The Vampire Lestat, the third season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, is officially set to premiere in June 2026.
On February 25, IGN Fan Fest kicked off promptly at 1:00 p.m. ET/10:00 a.m. PT, launching a packed showcase of exclusives spanning film, television, and gaming. For vampire fans, the promise of a The Vampire Lestat exclusive was more than welcome after months of brief teasers released since filming wrapped in October 2025.
For lack of a better description, The Vampire Lestat is a new interview.
The first two seasons of AMC’s critically acclaimed series followed Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) as he reckoned with fractured memories, buried truths, and the devastating realization that the story he told — and believed — was incomplete. Those seasons largely adapted the first novel in The Vampire Chronicles, the 1976 book that introduced Anne Rice’s lush, violent, and philosophically tangled vampires to the world and reshaped vampirism forever.
When The Vampire Lestat novel was published almost a decade later in 1985, it flipped the narrative perspective. Lestat de Lioncourt stepped forward to tell his own story so that he could both challenge Louis and reveal everything he hadn’t (or wouldn’t) before.
The television series appears to be following that same vein, and the new clip that premiered at IGN Fan Fest makes that very clear.
Season 1 of Interview with the Vampire opens with journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) arriving at Louis’ (or, more correctly, Armand’s (Assad Zaman)) elusive Dubai penthouse for a second attempt at an interview abandoned almost fifty years earlier. Louis claimed to be seeking “truth and reconciliation.” By the end of Season 2, that truth had clawed its way into the light, and it was anything but simple. The finale closed with Louis reuniting with Lestat (Sam Reid), Daniel’s unexpected vampiric turning at the hands of the ever-manipulative Armand, and Louis seemingly ending the interview for good by burning the tapes and the laptop that contained it all.
Of course, he hadn’t accounted for cloud storage.
The new clip opens intimately: Lestat seated at a piano, humming as he works out a melody. He’s on FaceTime with Louis, and it’s a delightfully surreal image, these ancient vampires navigating modern technology. Their exchange is easy, familiar, and charged with something stronger than admiration but not something either would, at this moment, admit to be love. Lestat asks Louis what he thinks of the song. Louis offers an opinion. Lestat deems it too simple. Louis clarifies, amused and affectionate.
Then comes the invitation.
“You should come visit,” Lestat says. “I have a space above the bed in one of the guest rooms I can’t find a painting for.”
“Oh, the guest room?” Louis replies. “You want me to come and see your guest room.”
The flirtation is obvious, and it’s tender, and it feels like the precipice of something fragile and hopeful. And yet — as with everything between them, it cannot remain uncomplicated for long.
Mid-conversation, Lestat pulls up a link to an entertainment website spotlighting a bestselling author: Daniel Molloy, writer of Interview with the Vampire.
He asks Louis if he knows who Daniel is.
And from there, it all unravels.
Within moments, they’re arguing. A moment later, Lestat is shown in a bookshop, picking up a copy of Interview with the Vampire while employees casually chatter about wanting to sleep with Armand — Louis’ lover and companion of more than seventy years. The sting is immediate and layered: betrayal, jealousy, fear.
It’s a pointed callback to the 1985 novel. On page 12 of the first edition, Lestat, upon introducing himself to a band he wanted to meet, finds they are familiar with the name Lestat and, specifically, a vampire named Lestat.
“From the other room they brought it, a small pulp paper “novel” that was falling to pieces…I got a preternatural chill of sorts at the sight of the cover. Interview with the Vampire. Something to do with a mortal boy getting one of the undead to tell the tale. With their permission, I went into the other room, stretched out on their bed, and began to read…And when the night was empty and still, I heard the voices of Interview with the Vampire singing to me, as if they sang from the grave. I read the book over and over. And then in a moment of contemptible anger, I shredded it to bits.”
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice, Page 12.
His anger is personal, but it’s also existential. The vampires have laws, and the greatest of them is secrecy. As Lestat explains in the novel, “Because if there is one law that all vampires hold sacred it is that you do not tell mortals about us.” Louis’ confession is not just reckless; it’s extremely dangerous. Others will come for him.
That fear — for Louis’ safety, for their exposure, for the fragile order of the vampire world — is what propels Lestat toward fame. It drives him to become a rockstar god who can seize control of the narrative before it destroys them both, and to step into a role that’s always existed within him, but is now necessary: the one who will stand in the spotlight, take the fire, and ensure that no one ever hurts Louis again.
The IGN Fan Fest clip solidifies that turning point. We are watching the moment Lestat realizes the story is no longer contained and he decides to deal with it. Loudly.
And perhaps the most thrilling thing of all: we now have confirmation of a June 2026 premiere.
What The Vampire Lestat ultimately has in store — musically, emotionally, catastrophically — remains to be seen. But if this clip is any indication, the new and old interviews are both truly just beginning.
Watch the new IGN exclusive clip of The Vampire Lestat below.
