“Interview With The Vampire” Is Back In June As “The Vampire Lestat”, The S*x Just Got Wilder
AMC has given Interview With The Vampire‘s third season a new name, a rock-star premise, and all indications of the same adult, explicitly queer storytelling that made the first two seasons appointment viewing. The Vampire Lestat premieres on AMC and AMC+ on 7 June, with seven hour-long episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
Is this season 3 of “Interview With The Vampire”?
Functionally, yes, and the question matters more than the show’s marketing department might like to admit, because the rebranding has confused a meaningful slice of the audience already loyal to the original title.
AMC has positioned season one of The Vampire Lestat as the direct continuation of Interview With The Vampire under the same creative team, the same showrunner in Rolin Jones, the same leads in Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson, and the same broader continuity established across the network’s so-called Immortal Universe.
The reason for the change is a structural one drawn straight from the source material: Anne Rice handed the narrative baton from Louis to Lestat between her first and second Vampire Chronicles books, and AMC is mirroring that shift on screen.
So if you have been typing “Interview With The Vampire season 3″ into Google in the hope of finding a release date, this is the show you are looking for. It simply happens to have Lestat’s name on the door now.
What is “The Vampire Lestat” actually about?
The new season is drawn primarily from Rice’s 1985 novel The Vampire Lestat, the second book in a series that now runs to 13 volumes, and it pulls the action forward by three full years from the in-story finale of the previous series, settling its central narrative in 2025.
Lestat, having sat through Louis’ account of their shared history with the journalist Daniel Molloy in the original show, decides that enough is enough and that the official record needs revising, so he commissions Molloy, played once again by Eric Bogosian, to direct a documentary about him while simultaneously announcing a multi-city rock tour designed to provoke, seduce and very deliberately expose the existence of vampires to a mass audience.
What unfolds is a story within a story, recovered from recordings sold at a posthumous auction of Lestat’s belongings, which raises a delicious question the show has every intention of dragging out for as long as it can: is the most famous undead man in modern fiction actually dead this time, or simply being more theatrical than usual?
The official AMC synopsis introduces a phenomenon called the Great Conversion, described as an unnatural surge in the global vampire population, an event that has been seeded across all three of the network’s Rice-derived seasons and which appears to function as the connective tissue between Interview With The Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and the cluster of further adaptations AMC has been quietly building since acquiring the rights to Rice’s catalogue in 2020.
Why fans are calling this the most adult season yet
There are two reasons worth taking seriously, and neither of them is hype. The first is the source material itself. The Vampire Lestat the novel is famously, almost notoriously, more carnal than Interview With The Vampire the novel, and Rice’s Lestat is openly bisexual, openly hedonistic, openly indifferent to the moral hand-wringing that defines Louis.
The book moves through his rock star years like a fevered concert film with fangs, leaning into sex, spectacle and the politics of being seen, and adaptation purists have been waiting for a screen version willing to honour that since the original 1994 film softened the romance between Louis and Lestat into subtext. The second reason is precedent.
The two seasons of Interview With the Vampire that AMC has already aired pushed the boundaries of what mainstream cable was willing to depict between two men, including a now-famous levitating sex scene in season one and the blood-soaked emotional reckoning that closed season two.
The show has the audience, the critical capital and the commercial cover to push further now, and a season built around Lestat’s most decadent decade is the obvious place to do it.
The trailer, which AMC released ahead of the premiere, leans into the bloodlust without apology, and what little we have seen of Sam Reid in stage costume suggests a performance that is closer to David Bowie circa 1973 than to anything the show has shown us before.
Who is back, and who is new
Sam Reid returns as Lestat de Lioncourt, the rock star vampire whose voice now narrates the season, and Jacob Anderson returns as Louis de Pointe du Lac, Lestat’s eternal love and his most aggrieved ex, whose presence in the new show is less central but no less consequential.
Eric Bogosian is back as Daniel Molloy, the once-mortal journalist whose transformation in the closing minutes of season two left fans speculating wildly about his role in this next chapter. Assad Zaman returns as Armand, the centuries-old vampire whose lies cost him Louis at the end of the previous show and whose unresolved presence at Lestat’s auction in the first episode promises a confrontation the fan accounts on TikTok have already begun rehearsing.
Delainey Hayles is back as Claudia, and Jennifer Ehle has joined the cast as a newcomer, though AMC has not yet publicly confirmed which figure from the Vampire Chronicles she will be playing.
What this means practically is that the Louis-Lestat-Armand triangle that closed the previous show has not been resolved, and that the first episode reportedly drops all three of them into the same auction room together, with Lestat’s belongings on the block, Louis’ grudges intact, Armand’s deceptions still uneaten by daylight, and three years of unfinished business waiting to spill onto the floor.
The music
Because this is the rock star season, Lestat sings, and AMC has built an unusually ambitious music campaign around the show to match. Sam Reid himself performs a cover of Billy Idol’s Dancing With Myself, released as a single ahead of the premiere, along with three original compositions written by Daniel Hart, the composer responsible for the scores of both Interview With The Vampire and last year’s Mother Mary.
The originals are titled Butterscotch Bitch, All Fall Down and Long Face, and all four tracks are currently available on Spotify and Apple Music. They are, predictably, very fun, and Reid’s voice is better than it has any reason to be.
When and where to watch
The first episode of The Vampire Lestat premieres on Sunday, 7 June 2026, in the United States on AMC and AMC+, with new hour-long episodes airing weekly through Sunday, 19 July. In Australia, AMC+ is available as a channel through Apple TV, which is how the previous two seasons of Interview With the Vampire reached local audiences, and the new show is expected to follow the same release pattern. DNA will update this story with confirmed Australian streaming details closer to the premiere.
If the gay vertical dramas currently flooding TikTok are the equivalent of fast fashion for queer attention spans, all 90-second hits and disposable tropes, then The Vampire Lestat is the couture show waiting at the end of the runway, designed for the audience that wants its romance long-form, expensive and faintly ruinous.
The two appetites are not in competition, and there is no reason a person cannot binge a bullied-boy-next-door story on a Tuesday morning commute and then surrender to a candlelit rock tour with fangs the following Sunday. Both have their place in the queer canon of 2026.
Mark the seventh of June in the calendar, dim the lights, and let Lestat get on with it.
