With only the season finale left to air, The Vampire Lestat pulled off its most jaw-dropping trick yet in the penultimate episode, “Montreal.” The series, which pivoted from Interview with the Vampire to tell the story through Lestat de Lioncourt’s (Sam Reid) mercurial perspective, has kept viewers on edge with Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) still drowning in grief over Claudia (Delainey Hayles). But Episode 6 resurrects Claudia in a way no one saw coming—and stars Anderson and Hayles are here to unpack it all.
A Night Out That Feels Like Old Times
The episode opens on a surprisingly hopeful note. Two years after Daniel’s book broke the vampire world, Louis and Lestat are together in Montreal, joking and teasing like the old days. They stroll through Halloween night, and Lestat’s voiceover reveals Louis has kept his distance from Regina (also played by Hayles)—the eerie doppelgänger who looks exactly like Claudia. But Hayles says Regina isn’t just sitting around waiting. “Meeting Lestat, after he leaves, she takes a big exhale, because she’s petrified,” Hayles explains. “Lestat has this energy that is alluring but also very scary. That’s her wake-up call—Louis is grieving, and maybe she exploits that, but Lestat makes it real.”
With Regina seemingly out of the picture, Louis and Lestat are closer than they’ve been in years. Daniel even dubs them “Taylor and Travis” during a private dinner where they sip the finest vintage of fresh blood. The highlight comes when Louis joins Lestat at a band rehearsal for a concert of 50,000 vampire devotees. Lestat performs “Brutal Love” for an audience of two—Louis and Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle)—but his gaze locks onto Louis. Anderson confirms what’s going through Louis’ head: “There’s this idea of the fog of love passing over them. Rolin Jones used to talk about it a lot, and that term comes back in Episode 7. I think that’s when it really starts to pass over him.”
The Seance Scene: Claudia’s Heartbreaking Return
But the episode’s emotional core is the seance scene, where Louis and Lestat attempt to contact Claudia’s spirit. Hayles reprises her role as Claudia in a gut-wrenching sequence that exposes raw grief. “Filming that was incredibly vulnerable,” Hayles says. “Claudia’s presence is so strong, even in death, and Louis is desperate to hold onto her.” Anderson adds that Louis’ grief has driven him to brutal revenge killings, but the seance forces him to confront the truth: Claudia is gone, and Regina was just a ghost of her memory.
The twist comes in the closing minutes, when a shocking revelation upends everything. Without spoiling the finale, Anderson and Hayles hint that the ending is “harder to talk about before fans have seen it.” The link between vampires—the bond that makes everyone else disappear—manifests differently for Louis and Lestat. “It’s nostalgia and feeling that vampire bond again,” Anderson says. “Like the only two people in the world feeling a cosmic version of that.”
What’s Next for Louis and Lestat?
As the season hurtles toward its finale, the stakes have never been higher. Armand (Assad Zaman) and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) are tangled in their own dangerous dynamic, while Lestat’s band—now all immortals thanks to Gabriella—prepares for the concert. But the Claudia twist ensures that Louis’ journey is far from over. For more on the series, check out our breakdown of Armand’s shocking love confession in Episode 5.
With the finale promising even more surprises, one thing is clear: The Vampire Lestat isn’t done playing with our hearts. And as Anderson puts it, “The fog of love is just beginning.”
