Spoilers follow for The Vampire Lestat Season 3, Episode 4 – “The Devil’s Road,” which is available on AMC and AMC+ now.
Abandonment issues run amuck this week in “The Devil’s Road,” the latest episode of AMC’s series formerly known as Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, starting with Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) still on the road with his band, but very preoccupied with the sudden mystery trip taken without explanation by his mother/fledgling Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle).
Showrunner Rolin Jones tells IGN that Gabriella’s incestuous yet apathetic dynamic with her son is core to many of his existential problems. “He has mentioned a number of times in Season 1 and 2 that abandonment is a big deal for him,” Jones says. “So you owe a very clear, ‘Where did that start from?’ It started from Mom. That’s straight from the book.”
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For this series adaptation of Anne Rice’s book, Jones says he and his writers approached this season as Part 1 and Season 4 as Part 2 to tell the full story of what’s going on with their ensemble. In Part 1, Jones explains that they need Gabriella to be off-screen doing things that will pay off in the future. “We have very deliberately built it that way,” the showrunner says of these mysteries.
Right now, “The Devil’s Road” is Lestat’s point of view on this destructive relationship. “He’s finally alone with her in the past, and she’s abandoned him for nine days,” Jones says of the flashbacks in this episode that reveal her history of callous, mercurial exits. “He just loses his mind. It’s [about] watching those things turn until it brings him to them meeting again and a very big moment happens.”
Louis and Regina
Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) continues to haunt a booth in the Brick & Bacon diner where he can observe the British waitress Regina (Delainey Hayles), who is the spitting image of his dead vampire “daughter,” Claudia.
The idea of a doppelgänger Claudia was created wholesale by Jones, co-showrunner Hannah Moscovitch and their writers. Though Louis and Claudia’s story isn’t revisited in Rice’s books until Merrick (2000), Jones says they invented these encounters to keep Anderson and Hayles front and center in the show.
“I have two really, really good actors that I love, and there’s been a promise in a weird way, especially with Jacob, to the people who tuned in that he’s part of the show and we’re never giving that up,” Jones says of their implicit pledge to the audience. “We have the freedom of not having to land on one book, so we had this thing in a later book that we thought was very, very ripe and interesting. And as you’re trying to shape something, you’re like, ‘Oh, if that’s a destination point, what’s an interesting way to get there?’”
Jones says they also had some nagging things to follow-up on from Season 2. “The last image of the season, with the dress on the wall, me and Hannah always looked at that and were like, ‘It’s beautiful. It’s lovely. It’s quite neat, isn’t it? Hmm.’ And we felt, especially with Delainey’s performance and the impact of it, there was more gas there to go.”
The Armand and Molloy Twist
After appearing in flashbacks and making a surprise appearance in ex-band guitarist Alex’s (Seamus Patterson) AA meeting, Armand (Assad Zaman) weaves back into the main story on an apology tour aimed at his fledgling Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) and Lestat.
“There’s a lot of agenda going on with Armand,” Jones admits. “As we get deeper and deeper into writing him, he becomes sort of the mirror for who you are; you can see what you want to see in him. Embracing that mystery on the writing page, then seeing it embodied in what Assad does all the time, it’s really, really seductive.”
Jones says they always intended to include portions of Armand’s arc from Rice’s book in this series: “We’re just taking our organic time with it.”
The show is also presenting it a little differently by reimagining how and when Armand turns Molloy and not sharing it with the audience yet. In Rice’s book Queen of the Damned (1998), there’s a whole chapter titled “The Story of Daniel, the Devil’s Minion, or the Boy From Interview With the Vampire” about Armand meeting Molloy in 1973, and then stalking him until he falls in love with the human and eventually turns him.
In the book, it’s all about a human and a vampire falling in love. We’ve removed that, and we’ve also aged [Molloy] up, so we have different circumstances.
Jones says they grappled with how to condense and retell what happens between Queen of the Damned Molloy, a.k.a. the Devil’s Minion, and Armand. “In the book, it’s all about a human and a vampire falling in love. We’ve removed that, and we’ve also aged [Molloy] up, so we have different circumstances,” he explains. “But we still owe the same sort of a weirdness to their manifestation, of what it’s like to be bonded between those two, and that was exciting for us.”
And so the show gives us in this episode Molloy following his sire out of Lestat’s concert and being rendered speechless after Armand professes his love for him going back to Dubai. “We had to do delicate writing there about how do you pull that off and buy that?” Jones says of the shocking moment. “How can you go back and look at Season 1 and Season 2 and go, ‘I can see that.’”
Jones says it works because of Bogosian’s performance where myriad micro reactions play out on the actor’s face. “We linger and we’re on camera with Eric [for] 75% of that scene,” Jones points out. “You have to watch his face and he knows that it’s truthful. I’d argue it’s some of Eric’s most beautiful acting.”
Be sure to check back at IGN every Sunday for post-morts of The Vampire Lestat with showrunner Rolin Jones!
