Rolin Jones Wanted The Vampire Lestat to Feel Like Rock 'n' Roll

[The following contains spoilers for the season finale of The Vampire Lestat, "The Failures."]

The Vampire Lestat begins with a dazzling, disorienting whirlwind, the type of breakneck voyage through Lestat's (Sam Reid) psyche that only he could provide. The season is framed by Lestat's "Failures" tapes, a recording that he makes at some later point about how he accidentally woke Akasha (Sheila Atim) through the power of his music, subsequently leading to mass destruction. The season finale of The Vampire Lestat doesn't end up showing or explaining how all that vampiric ruination unfolded, but it does provide another critical look into Lestat's head.

The episode, titled "The Failures," splits the majority of its story between two locations: Lestat's mind, which finally pays off the "long table" that Magnus (Damien Atkins) spoke about in Episode 3; and a butcher shop where Armand (Assad Zaman) demands an apology from Louis' (Jacob Anderson) severed head for all that Louis put him through during their relationship. After being beheaded by Armand and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) in the final moments of the penultimate episode, Lestat and Louis spend much of this hour on the edge of death. As his mind declines the longer he's separated from his body, Lestat's supposedly final thoughts allow the show to bring back a host of characters from his past, from Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) to Antoinette (Maura Grace Athari), all of whom take turns informing him what a failure his time on Earth has been. Only the vision of Louis' brother, Paul (Steven G. Norfleet), who died in the Interview with the Vampire pilot, comes to him with kind words. It all adds up to another dizzying episode, in the style that only this show could pull off.

Getting inside Lestat's twisted mind hasn't been, as showrunner Rolin Jones acknowledges, for everyone. Ahead of The Vampire Lestat's season finale, Jones spoke to TV Guide about all that went into bringing the episode, and the season as a whole, to undead life.

ALSO READ: Sam Reid unpacks the revelations in The Vampire Lestat's season finale

I have to start by asking about the Lestat death dream sequences, with all those characters from the past returning. How did you arrive at the decision to send him into limbo?
Rolin Jones: We weren't so interested in, you know, "How do we get the heads back together again?" You have Raglan there kind of talking about, "This is the soul fighting," and it's sort of back to one more time watching a vampire endure. But I think it was this gradual build from Episode 1, which is just this [performance from Lestat of] "I could give a sh--, I'm gonna put all this f---ing armor in front of me. I'm gonna dazzle you or distract you. I'm not gonna let you into it." And having recorded all these things, it becomes, I think, this manifestation of extreme self-loathing. Literally everybody who has meant anything in his life is sitting there at a table talking to him about what a failure he is. None of them necessarily think that. That's all him. That's all variations of him. It's a series of Dreamstats in front of him. And we felt Paul was this first act of wrestling yourself to the ground and saying, "You're OK." That "I can have some love for myself," and he manifests it. That unconscious manifests itself out of the thing that Louis loved the most in the world.

It was just very nice to see Paul again, even if those were Lestat's own words coming out of him.
Jones: Yeah, but in a weird way, that's also a very warped but truthful version of Louis and Gabriella. Everybody is there. It's a merger. It's the merger of the two. Or, again, Magnus suggested, we might be in a simulation, too. So, he's in the car already talking about the long table. The long table's already happening, right?

Both Lestat and Louis' brushes with death result in kind of the same revelation: They're the loves of each other's lives. Louis is more explicit about saying it, but Lestat gets that approval from Paul, and so much of his time in limbo focuses on the "could be nice" moment. What was the thinking behind having them both admit to that now?
Jones: You want to lead to something. It's two-handed, right? That's one part of the prism. The other part is, and maybe he has to get out of the dream and into the Failures of it, but there's contrition and responsibility on both sides. On Louis' side, somewhere in his telepathic words to Armand, it moves from, "Let's save Regina's life," to, "Oh, I actually probably have some bit of culpability in this weird way about how I have ended up here and what I did to this person for 77 years of shutting him out." And so I think also in Lestat's version, he starts off the season going, "Yeah, maybe I had some little thing to do [with it] — blah, blah, blah," about half the people being wiped out of the planet, and then at the end [he's] on his balcony again going, "It was all my fault." Maybe an overcorrection, but I think there were multiple things going on. If there was anything we were most proud of, or we tried to do — maybe we weren't successful in certain people's eyes — we tried to juggle multitudes in moments, that people can be thinking multiple things at the same time. We tried our best when we were fighting network notes about, "Both of those things could be true!" Hopefully it's giving more, giving different things as you age and watch it, or even as you just rewatch it a second time.

That's been one of my favorite things about this show from the beginning, the fact that multiple things can always be true at the same time. You can have different reads of characters that are all true. And, I mean, that brings me to Armand. To me, he's at peak psychosis in this episode, but it's also very, very clear that you all, as writers, have so much empathy for him. Can you talk about his role in the finale?
Jones: Well, the reveal is obviously that he's been there in every frame since the beginning of it. With Regina and Alex, he has been lurking the whole time, and it all started when he got thrown into a wall in Dubai, and was told, "Don't touch this, and everything is your fault for your two lies." And I think he was just sitting there with the debris coming down, and just starting to begin to think about it. "Well, there's a second person in this relationship. There are probably some other words you might want to say." And then watching him stew on that in the labyrinthian way in which Armand thinks and operates. It's not like most of us.

Certainly not.
Jones: Yeah, it's a weird place to go, to try to tap into that part of you. "Well, how would Armand haunt those who he feels have wronged him the most?" It's been hard. There's a real structure in the book, in Queen of the Damned. We've always said that this was part one of two. There are extreme POVs in the writing of Queen of the Damned. I think if we are lucky to have Season 4, you will be getting those, so a lot of things that were talked about or told here, or playwritten as we call it in the writers room, there'll be stuff seen. It's not just the concert that we withheld. There's a lot of stuff that we've been withholding for a while. So, yeah, there'll be more about what Armand's thinking. I mean, look, [Armand and Louis] are in the auction scene. They're not at each other's throats.

And someone's missing an eye.
Jones: Someone's missing a foot.

Someone's missing a foot!
Jones: There's probably an A carved into somebody's chest under there. How the hell are they gonna come to that peace? Stay tuned.

You brought up the last moment of the finale, where Lestat looks out over the destruction he claims to have caused. Having set that up, how are you thinking about where this show could go next [if it's renewed]?
Jones: Allison, you should move on to your next question. I'll say this: The machinations for a potential Season 4, and even a Season 5, really, really started somewhere in Prague during some editing at the end. Me and Hannah [Moscovitch] walking around that studio, talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. A lot of it is design, and a lot of it is still yet to be figured out, because you want a sense of discovery in these things. Otherwise, it's just moving chess pieces along the way.

I will move on. I had to ask.
Jones: Yeah, of course! I mean, it's gonna be called Queen of the Damned, too! [Akasha's] got one scene, for crying out loud. That's coming. That's what's coming.

I am so curious about the Regina stuff, which you brought up briefly. From a writer's standpoint, what do you make of the relationship that Louis formed with her?
Jones: Yeah, it's so hard, all the things that you would want to to really sit quietly and talk about. She's got a head off here and a body over there and a knife that she can't control. There's a lot of things she's saying to him in there, because I think she thinks this is her last hour, too. The whole landscape of our show is just filled with these broken toys and lost souls, and everybody sort of Band-Aid-ing themselves back together again, gluing your arm on. Like all things, there's two sides to it. Even in the pilot, the moment Lestat goes in is during the grief of Paul's death, but also in a moment when [Louis'] family sort of rejected him and outcast him, and always have, you know? So you could say the same thing, that Armand sought somebody out who was very vulnerable, and this person went along with it for a little bit. There is just so much hard bargaining and negotiation in the world, and it's our job as dramatists not to turn the camera on the boring moments, but actually the moments when we're at our worst sometimes, we're saying some of the worst things out of our mouth. And in our show, it's definitely about the moment afterwards, and it's usually not spoken about. We're not talking. There's just these moments where you get out of the way and you let actors show it on their faces and what actions they do. So, yeah, I do think that there was a bond there, warped as it was. There was an exchange. You know, there's a couple other scenes that we didn't quite get in there. Hey, we're a rock 'n' roll show! Let me tell you what you don't want from a rock 'n' roll show, is a fat-ass 65 minutes every week. It won't feel like rock. Or you end up like — I was gonna make a Counting Crows joke, I won't do it.

You can make it.
Jones: You just got a whole album of mid-tempo songs! No, no, that's unfair.

ALSO READ: The Vampire Lestat's Eric Bogosian on Daniel's role in the season finale

Can you share anything about the scenes that didn't make the final edit?
Jones: What do I really regret? There are scenes from Episode 4 that I really wanted to shoot. I don't care, I'm gonna say it right now. There was another scene other than that scene on the bus. There was a scene of Lestat singing the Russian national anthem at a Single-A baseball game, stripped naked with one red sock on his cock. And there was a really important scene that we couldn't afford for time and structure and just running and gunning, with Armand and Lestat and Gabriella in the forest. That probably has got a chance to make it back in again. Episode 4 is the one where you go, "OK, I gotta make 5, 6, and 7 happen," and you make some painful choices. And that's on me, you know? I wish there was a way to try to figure out how to do it all. But here's the biggest thing: We had to have a North American tour, and we had to have a past that takes place in f---ing Europe. You try to find the physical place on Earth where you can do both things. It's really hard. There's a lot of challenges to pulling off this year. I'll just say, anything that we didn't get in 3, there is a way for a potential Season 4. Again, point of view. Everyone's going to get their chance to speak.

A lot of fans were thrown by the tonal shift of this season. Does that line of criticism surprise you at all?
Jones: I knew it when we did it. What do I think? What I said initially when I was pitching, I said, "I think this will be 10 percent of our fans' favorite year, and a third of them will fucking hate it, and in 10 years from now, I think that'll be the one they return to." There's a lot going on here. The books do that. They do the same thing. And then we just had a responsibility to do our version of Lestat. There's now, I think, a very clear journey about what was going on in those first two [episodes]. Go follow the narration of the Failures, go follow the arc, go see where he gets to. You can't get to those things unless you do the first things. Also, if seven pieces are a movie, Episodes 1 and 2 are first 20 minutes, first 25 minutes of a movie. Get on board, folks. And then go back and look at it and go, "Hey, y'all, this is the death of TV." You want to keep repeating? You want the lovable, cuddly show? You don't want that. Go back and look at Episodes 1 and 2. There are already little chinks in the armor that are exposing, that you will miss because of the onslaught of it all. Hey, man, I did my best. I tried my best. It ain't for everybody. That's OK.

The Vampire Lestat is now streaming on AMC+.