‘Interview With the Vampire’ star Jacob Anderson reacts to Louis’ violent hookup

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Interview With the Vampire season 2, episode 3, “No Pain.”

Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Armand’s (Assad Zaman) relationship is definitely heating up, but Louis still isn’t over his toxic ex on Interview With the Vampire — and it’s creating some seriously fatal consequences.

In Sunday’s episode, Louis and Armand grow closer despite his refusal to join Armand’s Théâtre des Vampires coven. While Claudia (Delainey Hayles) gleefully joins, the coven won’t allow Louis to live without following their strict rules, so they order Armand to kill Louis. But Armand does the exact opposite — not only does he not attack Louis, he hooks up with him instead, fully knowing their shared history with Lestat (Sam Reid).

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What Armand doesn’t know, however, is that Louis can’t stop hallucinating Lestat. It’s gotten to the point where Louis is making out with his vision of Lestat before violently banging his head against a rock wall, killing who he thinks is Lestat but is actually an innocent human. That violent hookup shows just how deadly Louis’ complex feelings about Lestat have become.

“Louis has got issues. He’s not okay,” Anderson tells Entertainment Weekly of that shocking moment. “I don’t think he has sort of full facility, but he’s generally quite controlled. His true nature and his rage and like all these things that he has packed inside himself, he’s generally pretty good at keeping them hidden. But that is a moment where it all bursts out of him and he loses control, and I think that that is a really scary and frightening prospect for him: the idea that he’s losing control of how he presents himself to the world and to humans and to the the other vampires.”

Anderson laughs at how little Louis is used to being around other vampires, and this is only going to make things worse for him. “It’s hugely meaningful,” he says. “And it’s also the beginning of the ultimatum with Armand and the beginning of the darker side of their relationship, because of what it reveals to the coven.”

While Louis is really going through it in that moment, it couldn’t have been more different for the actors while filming it. 

“Shooting that scene with Sam was just really fun,” Anderson says. “Whenever Sam was there was fun, because he wasn’t there that much. Whatever days we had, it was like shooting season 1 again, where we were just hanging out.”

When Louis loses control and kills what he thinks is his hallucination of Lestat, Anderson had to stop and take a step back to really appreciate what was happening in that scene.

“You’ve got to fully commit to how heightened it all is and how bizarre a lot of this stuff is,” he explains with a laugh. “Like banging Sam’s head against the rock, it was like, ‘What are we doing?!’ We’ve gone from the seesaw levitation sex scene into slamming heads against the rocks.”

And even though Lestat isn’t really there with Louis, Anderson loved filming all their scenes together because it’s such a different relationship than what they shot in season 1.

“Something I really liked about their dynamic this season, which is weird because it is not really them, it’s Louis’ idea of him, and it’s something that I wish that we had more of last season, is them just sort of hanging out,” Anderson says. “You see them as friends or people that just enjoy each other’s company way more in season 2 than you do in season 1, talking about photos or what are we supposed to do about our daughter? These sort of domestic vignettes. I’ve really loved doing that stuff.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Armand reveals to Louis that Claudia’s mind will eventually break apart because she was made too young, foreshadowing a dark fate for his surrogate vampire daughter. Plus, we saw flashback scenes that showed the origin story of the theater coven and how Lestat abandoned both it and Armand in the 1500s.

Since Louis is now officially in his tourist era by developing a new passion for photography while in Paris, check out more of EW‘s exclusive photos from episode 3 below:

New episodes of Interview With the Vampire air Sundays on AMC.