REVIEW: ‘Interview With The Vampire’ Episode 8 — “What Can The Damned Really Say To The Damned”

Interview With The Vampire Season 1 was one of the most beautiful adaptations of a work that has come to television. Following that up is a tall task, but one that the cast of Season 2 lives up to in the premiere episode, “What Can The Damned Really Say To The Damned.” With Lestat (Sam Reid) dead, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia (Delainey Hayles) have escaped the United States and made it to Europe during World War II in Interview With The Vampire Episode 8. 

The series is helmed by executive producer Mark Johnson, creator and showrunner Rolin Jones, Mark Taylor, Christopher Rice, and the late Anne Rice. Interview With The Vampire Episode 8 is written by Hanna Moscovitch and directed by Craig Zisk.

As Louis begins his story this season, we hear the Vampire Armand (Assad Zaman) with him, interjecting, making us know that he’s here. But while the narration and the interview in the present day show Louis and Armand, the core of the series is Interview With The Vampire Episode 8 is about Claudia and Louis. Armand is there, hanging over it all, but this is Claudia’s story. One that Louis grows increasingly somber describing.

In this episode, Louis endures the elements and the war for Claudia as she searches Europe for any existence of other vampires. While she still holds anger that Louis didn’t burn Lestat, she takes care of him. She makes sure he eats, she learns the languages to get them through checkpoints, and, more importantly, she grounds him. Claudia is the adult in the situation despite her perpetual childhood.

Interview With The Vampire Episode 8 circles around two central points. Claudia explores the world around them looking for more vampires. Uncovering some who have died and others who have run and been killed, Claudia wants not to be alone. Louis just wants to be with Claudia. As they make it to Romania, Claudia and Louis finally find their answer in an area propelled by vampire superstition.

Artfully, Interview With The Vampire Episode 8 captures the hole that killing Lestat left in Louis’s heart. Reid makes his appearance back as Lestat’s ghost, a haunting vision with a hole in his throat. Louis’s love has not left, and the guilt of killing him rings and rings. Lestat tells him that it was the perfect betrayal, but for him, that’s what makes it worse. Louis notes in his interview that even after taking 7000 souls, Lestat was the only one who felt like murder. Lestat gripped him whole, even in death.

The second, however, is Claudia’s ingenuity and her thirst for home. Her home is Louis, for now, but she wants it to be with others like her. She wants to know that she isn’t alone and that the two other vampires she has seen in her life aren’t the reality, that there are others who aren’t truly monsters. It’s admirable and empathetic. Claudia’s loneliness echoes in a similar way to Louis, even if it’s not for the same reasons.

When Claudia and Louis find Daciana, a vampire struggling to make more vampires, they think that they’ve succeeded. Only for Daciana to throw herself on the fire. There is no community, just each other. A gutting reality for Claudia in Interview For The Vampire Episode 8, but one that shocked Louis out of his uselessness. But Louis only comes out of his own hole in order to help heal Claudia’s pain. She has to be his priority, even if Lestat’s ghost remains at the front of every conversation.

Narratively, Interview With The Vampire Episode 8 switches from just Louis recounting the past, and instead, he officially brings Armand into the interview. To Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) disapproval, of course. However, one thing is clear: this part of the past is cloudier than the last. Louis has blind spots and broken memories, and he has to correct himself to find the truth.

“Will now be played by…” is a passing of a baton that acknowledges the actress’s change at the top, and like any production, it moves forward. As Claudia, Delainey Hayles is fantastic. She steps into Bailey Bass’ shoes and does so with charisma and vulnerability. In a cast stacked with endearing and mesmerizing characters, including Assad Zaman as Armand, Hayles holds her own. Her relationship with Louis is one built on regret and love and Hayles plays that well with curiosity for the world around her as well.

When Claudia comes to life after finding a new vampire, Hayles brings light and excitement to the character, adding depth to her as a character. She isn’t just bloodthirsty, and she isn’t just a vampire. She is still a lonely girl in an empty world looking to piece together meaning.

Claudia reveals her tenderness in Interview With The Vampire Episode 8. Claudia reveals the real answer, which started as a search to just find community. After all the pain that she’s been through with Lestat and the vampire who assaulted her, she needs proof that there are good ones. Despite her resiliency, she needs to be able to let out the breath she’s been holding since they killed Lestat.

Outside Delainey Hayles’ performance, Jacob Anderson’s acting is astounding. The deep melancholy, the anger, the fear, and the love. God, the love that Anderson imbues his performance with is loud, painful, and soft. He is astounding to see on screen. Every monologue is enthralling, and as the memories bubble up, they cut him deeply.

The deeper he gets into Claudia’s story, the more he feels the past, and those feelings erupt in a performance that cements Anderson’s performance as not only award-worthy but a quintessential portrayal of love on screen. When he delivers one of the last lines of the episode, he verbally shakes Claudia, but he is talking to himself. They can’t forget the past; they can’t run away again; they just have to keep walking the earth together.

Louis says, “If you were the last vampire on Earth, it would be enough.” But as he delivers the words to Claudia in an effort to shake her alive before Paris, Lestat’s ghost hangs next to her. The two loves hin his life are Lestat and Claudia, and sorting them out, pulling them apart, that’s the real challenge.

Outside of expert character work and Anderson’s delivery of narration that is hypnotic in his tenor, the production design, costuming, and effects work of the series remain supreme. In Interview With the Vampire Episode 8, the dark episode somehow never loses the dark whimsy required for an Anne Rice story.

It’s clear that Interview With The Vampire Episode 8 is all about love, much like last season. But its not about a love that harms, it’s a about rebuilding yourself after love has carved you hollow. It is easy to look at Claudia in this episode and think that she doesn’t carry the same scars as Louis does from Lestat. However, the reality is that while they may not be the same, she does carry her own. It’s what binds Louis and Claudia together and what will make the eventuality of Claudia’s death all the more hard to swallow when the time comes now that the duo has made it to Paris.

Interview With The Vampire Episode 8 is streaming now on AMC+ with new episodes airing on AMC every Sunday.