After a two-season adaptation of Anne Rice’s game-changing novel Interview with the Vampire, AMC’s ongoing project undergoes a quick change of name, and a reshuffle of billing to reflect the new prominence of Sam Reid’s Lestat de Lioncourt over Jacob Anderson’s Louis de Point du Lac. The overarching project is entitled Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe, but you could be forgiven for ignoring the convoluted Mayfair Witches and the already-cancelled Talamasca: The Secret Order.
Perhaps all five of those seasons can be written off as mere growing pains, for this single-season adaptation of the contested sequel novel to Interview is the best thing we’ve been given yet. From the off, everything feels different: this is Lestat’s story, not Louis’ story as before, and that is meant literally, for the framing device for the story this time around is Lestat giving his autobiography in the form of multiple spoken record albums. (There are supposed to be 100 volumes, which assuming 40 minutes a side means about 67 hours of uninterrupted speaking, much longer than the audiobook of the relevant novel.) We learn about Lestat’s difficult childhood in France, his incestuous relationship with his mother Gabriella, played with an outrageously fake Italian accent by the wonderful Jennifer Ehle, and how he spent 2025 touring with a scrappy glam rock band named The Vampire Lestat.
Now, the novel this season adapts was published in 1985, and Rice’s portrayal of the vampire Lestat (the man, not the band) as an outrageous Bowie/Jagger/Jim Morrison figure was both outrageously silly and also made a kind of sense. In 2025 Lestat’s rock-n-roll theatrics are woefully outdated; but don’t worry, the show is aware of that and both showrunner Rolin Jones and star Sam Reid are fully prepared to lean in to portraying Lestat as something of a loser. Enough people like the self-pitying, bad-pun-filled lyrics composed for the fictional band this season to stream them and to attend a one-off concert put on by Reid in character (you can watch the highlights on disc one here), but really, you don’t have to enjoy the music to enjoy the sheer high camp with which the many performance scenes this season are handled.
The show is well past taking itself seriously, and the better for it; everything from the cinematography to the performances to the music has a new tongue-in-cheek glitter-punk quality to it that’s as far as can be from the “overheated Gothic” mood that characterised the Interview with the Vampire seasons. Returning cast such as Anderson, Eric Bogosian as indefatigable journo Daniel Molloy, and Assad Zaman as the impossible-to-pin-down Armand are forced by virtue of Lestat’s different take on their characters to adjust their performances and all do just fine, if anything improving despite, in some cases, having their screentime lessened as compared to before. Also returning is Delainey Hayles, who played Claudia in Season 2 and now…well, no spoilers, but she’s back and she’s fantastic.
This release includes a fair bit in the way of extras, including the After Dark talk show that originally followed each episode, a short behind-the-scenes for each episode, the aforementioned concert highlights, and short features highlighting specific aspects of the production. If you’d like to get the full series so far then that becomes available on the 23rd of November; a fourth season adapting Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned has been announced.
★★★★☆