‘Interview With the Vampire’ Season 2 is a Dark and Lush Triumph — Even If It Could Use More of Sam Reid’s Lestat

“You don’t understand the meaning of your own story!” is what one Interview With the Vampire character screams at another, in flashback form, only for it to reverberate again and again in the present. It’s a hyper dramatic thing for any character to say aloud, meaning it’s par for the course for AMC‘s preciously purple Anne Rice adaptation. Like Rice’s novels themselves, Interview With the Vampire continues to sink its teeth into the most unapologetically melodramatic, self-reflective, and, well, self-aggrandizing nature of humanity through its imagined excavation of one vampire’s life. While Interview With the Vampire Season 1 hinged on Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) second attempt to get vampire Louis du Pont de Lac (Jacob Anderson) to share his story and that of his maker/lover/nemesis Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) with the masses, Season 2 takes the show’s themes and goes deeper. The first six episodes of Interview With the Vampire retread the baroque dance steps that made Season 1 so much fun, while putting further emphasis on the chaotic natures of memory, self, and regret.

Interview With the Vampire Season 2 is mostly more of what made Season 1 a cult smash, with one glaring exception. Creative narrative moves aside, the show’s second season does suffer from a general lack of Lestat. Though that’s a tiny quibble considering how lush Interview With the Vampire Season 2 is.

Interview With the Vampire is AMC’s pulpy television adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, created by Rolin Jones. The first season largely followed the events of the original Rice vampire novel — wherein a young journalist named Daniel Molloy records a long interview with Louis de Point du Lac in 1970s San Francisco — but with a twist. This new adaptation imagined what would happen if an older Molloy was reunited with his infamous subject in the present day for another go at the strange tale. Not only that, but Jones changed Louis’s backstory so that instead of being a white plantation owner from 18th century Louisiana, he’s a closeted Creole man in 1910s New Orleans. Nevertheless, the beats of Louis’s story are the same: electrifying, sexy, and tragic.

Interview With the Vampire Season 2 essentially picks up where Season 1 left off, with Lestat murdered in the 1940s timeline and the vampire Armand’s (Assad Zaman) true identity revealed in the present day, with one major change. A dramatic title card announces with theatrical fanfare up top that the role of Claudia, the pre-pubescent child Louis begs Lestat to transform into a vampire as an act of love, will now be played by Delainey Hayles. Original series star Bailey Bass was roped into more aquatic CGI antics by Avatar director James Cameron and had to be recast. As it happens, the recast works fine as this season Claudia has her innocence fully stripped bare and her hope all but pummeled into powder. That is, Claudia was already going to feel different than she ever did before.

Plot-wise, Interview With the Vampire Season 2 continues to toggle between the cat-and-mouse games of Louis’s contemporary conversations with Molloy and Louis’s murky recollection of the past. As we’ve already learned, Louis can be a bit of an unreliable narrator. It’s a quirk that becomes a much bigger feature in Season 2, as Armand joins the sessions and Molloy begins to question even his own remembrance of events long past. “You don’t understand the meaning of your own story,” indeed.

Playing perfectly against this 2020s storyline is the introduction of the Theatre des Vampires, a Parisian coven led by a younger Armand that has contrived to feed in plain sight by tricking human audiences into swooning over their kills on stage. After a hiccup in Eastern Europe, Louis and Claudia arrive in a post-World War II Paris. Claudia craves connection and is immediately bewitched by this coven. Louis, on the other hand, reluctantly discovers he is falling for Armand, even while being haunted by the memory of his murdered maker and first love, Lestat.

As clever as Interview With the Vampire Season 2’s choices are, the first season fanatic in me has to admit that she missed the bejesus out of Sam Reid’s Lestat. In the fleeting moments we are treated to Reid here, he once again devours every corner of the frame possible. (In one scene, that’s literal, as he takes up a photograph and begins chewing.) The alchemy of Season 1 was the intense chemistry Anderson and Reid shared. Zaman, Hayles, and Bogosian are all ferocious scene partners for Anderson, but none of them come close to capturing the lightning storm that is Louis and Lestat.

That said, Interview With the Vampire remains the rarest of treats on television. It’s a soapy, gothic fairy tale full of sensuality, gore, and incredible performances. Jacob Anderson once more throws down a masterclass in brooding Byronic heroism while new addition Ben Daniels sparks up the screen as treacherous thespian Santiago. And Hayles, Bogosian, and Zaman all deliver equally exquisite turns as Claudia, Molloy, and Armand.

Once again, Interview With the Vampire invites you to sit back and — in the word of Louis himself, “let the tale seduce you.”

Interview With the Vampire premieres on Sunday, May 12 on AMC and AMC+.