Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for The Vampire Lestat Episode 6.

With only the finale left to air, fans likely suspected that the penultimate hour of The Vampire Lestat had more than one clever trick up its sleeve. So far, the show’s creative and stylistic pivot from Interview with the Vampire has resulted in the story being told to viewers through a very different perspective — that of Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) in all his complicated and mercurial glory. That doesn’t mean the series isn’t still following the vampires we’ve come to know and have increasingly conflicted feelings about. Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) is still grappling with his grief over the long-deceased Claudia (Delainey Hayles), preserving her memory through brutal revenge killings and spending too much time with her eerily uncanny doppelgänger. Lestat’s band, now down one guitarist (RIP, Noah Reid‘s Larry), has all been turned into immortals themselves with an assist from Lestat’s own mother and fledgling (yes, you read that right) Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle). Meanwhile, whatever’s going on between Armand (Assad Zaman) and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) can’t possibly bode well for everyone else.

Ahead of the premiere of “Montreal,” written by Ryan Kattner & Kevin Hanna and directed by Jane Wu, Collider had the opportunity to discuss the episode’s most pivotal moments with Anderson and Hayles, the latter of whom finally reprises her role as Claudia to absolutely heartbreaking ends. Below, the co-stars break down the events of a night that starts almost optimistically for Louis and Lestat, the experience of filming that emotionally exposing seance scene (and how Louis feels about it in the aftermath), and why that shocking twist in the episode’s closing minutes is harder to talk about before fans have seen the season finale.

Louis and Lestat’s Night Out in ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Episode 6 Is Full of Ups and Downs

At a glance, “Montreal” shows all signs of a potential reconciliation for one of Interview with the Vampire‘s most tortured romances. Louis and Lestat have certainly had their ups and downs over the years, many of them transpiring within the last five episodes of this season, but it seems that when Louis summoned Lestat to confront Regina (Hayles) — or “Fraudia,” as Lestat later dubs her — it resulted in these on-again, off-again paramours coming back together again.

Not only is Louis staying with Lestat at his house in Montreal, on a Halloween night two years to the day that news of Daniel’s book first broke, but the two are joking and teasing each other like old times as they stroll through the neighborhood. At one point, Lestat notes in voiceover that Louis has done his best to keep his distance from Regina since the night that Lestat saw her (and wrote “Stained Glass Eyes” in the aftermath), but Hayles says that her mysterious character hasn’t exactly been waiting around for either vampire to show up again.

“Meeting Lestat, after he leaves, she takes a big exhale, and it’s because she’s petrified. Lestat has got this energy that is the whole thing [of] why maybe he and Louis met — it’s alluring, but it’s also very, very scary.” While it may have been easier for Regina to manipulate Louis after recognizing that he was grieving someone who looked exactly like her, Hayles adds that her character’s run-in with Lestat has given her a new perspective on the dangers of getting involved with immortals. “I think that’s kind of her wake-up call. Because Louis is grieving, and maybe in a way she exploits that, and Lestat comes in, and it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re real.'”

With Regina now seemingly out of the picture, the two are more joined at the hip than they have been in years — Daniel even directly refers to them as “Taylor and Travis” when they meet him at a restaurant for a private dinner that could only be enjoyed by vampires, complete with the finest vintage of fresh blood. Even more telling is the moment when Louis tags along with Lestat to a rehearsal for the band’s upcoming concert for 50,000 vampire devotees, resulting in a performance that instantly brings reminders of their relationship swirling to the surface.

Previously, Anderson revealed that “Brutal Love” was one of his favorite songs of the season, and here, we finally get the official context, as Lestat initially sings for an audience of two — Louis and Gabriella, awkwardly enough — before his gaze intentionally drifts over to Louis and stays there through the rest of the number. It’s not the first time that Lestat has sung directly to him (and been “pretty harsh” about it, per Anderson), but listening to the lyrics, it’s hard not to feel as though this song carries all the weight of their past combined with potential hopes for the future. Now, Anderson doesn’t hesitate to confirm what’s going through Louis’ head in the moment itself. “I feel like there’s this idea of the fog of love passing over them in this episode that [series creator] Rolin [Jones] used to talk about a lot, and that term comes back again in Episode 7. I think that’s when it starts to really pass over him.”

Throughout the season, we’ve seen the power that the link between vampires holds and how it can manifest differently for different pairs. While Daniel is forced to realize that the feeling he has with Armand, of everyone else disappearing from view, is unique to their bond as fledgling and maker, Anderson points out that this song in particular is Louis and Lestat’s version of the same phenomenon. “It’s nostalgia and feeling that vampire bond again, like the only two people in the world feeling — maybe not quite as literally as Armand and Daniel, but a cosmic version of that.”

Anderson admits, with a chuckle, that he enjoyed having Ehle present for the scene, yet even through Lestat’s performance, there’s the looming sense that another shoe is waiting to drop regarding “Sofia.” Once the rehearsal is over, a text from Louis’ lawyer and lover, Lemuel (Moses Sumney), alerts him to a new video posted by Daniel, in which Armand’s daylight testimony and a leaked video from the recording studio reveal that Sofia is actually Gabriella, Lestat’s mother, and the two have been sleeping together. Lestat’s initial reaction is to deny the NSFW clip’s veracity, dismissing it as a deepfake, but when it’s clear Louis isn’t buying it, their argument spills out of the car and into the street. Louis is trying and failing to wrap his head around the idea, referring to Lestat’s omission of it as “Armand-level deceit,” while Lestat points out that their “unnatural” nature as vampires conflicts with human concepts of morality. Besides, who was there to pick Louis up after he was paying someone to pretend to be Claudia for him, and did so without judgment?

Witnessing the panic attack that results for Lestat is further confirmation for Louis that the situation is more complicated than a mere mommy fetish, and once emotions have cooled, the two retreat to a bar to hash things out at a lower volume. Lestat refers to Gabriella as “one of the many chainsaws I juggle,” and, as for where Louis ultimately lands on the subject of his maker’s relationship with his mother, Anderson directly quotes a line from the episode itself: “It’s a hill to climb, vampire or not. I think it’s that for [Louis], as well.” What that argument and its resolution represent on a higher level, he adds, is how much progress Lestat and Louis have made in their relationship; they’re actually listening to each other instead of letting their feelings get the better of them.

“They’re communicating in a different way in that scene. The way that they used to communicate, some of it kind of spilled over into these fits of emotional or sometimes physical violence. Now, I think they’re hearing each other more. They’ve both had an opportunity to vent, and now they’re able to hear each other. But where Louis stands on it is still something that needs to be processed.”

Claudia Finally Returns in ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Episode 6

As if Louis and Lestat’s night wasn’t already enough of an emotional rollercoaster, now they’ve got a seance to attend, one that Louis has been having misgivings about in the hours leading up to it. With Merrick Mayfair (Sarah Afful) having landed in town — seemingly confirming that Lestat’s longtime connection to one of New Orleans’ most powerful witching families remains alive and well — the task turns to officially summoning a ghost from their past. After weeks of watching Regina the waitress do her best impression of Claudia, “Montreal” finally resurrects the real vampire, and she’s got quite a lot to say now that the floor is hers. Hayles likens the experience of reprising the role of Claudia, especially on the heels of Regina’s playacting, to “putting an old pair of shoes back on.” She’s been mourning the character herself since the Season 2 episode that culminated in Claudia’s death by sunlight, and still considers the trial in Paris as the “worst injustice ever to her.” Getting the opportunity to return to the role made Hayles very happy, by her own admission, and, in her words, “what a way for her to make her entrance this season.”

In preparing to embrace her character’s complex emotional state for the seance scene, Hayles admits that her physical transformation into the state Claudia had been in prior to her demise was immensely helpful. “I think I sat for two or three hours in a chair, and my whole body was getting spray-painted with this yellow, ill-looking paint.” Getting a good look at herself in the mirror afterward reaffirmed that mentality as Hayles geared up for Claudia’s reappearance. “When you have the makeup on, and the lenses, all of it intertwined helps you feel odd, if that makes sense, and othered. The scene starts with a close-up of the feet and the tendons, and it draws out. All of those aspects combined helped me feel uncomfortable, but in the best way.”

The seance, which Hayles describes as “exposing in itself,” starts with Claudia first making her presence known by slamming Merrick face-first into a table and speaking through the Mayfair witch, but then the vampire’s ghost manifests in the room — within the limits of a salt circle, at least at first. Hayles says she felt like a spinning top set loose in a confined space alongside Reid and Anderson, whom she calls her fellow “fidget spinners.” Their approach to filming the sequence mirrored Season 2’s trial, with long takes for the actors to deliver their lines, “where you could run it until you don’t.” It’s a revealing scene in more ways than one, with Claudia divulging her true feelings about Louis and the ways in which she manipulated him over the years. At one point, she even admits that she liked Lestat more, because, in her words, “he knew who he was.”

Hayles isn’t surprised that Claudia uses being summoned by the two people she both loves and hates most to get a few things off her chest — including the confirmation that she had lied about what happened between her and Lestat on the train — but she initially grappled with the degree to which her character had seemingly manipulated events before reaching her own conclusion. “I got the script, and I was slightly heartbroken, but then I drew back, and I was like, ‘No, I’m doing it now,’ infantilizing her. She is a woman. She is intelligent. She’s learned to survive that long through the decisions she’s made.” It’s a scene that also speaks to the overall complexity of every individual involved, as well as what Hayles praises as the brilliance of the show’s writing: “They’ve never created black-and-white characters.”

Whether you believe Claudia’s words to Louis are “harsh or correct,” she adds, the seance spotlights more beyond just what others remember about her. “I love Claudia inside out, upside down, right way round — even through her, if you want to call them, ‘wrongs.’ It gives her the space to be multifaceted, as well. You have the complexities of Louis and Lestat, whereas we’ve known Claudia through her diaries and the guys’ memories. And now we get her. It’s not gonna be sunshine and rainbows, right?”

While the scene is full of anger and rage and revelations, there’s a different emotion that arises when Claudia declares that she can’t find her lover, Madeleine (Roxane Duran), in whatever afterlife she’s been existing in since her death. Seeing Louis and Lestat together, seemingly on the road to patching things up, only reaffirms that feeling of despair, and Hayles admits that the conversation might have gone differently if Louis had actually done the seance solo. “If Louis had just called her without Lestat by his side, maybe she would have been gentler. It’s about that vampire loneliness, and her wanting a companion and wanting somebody who understands her. She had that, and then it was dragged away from her.

Now she’s been called upon, and the two people that she does love, but she hates right now, have found each other again. How unfair. In every life, will they go back to each other? Probably, because they love each other. Claudia is not given that same privilege or grace. When I got the script and [read] the end, when she’s screaming for Madeleine, I was really, really sad. How much can one person take?”

Throughout our conversation, however, Hayles reasserts that her affection for Claudia has never dimmed, and the tragedy of her story actually reveals her most important trait. “She’s a traumatic character, and she’s written sad, but to me, she’s the one vampire that has been dished out terrible dealings in life, but tries to seize life at the same time, seize every moment.”

Meanwhile, how is Louis coping in the aftermath of Claudia’s brutal truths? Anderson says that the reunion represents the closing of a certain chapter in the vampire’s life, but only to an extent. “I think there is a real finality to that scene. As brutal as the séance is, what comes out of it is really beautiful. What comes out of it is they saw her again, rather than just the memory of her. They remembered the frustration in her and the brutality of it for her. I think that they were able to hold some of that for her again, rather than it just being about their own grief and their own feelings of injustice.”

Anderson admits that he’d originally wanted Louis to have processed Claudia’s death by the end of Interview with the Vampire Season 2, but he’s realized since that grief will always be wrapped up in who Louis is, given that he’s lost so many people he cared about the most, both before and after being turned into a vampire. “It’s a part of him in the same way that his grief over Paul will be with him forever. His grief about how things went with Grace will stay with him forever. He was made in grief. They were the circumstances around his turning. I think that’s always going to be a part of his character and his being.” Yet, in the same breath, Anderson adds that he has different aspirations for Louis’ future now, speaking about him in quietly affectionate terms: “I just hope it’s less overwhelming for him going forward. As a friend, I want that for him.”

Regarding Claudia’s potential future on the show, well, fans of Anne Rice‘s book series know that her ghost comes back to haunt the narrative more than once, interacting with other characters besides Louis and Lestat. While this season treated fans to a double dose of Delainey Hayles, the actress confirms that she’d definitely be up for returning in some capacity moving forward. “She made a promise that she was going to come back and kill everybody, so I think she should just do that,” she declares with a laugh.

Jacob Anderson Has Complicated Feelings About ‘The Vampire Lestat’s Most Shocking Twist

Image via AMC

As Lestat and Louis process the events of the seance in a nearby park, their choice to sit on a bench for more quiet conversation instantly calls back to some of their most introspective moments over the course of the entire series. Lestat questions why he’s developed the habit of actively pursuing failure, while Louis posits that it might stem from the eternal burden of their existence: “What’s to live for if there’s no end?” Both of them conclude, over the course of the conversation, that they have some work to do on themselves, which is a start. The episode’s closing minutes successfully lull the audience into a sense of calm — or maybe even hope about Louis and Lestat’s potential future together in a desert trailer park, growing evening primrose. Even a casual brush of fingers feels as significant as a kiss.

When Louis notices the newly turned vampire Alex (Seamus Patterson) watching them from beneath a nearby lamppost, it serves as enough of a distraction that they’re not aware of Armand and Daniel, disguised in Halloween masks, approaching them from behind until it’s too late. Louis and Lestat’s heads are neatly, unceremoniously severed from their bodies, and now there’s no telling what’s coming next in the finale. Chances are they’re not dead, but we also can’t imagine many good things are going to happen post-decapitation. Anderson reveals that this penultimate shocker was revealed to him and Reid fairly early on, but he can only say so much about why Armand and Daniel have taken action in the most brutal way possible. “That was one of the first things that Rolin pitched to Sam and I, told us was going to happen. And it was more about things that I won’t talk about necessarily right now. It was more about what happens after that.”

Funnily enough, it was Anderson’s time in another major fantasy franchise that actually resulted in him having a heads-up — pun intended — about what Louis’ precise fate would be. Any actor in Game of Thrones whose character was about to meet a certain fate always got a very specific summons. “There was always a thing where, if you get fitted for prosthetics, you’re probably going to die the next season.” When Jones approached Anderson and Reid long before Episode 6 was even filmed, the conversation included a familiar element. “He was like, ‘We’re going to have to do a head cast, so I should probably tell you why.'”

Anderson reiterates that he can’t give his full thoughts regarding the last scene of “Montreal” because of what will follow in the finale to provide added background for viewers — what motivated Armand and Daniel to do what they did, and how Louis will react to it, especially. Yet his cryptic response almost makes the wait for next week’s conclusion feel even longer. “I can’t really talk too much about that final moment, frustratingly, with all the context around it, because I have complicated feelings about that whole thing, physically as well as emotionally or psychologically.” What he will say, with a light shrug, is that it’s certainly a memorable way to end an episode: “I think it’s fun.”

The finale of The Vampire Lestat premieres next Sunday on AMC.