‘Interview With the Vampire’ Star Sam Reid Totally Gets Why We Love Lestat’s “I HEARD YOUR HEARTS DANCING!” Moment In Season 1

AMC‘s Interview With the Vampire isn’t a show you just watch. You experience it. The fabulously melodramatic series captures the torment of its characters with supernatural displays of power and gloriously unhinged temper tantrums. So much so, there are times since Season 1’s debut in late 2022 that I find myself simply watching supercuts of stars Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson‘s most over-the-top scenes. My absolute favorite moment to relive again and again? Lestat (Sam Reid) despondently crying to his philandering lover Louis (Jacob Anderson), “I HEARD YOUR HEARTS DANCING!!!”

Louis doesn’t know why it’s a big deal he hooked up with an ex for kicks. After all, Lestat has a separate arrangement with blues singer Antoinette (Maura Grace Athari) and they even agreed it was okay to have an open arrangement. But Lestat is furious. Lestat is jealous. Lestat is wounded. All because he “heard their hearts dancing!!!”

Something about Lestat’s explosion of rage lingered with me. As I told Sam Reid during our Interview With the Vampire Season 2 chat at Winter 2024 TCA back in February, “it feels over the top but expresses something I don’t even understand that’s deep in me.” Reid and his costar Jacob Anderson chuckled at my admission before breaking down why they think Interview With the Vampire‘s melodrama resonates so much with fans.

“Gosh,” Reid said. “Vampires, I find, I’ve always loved them, but I also find them very silly and very funny. And I think that’s kind of a very important thing. Because when you live forever, you kind of like just spiral into yourself. But you have an extremity of emotion because they’re kind of like, ‘[I] really fucking feel something,’ also. Like, what else are you supposed to do?”

Reid went on to describe Lestat as “this beast that has so much self-aggrandized elements to himself because he’s so incredibly powerful,” before teasing a bit about where we might find Lestat in Season 2. “In our show, we make him more powerful than he, you know, whatever,” Reid cut himself off with a laugh. [Laughing]

“Say it, say it,” Anderson whispered, teasingly.

“But I think what’s cool about it is that with these monsters, we get the license to go there, to do these things, because we can,” Reid said. “You don’t really get to do that in a normal-like drama. Like it just wouldn’t [work].”

“I want to see them go fucking batshit crazy. Like I wanna see that. And I love that people respond to it because when you’re doing it for the first time, you’re like, ‘Is this a little much?’ And I remember I did that when we did that scene. I remember going up to Keith [Powell], the director, I was like, ‘Hey, do you think that’s a little much?’ He was like, ‘No, no. No, no. I think you should just keep doing it exactly the way.’ I was like, ‘Okay…’ 

At this point, Anderson butted in to explain that Reid’s intensity was one of the many things he loves about working with the Aussie actor.

“My instinct is always — was in Season 1 — to make Louis as human as possible in the past. And then, we rehearse and I’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck,'” Anderson said. “Like, okay, I have to kind of match the energy.”

“If you’re seeing vampires, you want to see it and go, ‘Oh, fuck.'” Reid said. “If it’s supernatural beings, it’s like a supernatural thing that I’m watching. You want to be drawn in by their humanity but then also you want to be able to go, ‘Yeah. If only I could be that thing, I would scream like that, too. I feel like that deep down, but I don’t have superpowers. So I’m not going to be able to like walk out the room without giving a fuck, you know.’ And so I think that’s the kind of joy of it.”

It’s the supernatural scope of Interview With the Vampire‘s character’s emotions that allow them to capture something uniquely human we don’t give ourselves space to express.

Interview With the Vampire Season 2 will premiere on Sunday, April 12 on AMC.