vampires’ collective feeding has tipped the world into a state of “more deaths than births”). Even Louis is back in the picture, having expanded his worldwide empire from the fine art trade to a chain of hotels and other real estate. In one of the season’s most memorable comedic scenes, a lawyered-up Lestat and Louis clash after the Detroit coven makes an attempt on Lestat’s life following his band’s performance in the city, which has caused damage to Dracula’s Daughter, Louis’s Motor City hotel. Moses Sumney makes a brief, stellar series debut as Louis’s legal representation and current lover, Lemuel.
If this sounds like an absolute mess of interpersonal drama and global strife, again: it is. It’s even further compounded by the fact that Lestat is, as he performs, actively being haunted by “muses” from his tempestuous past. Magnus is one of these, as is Nicolas de Lenfent (Joseph Potter), the ill-fated childhood friend and violinist with whom Lestat was romantically involved in eighteenth-century Paris during the time he founded the Théâtre des Vampires coven with Armand. Lestat’s abusive father (Peter Outerbridge) and brothers (Kaleb Horn and Rhys Alexander Phillips) weave in and out of Lestat’s hallucinations as scornful presences.
Lestat is using the tour to run from his past, but invoking it night after night in his songs effectively means that he’s losing the race. Eventually, he does face each of these shades in their turn, often processing the attached grief and trauma during documentary interview sessions with Daniel. Even the documentary production isn’t without consequences, as Daniel is just as invasive and ruthless with his questioning as he was with Louis. As an interview subject, however, Lestat is far less willing to be pushed, and he routinely pushes back.
Out of necessity, the events of The Queen of the Damned have already begun to bleed into the narrative. Marius de Romanus (Christopher Heyerdahl), Armand’s abuser and maker, appears in some of the flashbacks owing to his eighteenth-century attempt at having made Lestat his replacement as the custodian of Those Who Must Be Kept, Akasha and Enkil, the first vampires ever to exist. Much like in the novels, Lestat strikes up a telepathic rapport with Akasha (Sheila Atim) as he tends to her prone, statue-like presence—only to end up being fed on by her and feeding on her in turn. In this adaptation, Marius is not so forgiving when he finds out: he ousts Lestat from the role of keeper straightaway, leaving him adrift to travel to America, where he eventually meets Louis. Many of the events in Interview’s first two seasons find their connecting points amidst this narrative chaos, but it’s wise to refresh one’s memory on those previous seasons so as not to end up too disoriented. TVL is ambitious in scope, but with only seven episodes allotted to this season by the network, showrunner Rolin Jones and his creative team struggle at points to pace some of the episodes effectively, the finale in particular. This is arguably forgivable given that the events of this season will be wrapped up in the next; this was also the approach Jones took in Parts 1 and 2 (seasons one and two) of Interview.
TVL is a dizzying adventure, delightful and distressing by turns. The emotional shifts happen with lightning speed, and some viewers have found this disorienting. Some have even outright detested it, longing for a return to the narrative style and pacing of Interview. However, the writing team has been candid in interviews at every step in the process, emphasizing the season’s tonal and structural shifts; they’ve taken their cue from the novels, where Lestat has traditionally been a more chaotic and disjointed narrator than Louis and Armand. In addition to Sam Reid’s stunning center-stage turn as Lestat, additional standout performances come from Jacob Anderson as Louis and Assad Zaman as Armand. While the finale is hardly the strongest episode of the season, Zaman’s chilling, touching performance in it as one of the ongoing antagonists reaches a pitch previously seen from him in the fifth episode of season two. Among the secondary cast, the ensemble playing Lestat’s band deserves honorable mention—as does Christopher Geary, whose humorous, nuanced performance has made Sam Barclay, who seemingly continues to spy for the Talamasca as he did in Paris, a fan favorite.
Finally, Lestat’s lineup of “muses” wouldn’t be complete without mentioning one of the season’s best-kept secrets: Delainey Hayles returns as Claudia, Lestat’s and Louis’s fledgling who met her fate in 1949 at the hands of Armand’s theater troupe in Paris. Hayles, having taken over the role of Claudia from Bailey Bass between seasons one and two of Interview, shines as incandescently as she ever has. Claudia is a vengeful spirit, and the chance to speak her piece to her adoptive fathers about their failures is nothing short of what she deserves. This narrative move is poignantly in-keeping with a season focused on the effects of intergenerational trauma and the implications of carrying them into eternity: Lestat’s failures include not only perpetually struggling to find peace, but continuing the cycle of inflicting these horrors upon others.