***Note that the following interview contains spoilers for the season one finale***

Tonight, AMC aired the season finale of Interview with the Vampire, based on the novel by Anne Rice. In the episode, during a Marie Gras ball, Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia (Bailey Bass) move forward in their plans with Lestat (Sam Reid). In Dubai, a reveal is made.

Recently, the cast reflected on what their characters have taught them about themselves this season to SciFi Vision during a roundtable with the press.

Playing Louis has made Anderson look at his own past a little different. “I think Louis really made me think about how I reflect on my own past,” explained the actor, “how I think about my own sort of participation in my own version of history. I think he's made me slightly reframe events in my life that I kind of thought went one way, and actually, they were more nuanced than maybe I had sort of thought of them before…I found the whole thing really cathartic.”

Sam Reid, who plays the vampire Lestat, talked about his character being a “train wreck” and making bad situations worse. “He sees something unfolding in a negative way,” said Reid, “and instead of probably taking the moral ground or the adult perspective and admitting fault or having a full set of empathetic reactions to the person [he’s] operating with, [he continues] to make it worse. It's almost like he can't help but make the situation worse for himself. It's almost like a compulsion…I think, in terms of myself, I think, being able to stop and to just to leave it, to leave a situation and to just go, ‘You don't need to defend yourself here. You don't need to prove your point. You don't need to do these things; you can just stop and leave it and listen to the other person.’ I think that's hopefully a lesson I can learn from.”

For Bass, it was about her character Claudia’s strength. “[Director Levin Akin] would keep reminding me that Claudia is not weak,” the actress told the site. “Even when she is having a panic attack, or she's being extremely angry or completely defeated, like in the scene with Lestat in the train car, she is still strong. You can still be strong in your weakness. I think that's something that can be applied to everyone in our everyday situations; just because we are defeated or burnt out or sad or any adjective that's similar to that, it doesn't mean that we're not strong.”

Eric Bogosian, who plays Daniel talked about his life in the mid-70s paralleling his character. “I think the curiosity of a young man who doesn't care what happens to him should he get into some serious trouble, I can see that blindness that I had when I was in my twenties, that today, of course, I would not [have].” said the actor “…I definitely have learned about that impulse that was so much a part of who I was when I was in my twenties.”

“I think I'm better at being more attentive,” Assad Zeman said about his character Rashid, “and I have a have a habit of not being able to stay still. So, that's been useful. And I guess I can't speak too much for Armand yet and what I was taught me. I'm kind of looking forward to what I'm going to discover later on.”

For more, read the full transcript below.


***Edited for length and clarity***

SCIFI VISION:   I tried to think of something I could ask all five of you, since you're not all in the same scenes. So, what I want to know is what has your own character taught you about yourselves from playing it?

BAILEY BASS:   Claudia taught me – [and] this is a big part of Levin Akin, the director of episodes five and six, because he would keep reminding me that Claudia is not weak. Even when she is having a panic attack, or she's being extremely angry or completely defeated, like in the scene with Lestat in the train car, she is still strong. You can still be strong in your weakness. I think that's something that can be applied to everyone in our everyday situations; just because we are defeated or burnt out or sad or any adjective that's similar to that, it doesn't mean that we're not strong.

JACOB ANDERSON:   I think Louis really made me think about how I reflect on my own past, how I think about my own sort of participation in my own version of history. I think he's made me slightly reframe, like, events in my life that I kind of thought went one way, and actually, they were more nuanced than maybe I had sort of thought of them before. None of them examples that I'd like to share, but, yeah, I think like, there's a lot of that. I think, as well, I found the whole thing really cathartic, because I think, not everything, but there are so many similarities between Louis and I that I think sort of play acting those similarities sort of, in some ways, it made me go like, “Oh, maybe I'm not as sort of neurotic as I thought I was,” [or] “Oh, maybe I'm not quite as depressive as I thought I was.” Like, this guy's really going for it.

SAM REID:   Look, it's hard to quantify how Lestat would make me reflect on my own life, because I would hate to think that there's too much similarity there. He's a bit of a train wreck in terms of the way that he operates. He sees something unfolding in a negative way, and instead of probably taking the moral ground or the adult perspective and admitting fault or, you know, having a full set of empathetic reactions to the person you're operating with, [he continues] to make it worse. It's almost like he can't help but make the situation worse for himself. It's almost like a compulsion. So, I do look at it like a lot of the way that he operates, you just think, “He is such such a train wreck.” Can you just pull it together? I think, in terms of myself, I think, being able to stop and to just to leave it, to leave a situation and to just go, “You don't need to defend yourself here. You don't need to prove your point. You don't need to do these things; you can just stop and leave it and listen to the other person.” I think that's hopefully a lesson I can learn from.

JACOB ANDERSON:   You've done really well at that; you've really come a long way. [laughs]

SAM REID:   From Lestat, I think,  yeah, he's a very chaotic energy.

SCIFI VISION:   Eric, Assad?

ERIC BOGOSIAN:  I will say that I definitely have learned because of that scene in San Francisco and how this all got started. You know, my life parallels exactly the life of the character that I'm playing. So, in the mid-70s, I got to New York, and I was like, “I don't care how crazy the place is. I'm going to go and see what's going on in that bar,” or in that whatever it is, drug den, whatever it is, I was there. Because why? Because I was curious. I think the curiosity of a young man who doesn't care what happens to him should he get into some serious trouble, I can see that blindness that I had when I was in my twenties, that today, of course, I would not. I mean, I think twice before I even go down the subway anymore now. But anyway, I definitely have learned about that impulse that was so much a part of who I was when I was in my twenties, you know, exactly parallel to the character.

SCIFI VISION:   Assad?

ASSAD ZEMAN:  What has Rashid taught me about myself? Well, I think I'm better at being more attentive, and I have a have a habit of not being able to stay still. So, that's been useful. [laughs] And I guess I can't speak too much for Armand yet and what I was taught me. I'm kind of looking forward to what I'm going to discover later on. Yeah.

QUESTION:   We know what happens to all of your characters as they progress through the season. We know what happened from episode one to where they end up in the finale, but I'm curious, was there anything about how your characters got to where they are at the end that surprised you? And it's open to everybody.

SAM REID:   Man, heaps of stuff surprise me. [laughs] Yeah, I have got to say, heaps of stuff surprise me. And I really appreciated the way that Rolin did it. We talked a lot about this in lots of other interviews, but we talked about looking at the book, the entire arc of a show, encapsulating the entire arc of the books as well. And like for Lestat, how do you marry Lestat from Interview with the Vampire with Lestat in Vampire Lestat? There needs to be a progression. I kept asking, “How does he change? When is he going to learn a lesson? When is he going to progress through the season?” And I think by making Louis the one who kills him was such a huge departure and change, but so necessary, and I was so appreciative, really, of that, because it enabled me to let a character develop. Creating such a big sort of shift there was really cool. But obviously, to do that, you had to get Louis to the point where he was going to kill Lestat. So, we had to make everything more extreme in their relationship. We had to physicalize the abuse, and we had to do a lot of other things, which, again, we're surprising, but I think, in the end, they do pay off, because they create a more dynamic arc for the character. For someone who's so set in their ways, you really do need to do some pretty hectic shaking up. So, being killed by your husband is about as hectic as it can get. [laughs] will he learn [is the thing].

JACOB ANDERSON:   I always knew the interview was going to kind of devolve into this like, explosion of truth at the end, or at least that the mask was going to fall away towards the end, but I didn't know how it was going to happen. I wasn't prepared for [that]…I didn't know about the kind of betrayal of Claudia, I guess, from Louis, and that was a shock, but, I think, a really refreshing shock in some ways, because I think it essentially is like Daniel holding Louis accountable. I think that Louis, because he's telling his own story, [he’s] not really held accountable that much in in the telling of this story. I guess you get a bit of it with Claudia’s diaries and then the sort of questioning of the “was it raining,” that kind of thing. But, yeah, I really enjoyed kind of exploring Louis' accountability in all of this a little bit more towards the end, and I wasn't sure if we were going to get the opportunity to do that, as awful as it is.

QUESTION:  So, this is a question for Assad, and I guess also for Sam to an extent. For Assad, at what point did you realize that you were also the vampire Armand, and what are the challenges of playing a being that is hundreds of years old but trapped in a much younger body?

ASSAD ZEMAN:  The moment I started floating, I was like, “What's happening here?...What's going on?” I found out halfway through the auditioning. I thought I was Rashid when I first auditioned, and I had like a very clear idea. Rashid has very clear, specific goals, and I kind of thought I was fairly confident going into that, and then halfway through, I had a meeting with Rolin, and I was all the way through thinking, “Why is he sitting down to have a meeting about Rashid when he should be thinking about Louis and Lestat and Claudia and Daniel?” Then, in that meeting, he was like, “Okay, so we want to do a few more rounds with you, and we wanted to test a few things out, because Rashid is Armand. [laughs] At this meeting, my hands are like clenching on the seat going, “Don't lose your shit. Don't lose your shit.” Yeah, so, that's how I found out, and that's when I found out. From then I was like, “Okay, I've got to really like, delve into who this is,” and I wasn't familiar with Armand. I knew Interview with the Vampire through the film, but I wasn't hugely familiar with all the other books. So, yeah, it was like before starting a kind of very quick and deep and heavy kind of learning process just to find out, and it was fascinating. I think from that, I'm kind of hesitant to say too much more, because I actually think…I'm in a unique position here. These guys have had a chance to sort of flower their characters and go there, and I have been Rashid most of the time, and I've only kind of been Armand for this tiny, one beat. And even though he has lived in Rashid in those other scenes in small ways, I think it's going to be exciting for me as well, like really surprising to see where it goes. And I don't know. I really don't know.

QUESTION:   Jacob, how long did it take you to adapt a Louisiana accent, and did you do anything special to prepare?

JACOB ANDERSON:   Yeah, so the first conversations we had about the accent, we discussed this kind of like more French inflected version of the accent, because of their Creole heritage, the Pointe du Lac's Creole heritage. It was like, “let's try that.” But actually, I think it was a bit distracting, and I feel like a distracting accent is like a bad wig. [laughs] Like immediately it kind of takes you out of it. Also, there's no real record of how somebody actually spoke in 1910. There are people that lived at that time, and his accent sort of hints to it, but to be honest, what I settled on in the end is quite, it's very anachronistic. I just listened to people in New Orleans [and] spoke to people, took stuff from like cab drivers and people that I was like hearing talking. I wanted [the accent] to be familiar to people in New Orleans. I wanted New Orleans to be like, “Yeah, he's from here.” And the only way to really do that would be to take an anachronistic approach, to be like, he needs to kind of sound a little bit like a combination of how people sound now and how I imagined people sounded then. Obviously, the language is different as well. Like the way people spoke back then, it's different, so it's going to give it a period flavor anyway. But yeah, it's more or less a modern [laughs] New Orleanian accent that I'm plugged into, because I felt like the other thing could have been quite distracting. But we tried it. We tried it.

QUESTION:   For Jacob, Sam and Bailey, I would love to hear you all talk about what went into filming that massacre in the finale, because that was to me an especially over the top moment. So, what was that like for you? How did it all kind of pan out?

JACOB ANDERSON:   I wasn't there for a lot of it. I was with Eric and Assad in Dubai whilst most of that massacre was happening. So, for me, really it's the final stuff, and then the jaw rip.

SAM REID:   We shot it over a number of days, like weeks actually, I think ended up being.

BAILEY BASS:   It was the last two weeks

SAM REID:   Yeah, last two weeks, and it was broken up into lots of different parts, as per usual with these stunts; it’s really compartmentalized shooting. So, two weeks covered in blood. Very sticky costume. [laughs] But yeah, I think it's quite fun doing that sort of stuff in a way. You know, there's lots of stunts, operating, yeah, I mean, it was it was a process.

JACOB ANDERSON:   It was fun as well to play the drunkenness, right?

SAM REID:   Yeah.

JACOB ANDERSON:   Like the hunger drunkness, like they're so hungry…They're all in a state that you haven't really seen them in before that. I thought that was really fun. You haven't really seen the three of them in that headspace.

SAM REID:   Yeah, and it was also sort of making sense of what was going on with the dialogue and also with the plot twists. It was this sort of bizarre sequence that we shot over a really long time with a whole bunch of like, little secret plot twists that were unfolding as we were shooting, and shooting it out of sequence. There was a lot of discussion about, well, “how drunk is Tom Anderson (Chris Stack) going to be?” because he's got to be about to die, basically. And we were trying all these different ways, and Chris is such an extraordinary actor. It was all of this really fine detailed work of like, watching him go. He's not about to die enough, but then, now Lestat would definitely work out this guy is about to die. So, it's all of these little moments that were there. And a lot of the cast in that sequence were all stunt performers as well. So, it was also amazing to watch them do all of this stuff and see them go through all of these kind of like brutal deaths as well and having a great time doing it.

BAILEY BASS:   And I think it's not just hunger, because they're vampires and [with] blood, you get like a lust from it. And because of that, it's even more intense, I think, something I didn't expect. When I was reading the scripts, I was obsessed with the entire scene. Imagine reading an action sequence in words, just in the scripts. It's just, I love action movies. So, it was just so exciting for me to read. But then what I didn't expect is how emotional the scenes are…I'm someone who's extremely empathetic, and I have to fight someone now and be extremely violent as Claudia. It's extremely emotional. And we're doing that for two weeks. But then we're also wearing - I got to wear this beautiful Marie Antoinette dress, and getting to put that on every day was extreme plus, but then again, we're on set for hours, and it was a very tight dress. So, by the end of the day, I was like, “I've eaten so much I can't even - I don't know how I'm going to take this off.” But there're so many technical things that are part of this whole big scene that people will want to see, because it looks so effortless. So, I'm glad we get to talk about it, but it was definitely very fun.