Few dramas get as raw as Interview With the Vampire did in its second-season finale (now streaming on AMC+). The climactic scene finds lovelorn vampires and former companions Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid) finally reunited after decades of volatile betrayals ranging from infidelity to attempted murder. They gather to hash it all out, to find some common ground, and to grieve the loss of their surrogate daughter, child vampire Claudia (Delainey Hayles). They’re back in New Orleans, where they met; a literal hurricane is swirling outside. But it’s got nothing on the storm brewing between these two actors, who hold nothing back. For a show that loves a gory blood drip, it’s almost a surprise we don’t see their guts literally pouring out.

This is one of many selling points for a show that broke out with critics in its second season, and that has earned a swift renewal for season three from AMC. In an era of streaming sameness, Interview flies into uncharted territory, an epic queer melodrama laced with camp and a centuries-spanning examination of found family.

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Anderson’s Louis is the show’s humane anchor. Based on Anne Rice’s 1976 novel, Vampire follows Louis looking back on his life during a conversation with the cynical journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian)—taking him across post-WWII France, ’70s San Francisco, and present-day Dubai. In this finale, penned by showrunner Rolin Jones, two twists hit Louis hard: he learns that his current lover Armand (Assad Zaman) plotted Claudia’s murder, and that Lestat actually saved his life when he thought the opposite.

Next season will turn toward Lestat’s perspective (in line with Rice’s novels), giving Anderson a chance to show us yet another side of our titular vampire. As he tells Little Gold Men in a wide-ranging conversation (read or listen below), he has no idea what to expect—and he’s learned a whole lot about himself in that process.

Vanity Fair: We meet Louis in this finale in a state of rage over Claudia’s death, which you play in a way we haven’t seen from Louis before. How did you go from that state of primal anger to the devastation at the end of the episode?

Jacob Anderson: You can kind of tell in the show, I have a lot of fun trying to reference the timelines to each other. I like the idea that Louis is calling and responding to himself in the past, or in the present, and so I think he becomes rage. The suggestion is that he’s not angry, he’s not full of rage—rage becomes him. That was a really difficult thing to play because it’s also mixed in with madness, and madness is completely subjective. It’s not an easy thing to pinpoint. There’s always this calm, detached thing that Louis has, so it was just about letting the rage leak out. He’s so on the edge.

Louis also learns in the finale that Armand, who we meet this season as his life partner, was fully in on the murder of Claudia. Did you know that twist was coming, or did it surprise you in the script?

I knew from the beginning that that was the path of that relationship. The one thing I didn’t know, that was a fun thing to discover, was that their relationship for the last 70 years since Claudia’s death is out of spite. For me and Assad [Zaman], the challenge was to un-know all that stuff, to try and establish that there was some real connection in the beginning between them—and that it slowly degrades into resentment. It’s scenes from a very stuffy marriage at that stage. [Laughs]

If we’re calling that Scenes From a Marriage, then what are we calling Louis’s final confrontation with Lestat in this finale?

Scenes from a different marriage. [Laughs] Well, scenes from a divorce is probably Armand, and then scenes from a marriage feels more fitting to Louis and Lestat.

The scene between Louis and Lestat, reuniting in the present day, is so intense and emotional—taking place against a hurricane, no less. Can you walk me through the conditions of filming that?

That felt like one of those days where everything was against us. There was a real blizzard outside. We shot that in Prague towards the end of the shoot. We kept looking at each other as the day was going on and saying, “We’ll be okay. We know these characters, we know each other. We can trust each other and trust ourselves. Let’s just do it.” It strips down into something that’s quite simple, just about grief and two people who love each other and mutually love somebody else—in this case a child—communicating about that grief with each other for the first time. It’s kind of a confession and it’s a reconciliation

I love my job. I’m hesitant to talk about the perils of playing for a living, but it wasn’t an easy season in terms of the shoot. For me and Sam, the dam broke and it was actually very cathartic for us to go back to NOLA. Even though we were in Prague, it felt like we were able to be with those characters again; even though the day was chaotic, there was just something very peaceful and comforting about that scene. It just feels real and personal and sweet. I was happy for those two characters that they had that moment.

How many takes do you get in a scene like that? Does it get to feel draining?

We didn’t really get very many takes. We had two each, because we were running out of time. There were maybe four leaf blowers going, and there were people pulling ropes to make the shutters slam and we could hear each other, but you have to really tune in to each other. It was like being in a busy kitchen while having one of the most important conversations that you could have.

Can you talk a bit more about Sam as a scene partner, the connection you two have developed over the years?

The key thing that Sam and I have is complete and utter trust. We know that wherever the scene goes, it’s going to be safe. Sam always does things with his chest and that is also how I like to work. Say it with your chest; mean it.

When Sam and I are in a room together and we’re about to shoot a scene as these characters, anything’s possible. You don’t always find that, where you just have a symbiotic, or completely common language in the way that we work together. Even though we’re quite different.

We’re getting the Lestat side of the story coming into next season. Knowing how much of the show is about memory and Louis replaying events and maybe not remembering things correctly, are you getting ready to play a new version of Louis?

I haven’t thought about it an awful lot yet, to be honest. I’m very excited to see The Vampire Lestat adapted [and] I really enjoy playing Louis in his many guises. This is a sort of insane show and it asks you to do insane things and behave in quite an unhinged way…. This show really asks you to commit to whatever you’re doing, and if you resist committing, it will chew you up and spit you out. As long as you are prepared, then you can have a lot of fun playing the different shades of any given scene. You can really stretch these scenes because the writers are amazing. You can play each thing 30 different ways. That’s a very long-winded way of saying, I have no idea what the future holds. [Laughs]

What would you say is the most insane thing you were asked to do as an actor this past season?

There was one evening where I was inside a metal coffin, partially submerged in freezing cold water. I think it was in a sewage museum, and I was completely submerged in what I can only assume were hundreds of thousands of little stones—and they’re heavy when they’re all together! I had blood on my face and I swallowed rocks and I was shivering from head to toe. Physically, that was the thing that felt like a real endurance thing. I’m glad to do it because it’s a great moment, but what the hell? [Laughs]

In terms of having to really commit, is that something you felt comfortable with right away? Did it require a level of adjustment?

I remember reading the Dubai sections, and just trying to make that language conversational but alien at the same time was always what I was going for. There’s a version of this show I think that is very stoic and takes itself too seriously, and I don’t think any of us ever wanted to make that show and thank God.

This is going to sound like a very random thing to say, but I got a weird bit of inspiration the night before my first day of shooting. One of my favorite films is Hot Rod with Andy Samberg. I think it has one of the best plots of any film ever, and I think the performances in that are incredible. After all of this preparation for season one—learning to tap dance, learning these huge passages of Anne Rice’s writing and Rolin Jones’s writing—I felt really overwhelmed by the whole task ahead. I had a bath and I watched Hot Rod on my laptop. Genuinely, the commitment that everybody in that film gives to what they’re doing, I had this realization that the only way that any story works is if everybody is giving their all.

I don’t mean this in a shady way, because there’s lots of great stuff being made at the moment. But this was never going to be a show where we were banking content and just saying our lines and going home. It was only going to work if all of us allowed ourselves to be as silly as possible and as emotional as possible.

That makes me think of the moment in the finale, in your scene with Lestat, where there’s this very dramatic music playing and we’re having this long-awaited meeting between the two of you—and then Lestat says, “Siri, stop.” The music coming from his phone just stops.

It’s one of my favorite moments! When those heightened moments are infused with humor, that’s what makes it feel real. That’s what grounds these really big feelings. We all metaphorically slip on a banana peel on the worst day of our lives.

Episode five is one of the strongest of this season, where we get to know Louis in the 1970s—and in one of his darkest moments. It also ends with you in head-to-toe prosthetics, after Louis walks toward the sun in a suicide attempt.

I was doing a lot of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly things. It felt reminiscent of that. I was doing a lot of Jeff Goldblum impressions. [Laughs] There are things about Louis in San Francisco at that time [from Anne Rice’s books] that aren’t really in the episode, but hopefully I managed to sneak some in. That version of Louis more closely matches the Louis of the book, the way that he speaks about Lestat. There’s cockiness and a genuine detachment. I wanted to make sure that that would be a little bit jarring, because in season one, we first meet him, he’s charming. As soon as they get back to the apartment, that drops, and he doesn’t have the energy anymore. I always thought of it like, Louis is an addict at that moment. His mood is defined by his meal and by what his meal has put into their body, and so he’s very erratic. I wanted him to feel like he could flip at any moment. He could burst into tears or he could do what he does.

I feel like there’s no role where you’ll cry as much as you have to cry as Louis.

No, no. And it used to be a thing for me! I’m not somebody that can cry on cue.

Really? That surprises me.

No, I have to feel it. I tell myself that if you don’t cry, then I guess you didn’t have a reason to cry. But yeah, a lot of tears…. It means you need a bath sometimes at the end of the day to be able to sleep. You have to let it all come to the surface. It doesn’t really allow for you to not do that. I cried a lot this year.

In the season-three renewal announcement, Rolin Jones thanked “the rabid, beautifully unwell fandom.”

Who writes a press release like that? [Laughs] It was insane. This is Rolin. That’s him.

But he was speaking to the level of passion that people approach this show with. How have you encountered the fandom over these two seasons, on social media or just out in the world?

I feel like I’m technically on social media, but I’m not really on social. It is too dangerous a place for me. It would feel like being able to read minds. I think there are some really beautiful elements of it. A week ago, I received this fan book: people had written letters and drawn pictures or made collages and compiled it into an actual bound book. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. It’s full of these really personal, but really beautifully expressed thoughts about this thing that we made. That I find really moving and really love it. And I really appreciate the people engaged with what we’re doing to that level.

I’m a TV kid and a film kid. I was parented by screens, and so I understand something meaning that much. The thing that I find harder—I just have to just switch it off, and it’s why I don’t really go on social media—is the parasocial element of it. There’s this version of you that exists in people’s heads or between people and the internet that’s just not you. I find that a bit alarming.

Did you experience that at all during Game of Thrones? You weren’t the lead of that show, but you were on it for many seasons.

Yeah, that’s completely where I learned you have to know when to not look. You have to know when to switch it off a little bit. The amount of times that people would stop me in the street, would stop me doing whatever I was doing and would ask me questions about my genitals. And I’d be like, “Sorry, sir. This is a Tesco. I’m buying some raspberries right now. Could you not?” People felt an ownership over all of us, I think, that was quite alarming sometimes, and I find that part of it quite odd. I love my job and I know that’s part of, it’s part of the trade-off.

It does feel like this show is primed for a kind of breakout on the level that hasn’t quite happened yet, just given that it is on AMC+ here in the US. It’s a smaller streamer, but it’s going to go on Netflix soon. Do you sense momentum building?

No. I only want to work on things that I would watch or I would engage with myself, so if 10 people engage with that thing and it’s their favorite thing, then I’m happy. Of course, I would love as many people as are able to love our show and love this story to find it. If that person that didn’t have access to it finds it and they’re like, “This is the thing that I’ve been waiting for since I was 15 or whatever,” then that’s the little bit of magic for me.

I know a lot of queer viewers who have been drawn to this show, because it’s telling this really unabashed and fluid queer story that’s also, like you were saying, this bizarre melange of tones and ideas. That feels like something that this community hasn’t gotten a whole lot of, and I think that’s one of the reasons it’s resonated so strongly.

And that’s what I mean. If there were people that didn’t know that we could do this, didn’t know that this existed, that there was this space. I don’t want to generalize about areas of America or the UK, but there are areas where you don’t get access to it. I think we can be very London-centric, LA-centric, New York–centric, and only see that. I would love it if there’s a kid who really needs this and sees it and is like, “I’m going to do my own thing,” or that’s just like, “I’m going to go out into the world feeling a little bit more comfortable in my skin today.” That’s beautiful.

This interview has been edited and condensed.