The Big Picture
- AMC’s adaptation of Interview With The Vampire takes a fascinating departure from the novel, reframing the story as a toxic romance set in New Orleans during the 1920s.
- The season finale of Season 1 reveals that Louis’ story is full of inconsistencies and manipulations, particularly regarding the fate of Lestat. This calls into question the truthfulness of Louis’ entire narrative.
- The true identity of Rashid is revealed in the finale: he is actually the vampire Armand, who has been manipulating Louis and the interview from behind the scenes. This revelation further undermines our trust in Louis as a narrator and leaves us wondering what is truth and what is fabrication.
AMC’s adaptation of Interview With The Vampire has taken the source material in fascinating new directions. Reframing the story as a toxic romance in New Orleans during the roaring 20s was an innovative departure from Anne Rice’s novel. The story follows Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), an enterprising young Black man, who meets, falls in love with, and is turned by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid). The titular interview involving Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) takes place nearly a century later, capturing the tale of Louis’s time with Lestat. In the finale of Season 1, we’ve finally caught up to where the two parted ways, but Daniel has been picking up on inconsistencies and wrongness throughout Louis’s tale, culminating in the final scenes of the season that unravel everything that has come before.
The interview falls apart as Louis describes how he and Claudia (Bailey Bass) executed their plan to kill Lestat and escape together. Louis claims they couldn’t bring themselves to burn his body like the rest from that fateful night, that they had instead stuffed his body in a rolled-up carpet and sent him to the dump as they escaped. But, as Daniel is wont to do, he picks apart the details. Claudia was the mastermind behind their escape plans, setting up a decoy without Louis’s knowledge to ensure they succeeded, and then sat calmly writing Lestat’s last words in his own blood.
Daniel correctly assesses that Claudia would have had no reservations in finishing Lestat off, and here we see Louis’s tailored image start to fall apart. Flashes of alternate images of that night from Louis sobbing cradling Lestat’s body to him later choking Claudia against a wall after she begs him to burn Lestat’s body. We’ve gotten hints that Louis’s story may be flawed before, but this casts everything into doubt.
Does Lestat Actually Die in the Season 1 Finale?
Spoiler alert: no, Lestat isn’t dead. Louis couldn’t bring himself to kill him, instead sending his body in a coffin fitted, with locks on the inside, to a dump brimming with fat rats he could bring himself back from the brink with. Louis and Claudia did leave New Orleans that night, and they did massacre those party guests but everything else is tainted by memory and manipulation.
This reveal calls into question a number of inconsistencies we’ve been noticing in Louis’s story. Daniel has pressed him for minute details of recollection before, like the weather on the night Louis went to hook up with his old friend. But more importantly, it calls into question major events like Louis and Lestat’s brawl. How could Louis survive a drop from such a height? Was he dropped at all? Instead of gaining answers, the finale reveals even more questions. This could be the result of Louis suppressing bad memories, fixing them in his mind to make them fit better with the story he tells himself or to make the pain bearable. But that line of thinking is inadequate by the other major reveal of Season 1’s ending: Armand.
Rashid’s True Identity Is Revealed in ‘Interview With the Vampire Finale
Throughout the season, we’ve seen a variety of people who work with or for Louis in modern times. Most prominent among them was Rashid (Assad Zaman), who seemed to function as Louis’s right-hand man. Rashid would step in when things got too emotional for Louis, handled all of Claudia’s journals for him, and was otherwise the person in the penthouse that Daniel talked to the most. He seemed, for the most part, like a normal vampire familiar… until Episode 6.
At the end of Episode 6, we get a flashback to Louis and Daniel’s first meeting at a gay bar in San Francisco half a century ago. At first, everything seems normal until someone arrives to retrieve Louis, and that person is Rashid. He looks the exact same 50 years later and Daniel can’t make sense of it — but in the finale, as Daniel is interrogating Louis about what truly happened that final night, Rashid steps in like he usually does when Louis is getting worked up, only this time he doesn’t do it by politely cutting off the conversation. Instead, he reveals who he truly is: a vampire. He has the power of flight, he can stand in the sun, and he’s been a puppet master behind this interview the entire time. Rashid is actually the vampire Armand, as Louis tells us. He’s a 514-year-old vampire, and Louis claims he’s the love of his life.
The Armand Reveal in ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Throws Everything Into Question
This reveal paints everything we’ve seen in a different light. Not only do we know that Louis’s story isn’t entirely true, but we also know he’s possibly been under the influence of yet another controlling vampire for at least the past 50 years. It doesn’t just call into question Louis and his intentions, but how capable he even is of telling the truth. As soon as we know Rashid’s true identity as Armand, we see the same pattern of behavior Louis exhibited toward Lestat. His blinding devotion becomes clear immediately. How much of what we heard was fabricated and manipulated? How much of that was by Louis’s choice? How much was Armand’s?
Ultimately, what this ending shows is that the story is artifice, and what we, like Daniel, must do as listeners is try to suss out the truth through the fog of disinformation and memory. We’ve gotten hints that Louis’ memory might not be perfect before when Louis described hooking up with his old friend but couldn’t recall the exact details. Daniel reminds us and Louis of this inconsistency by asking “Was it raining, Louis?” We’ve heard the story, but we’re left to ponder how much is true. The inconsistencies keep stacking up, from minor details like the rain to how Louis managed to survive being dropped from the sky by Lestat. The Armand reveal adds a layer to this, as it’s not only Louis misremembering events but likely intentionally misremembering through Armand’s influence. The reveals in tandem upset everything we thought we knew about the story. Both our trust in Louis as a narrator and our understanding of the events he’s relayed are dissolved in only a few minutes. Only in time with Season 2 will we be able to understand what was truth and what was lies, but the key to all of it lies in Louis’s self-proclaimed love of his life, Armand.
Season 1 of Interview With the Vampire is now available to watch on Max.
