‘The Vampire Lestat’s Eric Bogosian and Assad Zaman Pitch a Devil’s Minion Spin-Off After the Game-Changing Finale

Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for The Vampire Lestat finale.

Tonight, The Vampire Lestat comes to a close — not with a bang (unless you count that final shot), but with a quiet reflection on some of the most impactful moments of the past two seasons. Lestat’s (Sam Reid) head may be getting toted around by Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) in a bowling bag, but internally, he’s grappling with his biggest failures as both a vampire and a human. Meanwhile, Louis (Jacob Anderson) is faced with Armand’s (Assad Zaman) unique attempt to clear the air between them — to make “Armands,” in his words, even if it occurs in the most twisted fashion possible. Although the episode wraps up with Lestat and Louis ultimately back in one piece, there’s a looming sense that an even bigger threat still lies ahead.

Before the premiere of “The Failures,” Collider had the opportunity to speak to several cast members from The Vampire Lestat, including Bogosian and Zaman, about their characters’ most crucial moments in the episode. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, the co-stars break down Daniel and Armand’s respective motivations for carrying out their grisly plan, what fuels Armand’s decision to leave his mark on Louis, how much they know about where the story is heading in a potential fourth season, and more.

COLLIDER: Eric, as much as Armand really lays out his motivation for this plan and the emotions at the heart of it, where did you land on what’s driving Daniel to be a part of it?

ERIC BOGOSIAN: Look, first of all, Daniel is completely thrown off by all the information that’s coming at him, and he’s a new vampire. It’s a lot going on here, so he’s grasping at something that can protect him. I think two things are going on. One, he’s grasping at his anger, and that fuels what is going to end up happening. Eventually, even the anger will get stymied when the bowling bag gets taken away from him, so now that will rocket him into hopefully another season where he gets to be even angrier.

I also think that Armand’s power is way stronger than Daniel has even suspected. He is under his thrall. Daniel is mesmerized by Armand. Armand is pulling out all the stops on this one, and he’s definitely got his spiderwebs around Daniel’s brain and soul. So, I think he just gives into it for a while. Basically, he believes he’s committing murder, which would be pretty finalizing. They decapitate the two main people so that Armand and Daniel can have their own TV series without these guys anymore. We can move on and get rid of them. They’re way more interesting.

ASSAD ZAMAN: You’d watch that, Carly, wouldn’t you?

Oh, absolutely. 100%.

Assad Zaman Explains Armand’s “Surprising” Reaction to Louis in ‘The Vampire Lestat’s Finale

“You see a glimpse of that little boy for a moment.”

Image via AMC

One moment that did move me, though, and I think you can see moves Armand, is when Louis switches to telepathy and starts talking about Arun and that he’s sorry for never giving Armand the love that he needed in their relationship. Is there a specific part of his speech that catches Armand off guard, or is everything Louis says in that moment just building to that reaction from him?

ZAMAN: The sort of surprising beginning of that is when [Louis] says, “You and I didn’t talk about it very much.” That’s the first gateway into an acknowledgment and a confession that Armand wasn’t aware that was going to come and wasn’t really ready for. This has been really hard to keep to myself, because we all know that we’ve been leading to this, but I’ve had to try and sort of hold back on what Armand’s motivations were and why he was doing this, and what he wants to get out of it. It’s a really difficult thing for him to hear from the person he thought was the love of his life, acknowledging him in a way, and acknowledging Arun, when no one else has.

Even though some of the information Armand will always keep, and Armand will always feed information, and it will always be littered with lies and manipulation, I think Louis knows the most about where he’s been, but never really acknowledged it at the time. Armand never really got that acknowledgment, and so to get it in that last final moment was a really unexpected blow, and I think it really displaces him. You see a glimpse of that little boy for a moment.

He does it beautifully. I read that last script, and I remember reading his monologue once, and then I never looked at it again. I purposely didn’t want to ever look at that monologue again until I heard it from Jacob. The first time he did it in the space, it was just gorgeous. It really moved me, like properly moved me.

Eric, you already referenced the moment when Raglan and the Talamasca show up to take custody of Lestat’s head. There’s been a bit of a give-and-take between Daniel and the Talamasca over the seasons, but at the end of that scene, he bares his fangs at Raglan, and I was curious about your read of that interaction.

BOGOSIAN: I see it as he’s cornered. He has no choice. He has to give it up. But this is a warning that he is also capable of violence. Now, who is he warning? Raglan has been kind of an unknown entity in terms of whatever powers he has. Very early on, when we started working on this show, we all came to understand that the vampires are not human, that we should think of them as another type of being, and beings that follow their own rules. The rules are that we can commit violence without thinking, more like a wolf or something. We may not necessarily do the thing that’s in our best interest at any given moment, because we’re just inherently violent and we’re inherently killers. So, Daniel is doing something there, and it’s just like he’s snarling. I mean, it’s a snarl. We never got the snarl sound right, unfortunately, but we tried. [Laughs]

For me, all of what goes on in the last beat is all about pulling back the elastic band to shoot into another season, which I hope we get to, and motivate Daniel into a more intensely powerful and difficult vampire, which was my dream from the very beginning. Assad’s gotten to be a difficult and enigmatic vampire from the get-go. I had to put in that whole year of all that false humility.

Which, by the way, you know that I didn’t know what he was doing? Nobody ever explained it to me, and then when they finally did explain it, I still didn’t know everything. I hadn’t read every single word of everything that’s been written by Anne Rice about the relationship between them, and so then they sort of had this sneaky fun with me of, like, “Oh, you’ll see what’s happening. We’re going to go some places.” I’m like, “What? What are you talking about?” And [Assad] just loves this stuff. He gets a big thrill out of it. Because the thing with Assad is that he plays this really evil guy, but he’s actually a really nice guy, but really deep down, he’s a really evil guy. Really, at his core, he is actually evil.

No, I don’t believe that. [Laughs]

BOGOSIAN: Thank God he’s not supernatural, or I’d be in trouble.

ZAMAN: No, no. I learned very early on that the most evil people are the ones that seem the nicest because they break into you. They break into your vulnerabilities.

I have to get your thoughts, Assad, on the decision Armand makes to carve the A into Louis’s chest. He heals Regina and lets her go free, and Louis is ultimately put back together as well, but why do you think Armand makes that his final act before leaving?

ZAMAN: Because Armand can never truly do something for someone without his signature or his initial there somewhere, and I don’t mean that literally. This time, we saw a literal initial, but in every sense, even when he’s the most sincere, a little bit of the psychopath, the sociopath, always comes out, and I think that’s just another weird psychotic thing that he just had to do. I don’t know if there’s any sort of deeper meaning behind it except, “Thank you for acknowledging me. I let you go. We’re done. Also, here. Don’t forget I was in there. Don’t forget that.” I think that’s just more for himself.

He’s always going to be that weirdo. He’s always going to be a bit of a psychopath, and that’s because of his trauma. I think anyone who’s gone through and suffered and sort of had to weave in and out of snake-like behaviors and be abused and abuse themselves, I don’t think they ever really lose that. It’s a mental illness, and I don’t think they ever really lose it in a way. I don’t think his speech, that moment, was going to suddenly turn Armand into a good person now. I don’t think, going into Season 4, we’re going to see a massive shift in Armand. I think we’re going to see some different things, but this is part of his nature. His illness is there, and it’s always going to be there, and that’s a little sign of that.

‘The Vampire Lestat’s Eric Bogosian and Assad Zaman Tease What To Expect From Season 4

“Rolin [Jones] kind of made some light suggestions for where we’re going to be.”

Image via AMC

Lestat and Louis have been reassembled by the end of the episode, but did you two have any conversations at all about where you think Armand and Daniel have slunk off to?

ZAMAN: Rolin [Jones] kind of made some light suggestions for where we’re going to be. Did he say anything to you, Eric?

BOGOSIAN: He doesn’t talk to me.

ZAMAN: [Laughs] It’s only because I hound him a little bit, and he drip-feeds me information. But if we know the books, we know the main thing that’s happening next season is we’re going to be introducing Akasha, and I think that’s going to bring everyone from their little side plots and side quests into the fold. Armand and Daniel are very much part of that.

But I think there is also room to explore their relationship outside of that. We’ve joked about a couple of things that we want to see that we didn’t get to see this season, like how Armand specifically trains Daniel to be out in the sun. We talked about those being quite fun scenes to explore.

BOGOSIAN: And we’ve never been physically intimate. We also didn’t see how I got turned in the first place. There’s a lot of generating things for Daniel that we don’t see. Why is he doing this documentary? Where’d that come from?

The weird thing about it, as we talk about it more and more, is that those three guys, Lestat, Louis, and Armand, they got problems. They’ve got issues, as a friend of mine would say. Daniel, even though he’s definitely made a wreck of his life, he’s actually not psychotic or anything. He’s just kind of an asshole. Very ambitious, but not anything on the scale of these guys. So, maybe I can improve on that.

All episodes of The Vampire Lestat are now streaming on AMC+.