First there was Interview With the Vampire. Then came The Vampire Lestat. Now, get ready for Queen of the Damned.
The fourth season of Anne Rice’s AMC horror franchise announced its new title at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. In addition, The Vampire Lestat executive producer Hannah Moscovitch has been tapped as showrunner of the next chapter, with her fellow EPs being Mark Johnson and Rolin Jones.
Panelists for the blood-suckingly exciting event at Hall H included Moscovitch and Johnson, plus cast members Jacob Anderson (Louis de Pointe du Lac), Assad Zaman (Armand), Eric Bogosian (Daniel Molloy), and the Queen herself, Sheila Atim (Akasha). Alas, Lestat de Lioncourt, Sam Reid, did not appear in person at Comic-Con because he’s filming a play in Australia. But attendees did watch him strut his stuff in the concert special, The Vampire Lestat: One Night Only LIVE, coming to AMC+ on Aug. 23.
Watch the just-released teaser trailer for Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned:
Dan McDermott, Chief Content Officer of AMC Global Media and President of AMC Studios, said in a statement: “In The Vampire Lestat, Mark, Rolin, Hannah, and this extraordinary cast delivered an unforgettable season filled with propulsive storytelling that captivated the passionate and engaged fans of this franchise.
“We can’t wait to continue the journey with Queen of the Damned, one of the most iconic stories in Anne Rice’s mythology, and watch our established and beloved characters confront Akasha with their world, and ours, very much hanging in the balance,” he continued.
At Comic-Con, Atim said that she came in late in the production of Season 3 and only had “one day” to film Akasha’s monologue, which she filmed in two takes despite it being “four pages long with no full stops.” To fully immerse herself in the character, she prepped the speech in her hotel room while lying down on the bed.
“I’m playing Akasha, but it’s really a team effort,” Atim explained about the collaborative effort of the crew. “Stepping in there and taking on all the wonderful work that all the other departments had done — the hair, the makeup, the set — everyone had just prepped so hard before Akasha’s arrival.”
Anderson said that the sticky fake blood is the bane of his existence, and before Season 3 began, he was told by the producers, “I promise you, you’re not gonna get super bloody this year.” The crowd in Hall H laughed, knowing the penultimate episode ended with his character’s head being decapitated.
“We knew fairly early on that we were going to do that,” Moscovitch noted. “We wanted Episode 6 to reunite Louis and Lestat, and for us to see their love again, which is at the very core of the show — and then wanted to cut their heads off. We wanted Lestat to have to face his own trauma and run through the different rooms and hallways of his mind until he understood that Gabriella [Jennifer Ehle] had been abusing him and that Louis really loved him.”
Anne Rice’s influential The Vampire Chronicles series of novels followed the same title trajectory, with Book 1 being Interview With the Vampire (1976), Book 2 being The Vampire Lestat (1985), and Book 3 being The Queen of the Damned (1988).
