Interview With the Vampire Season 4 Confirmed, Changing Titles From Vampire Lestat to Exactly What Fans Wanted
AMC’s Interview With the Vampire surprised everyone when its third season renewal came with a big change for the series in the form of a name switch to The Vampire Lestat. It was a shift that ushered in a new dynamic for the series, as it took on the second book in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles series and gave Lestat de Lioncourt a chance to tell his story. That chapter came to its stunning conclusion just a few days ago that left fans not only eager for more of the story, but with one big question: where’s Akasha? Now, AMC is answering that question and shaking up its critically acclaimed series once again.
Announced on Friday at San Diego Comic-Con, Interview With the Vampire has been renewed for a fourth season which will be titled Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. The series will also see Hannah Moscovitch, writer on the first two seasons of Interview With the Vampire and executive producer for The Vampire Lestat serve as show runner for Queen of the Damned. Perhaps more exciting than all of that, however, is the confirmation that the queen herself, Akasha, is indeed coming in the most epic way possible in season four.
“In The Vampire Lestat, Mark, Rolin, Hannah, and the extraordinary cast delivered an unforgettable season filled with propulsive storytelling that captivated the passionate and engaged fans of this franchise,” Dan McDermott, chief content officer of AMC Global Media and President of AMC Studios said. “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.”
She Is the Answer (And Both Vampires and Men are Cooked)
AMC also released a teaser for Queen of the Damned and, well, if you thought Akasha was intense in her debut appearance in The Vampire Lestat episode “New York” then you’ve seen nothing yet. The new teaser, which you can check out for yourself in the video above, doesn’t necessarily have new footage of Akasha in action, but we hear her call and she’s demanding women rise up: “You. You who have called to me not knowing my name. You with your dresses stained your faces down in the mud. I have heard you. And I say this to you now do not let them shape you into the size of their cage,” she says. “Women, get up! Out of the ditches where they have thrown you and come with me now to where the men are gathered and do what you have long longed to do. Kill them all.”
That’s right; Akasha wants to kill men. Not all of the men necessarily, but 90% of the male population. In Rice’s novels, her reason is that men are the source of suffering and killing nearly all of them would end thousands of years of violence, war, and oppression, thus allowing her to rule the world and establish a matriarchal Eden. Of course, Akasha isn’t exactly a noble (albeit violent) figure, and a big part of her motivation is a desire to be in control as well as to be worshipped. Oh, and it’s not just human men who need to be afraid. In the novel, Akasha demands that the other vampires stand with her—and if they stand against her, she will destroy them. Things don’t exactly go well for anyone, something we already got a taste of with the season finale of The Vampire Lestat. We also had an inkling of things going nuclear when speaking with Akasha actor Sheila Atim who teased that we should be very scared of Akasha when we spoke with her previously.
“I think we should be very scared because I actually believe this is the calm before the storm, ironically,” she said. “I think there’s something about the explosion of rage and pure emotion and whatever else she’s feeling in that moment, while simultaneously still being stuck to this stone slab, right? That intensifies this volcanic eruption. But then there’s the after bit. She gets off the slab and now she’s really capable of some stuff. And she’s gonna sit with it. She’s gonna have some thoughts and she’s gonna have some feelings and she’s gonna plan some stuff out. And that stuff to me is way more terrifying because now it’s actually seeing her put some of these things into action.”
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