‘The Vampire Lestat’ and ‘Talamasca’ Casts Explain Connected Universe, Newest Chapters and Reveal Trailers at NYCC
The casts and creative teams behind two Immortal Universe series — the third season of Interview with the Vampire and the upcoming Talamasca: The Secret Order — appeared together Friday night at New York Comic Con, where they revealed new footage for both shows, shared casting announcements, and teased what’s ahead in the Anne Rice adaptations.
In attendance on the convention’s main stage for Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat — retitled from Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire — were executive producers Mark Johnson and Hannah Moscovitch and cast members Sam Reid, Jacob Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Jennifer Ehle and Assad Zaman. Christopher Rice and the late Anne Rice also executive produce the latest season of the AMC/AMC+ series, which is expected sometime in 2026.
On the Talamasca front, executive producer Johnson as well executive producer, director and writer John Lee Hancock and castmembers Nicholas Denton (Guy Anatole) and William Fichtner (Jasper) appeared on Friday night ahead of the new six-episode series’ Oct. 26 premiere. Talamasca is also executive-produced by Mark Lafferty, who co-showruns with Hancock. Additional EPs include Tom Williams and Christopher and Anne Rice.
The series follows Guy Anatole, a young man on the verge of graduating from law school, when he is approached by Helen (Elizabeth McGovern), a representative of the Talamasca, a secretive agency that monitors and protects humans from the supernatural world. The Talamasca has been tracking him since his childhood, and soon he falls headlong into a world of secret agents and immortal beings charged with maintaining a fragile balance with the mortal world. The cast also includes Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Celine Buckens, Jason Schwartzman and Bogosian reprising his Interview with the Vampire role as a crossover character.
Read on for more on what the cast and creative teams behind both AMC/AMC+ series teased during their respective portions of the New York Comic Con panel.
As part of the Talamasca portion of the event, a clip featuring Interview With the Vampire star Bogosian, who portrays journalist and author Daniel Molloy, was screened for fans alongside a larger discussion previewing the series and a special appearance by Bogosian.
During the rest of the conversation, the cast and creative team discussed how they adapted an aspect of Rice’s novels that didn’t have their own book. Johnson noted that the premise of the series — “agents whose job is basically to observe, to report and not to interfere, which seldom happens” felt like a good base for this show. Hancock leaned into his own interests in the spy genre and the work of John le Carré to help shape this take on Talamasca.
In terms of how the series invites Daniel Molloy into the narrative, Bogosian teased that it ties into the novel viewers learn he wrote at the end of Interview season two, “Guy finds that there is a piece of information in the book that he needs to know more about,” which explains a bit about the scene in which the duo connect in the new series. “When we shot it, we didn’t know each other before we did the scene. And that’s actually what happened in the scene. I was working with Nick, and I kept feeling Nick’s charisma and he kept pulling me toward his energy in a way that was so positive and so empathetic.”
In terms of who Guy is, “he’s got some ambition, but he also has something else going on. He’s got this disability. He’s heard voices for years, since he was a kid, and he’s always thought that that was something, that was a mental illness of sorts, so he’s heavily medicated himself, but he actually does find out that he has the mind reading. And that’s what begins to happen with Daniel Malloy in this scene, and I think that maybe gives him a little bit more leverage in all of it.”
In terms of Jasper, Fichtner noted that his character is misunderstood. “That was part of the joy of working on this. I’ve said it a million times. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage, and what John Lee and the entire writers and Mark Lafferty, co-showrunner, put together was something that was so grounded in this world that it was a pleasure to discover who Jasper is,” he said. “It’s just wonderful to figure out what is driving this guy, which are very real things to him.”
After an exclusive clip featuring monsters known as “revenants,” the panelists discussed having to film late at night due to the nature of the show’s vampiric characters. “A lot of stories, Guy is interacting with vampires, and if you’re shooting with vampires, you have to shoot between a certain hour of nighttime. So we shoot 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. a lot of the time,” said Denton. “That’s a heavy hit, but I think it kind of brings us together. We get into that loopy stage where we’re kind of shooting, we’re not really sure what’s going on and everything feels kind of possible.”
While discussing the rest of the cast, Hancock noted that Helen “is prone to half-truths when necessary. Somebody that you might not trust” but that “Elizabeth also has such a maternal instinct. She has such a beautiful, soft face and her voice is — you want her to read every book to you in the car. So when you’ve got that mixed, do I trust her? It makes it really perilous for Guy.”
Bogosian noted his invitation into the latest series was wonderful. “It’s a pretty simple formula. We have these three different series that create a universe, so what you end up with is the sum of the three is greater than the three. You then start to have this. It just opens up the imagination that it goes off in so many different directions,” he said.
For Johnson, weaving the series together isn’t deliberate, as “all three of them on one hand couldn’t be more different. But they have themes and characters, and I think concerns all tied together.” But, he added, “We have a certain amount of shared actors who come and go, but we’re going to be very judicious about it and make sure that when Eric Bogosian shows up in another show that there’s a reason for it.”
As part of the NYCC panel, the series made several new casting announcements, including Sheila Atim (The Woman King) in the role of Akasha, Noah Reid (Schitt’s Creek) in the role of Larry, Ryan Kattner (Destroy All Neighbors) in the role of Salamander, Seamus Patterson (Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities) in the role of Alex and Sarah Swire (The Boys) in the role of TC. The panel also featured a new, extended look at The Vampire Lestat for the packed main stage appearance.
The panel kicked off with a question about why the show and its characters resonate so much, with Reid noting that it’s likely because what’s happening is “so fucked up.”
Speaking to where his character of Louis begins the season, Anderson said, “You can only own the night for so long. I feel like Louis is a really, really moving, beautiful place at the end of season two. That’s all real, and I think he’s found a sense of being in the present. However, I’m stealing this from Hannah as she said this earlier. You can put the dress on the wall, you can put the portrait on the wall, but ultimately, his child died, and that’s not something you just get over.”
In terms of where Daniel begins, Bogosian shared that he’s still acclimating. “It’s not easy. When you become a vampire at different stages in your life. In my case, it’s very late in life, so there’s a lot of Daniel as a human being in his struggles with it,” he said. “If you go all the way back to the very first moments of our series, Daniel’s kind of a grumpy guy hanging around his house in his socks watching TV, pissed off… and pissed off guys with power can be dangerous.”
For Armand, “He’s a bad daddy,” according to Moscovitch. “You know when a little kid has a stuffed animal when they’re very small, and they just drag it around for years and years, and it only has one eye for a while, and it’s all torn up? That’s his approach to Daniel,” Bogosian said. Added Zaman, “It’s tattered, it’s broken, but it’s mine.” At another point in the panel, Zaman noted that in terms of where Armand ends up in the upcoming season, the character’s focused on “his relationship with himself, and that informs how everyone else fits around it or doesn’t.”
In terms of how the rock-star setting changes things up, Johnson noted that “what Roland and Hannah and this cast have come in [and done] this season is so unpredictable and so surprising. On one hand, it makes total sense. These are the characters we know and we love, but it is the most — somebody just described as the most fucked-up — surprising. Reminds me of those movies that have just changed my way of looking at things.” He added it’s also “so wild and unexpected and jaw-dropping and funny and yes, like the first two, really romantic.”
Speaking to the arrival of Lestat’s mother, Gabriella, Ehle noted that “she kind of creates chaos. She kind of thrives in creating it. She’s had so little agency in her life, and she was married at 15 to somebody she didn’t choose. He was horrible, and she had no hope, but she had this boy, and she had her hopes in him in a really fucked up way. Several really fucked up ways.”
Later, while discussing what source material they used to put the latest season together, Moscovitch noted that the writing team was pulling from multiple books, including Merrick, The Vampire Armand, and The Queen of the Damned. “In terms of how we chose which pieces of The Vampire Lestat to use this season, because we’re running through the subjectivity of Lestat it has to do with what he wants to remember, what he’s willing to remember and then what memories are going to come for him, whether he likes it or not.”
Speaking after the extended look played in the room, Anderson spoke to Louis and Daniel’s relationship this season after the fallout from the book. “It’s interesting their dynamic this season because the book was released without Louis’ consent. I wish Louis had learned about the Cloud,” he joked. “I think it sets up a really interesting dynamic between them because ultimately Louis trusted Daniel, and Daniel trusted Louis, and Louis didn’t stop him from being killed and resurrected.”
During the panel, the cast and creative team teased a season that ultimately “reinvents [the characters] so completely, and the season itself is so radical because we’ve changed the lead character,” said Moscovitch during the panel. “So the whole story is run through a different perspective now.”
