Spoilers follow for The Vampire Lestat Season 3, Episode 2 – “Toledo,” which is available on AMC and AMC+ now.
As it’s been proudly touted, the third season of AMC’s series Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is the concert season. In Anne Rice’s book The Vampire Lestat, she reinvented her French bloodsucker as a Jim Morrison-esque 1980s rock star. For the TV series, now retitled after that book, showrunner Rolin Jones has contemporized Lestat de Lioncourt as the lead singer of the 2025 band The Vampire Lestat, formerly known as Satan’s Night Out. And actor Sam Reid deliciously sells Lestat as front man with plenty of preening, stomping and even flying around the stage, much to his audience’s delight.
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With all seven episodes of The Vampire Lestat Season 3 featuring at least one new song, the question must be asked: How did Jones, series composer/songwriter Daniel Hart, and the crew stage a series of concerts on a television budget and tight turnaround schedule?
“We would get as many in as we could, or as few as needed,” Jones tells IGN about how they wove Hart’s original songs into the episodes like this week’s “Toledo.” “We let the story dictate itself. Also, just as a budgetary/scheduling thing, it was really hard to do more than two. It takes a long time to do those scenes. Sometimes we had to do it very cleverly, or do short parts of [a song] because in those same episodes, we still had two more set pieces that would normally take two days [to shoot]. There was some practical math, and then there’s some creative math that was involved in it.”
Jones says they broke the season production into four blocks, with multiple episodes shot together: Episodes 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and then 5 and 6 and 7. They even found themselves dropping standard sequences and later folding them back into the schedule to facilitate the concert scenes.
‘[The song is] literally sitting there for the continuation of the story.’“
“For the most part, we never went back to the songs, as those things were intricate,” Jones explains. “We knew that was going to be hard to go back to, so those were mostly shot in time. They were rehearsed to death on their own, and then there’s some staging. But there’s story points in all of them, and if there weren’t story points, it became wallpaper and we did something else with them. You can’t just throw three cameras all over the place and think you’re going to be able to smash it together. There has to be a lot of coverage to get those little tiny points. And in the middle of wrangling 300 extras, it was a monster.”
Thankfully, Jones says that Hart, his series composer for two seasons, was just sitting in wait – a songwriting secret weapon that he hoped to deploy if they got picked up for Season 3. “I had Daniel in my hip pocket, right? Daniel’s band opened for Bowie,” Jones emphasizes. “He hadn’t been able to strap on a guitar and write rock songs in a long time, so he was jazzed as hell to do it.”
Hart was in the writers room and provided the group demos of songs that hit emotional beats, and which often replaced other scenes. Jones says oftentimes the lyrics were stunningly on point in conveying everything they needed to say.
“And we’ve still got some more bullets in the chamber,” Jones says of unplaced songs. “I’m sitting on the best song [Daniel] wrote. It’s not in Season 3. It’s literally sitting there for the continuation of the story. So the two guarantees this year of uncompromising work, singular work in American television, is Sam Reid and Daniel Hart. You can’t believe they are happening in the same season.”
Be sure to check back at IGN every Sunday for post-morts of The Vampire Lestat with Rolin Jones!
