Interview With the Vampire Is Coming Back as Queen of the Damned — and Akasha Is Taking the Throne

Loustat truthers, the wait is over. AMC used its Comic-Con Hall H panel on 24 July to confirm a fourth season of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire — and, keeping with the show’s habit of renaming itself after whichever book it’s adapting, the new run will be called Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned.

That title is the whole announcement, really. It signals a jump to the third novel in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and it moves Akasha — the original vampire, played by Sheila Atim — from a looming presence to the story’s center of gravity.

There’s a changing of the guard behind the camera, too. As The Hollywood Reporter reported, Hannah Moscovitch is stepping up as showrunner, taking over from Rolin Jones, who ran the first three seasons and stays on as an executive producer. Moscovitch isn’t a parachute hire — she wrote on the first two seasons and executive produced the most recent one, where she was the writer who specifically handled Akasha. Handing the Akasha season to the person who shaped her on screen is about as clean a succession as this kind of show gets.

Why this one lands for us

There are plenty of shows with a gay couple in them. There are very few where the central, decades-spanning, mutually ruinous love affair between two men is the plot — where the fights, the jealousy, the memory games and the outright violence are all read through that relationship rather than parked beside it. That’s what Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid have been doing since the show launched in 2022, and it’s why the fandom around this show runs as hot as it does.

The Queen of the Damned material is a different animal. This is where Rice’s mythology stops being an intimate horror story about two men in a house and starts being a full-blown vampire cosmology: ancient bloodlines, a global reckoning, a queen waking up in a very bad mood. It’s grander, sillier, more theatrical — and if the show plays it with the same conviction it has brought to everything else, the camp ceiling here is extremely high.

What we know so far

• The panel: executive producers Mark Johnson and Hannah Moscovitch appeared alongside castmembers Jacob Anderson, Assad Zaman, Eric Bogosian and Sheila Atim.
• The ensemble: Sam Reid, Anderson, Zaman, Bogosian, Atim, Delainey Hayles and Jennifer Ehle have all been part of the current cast.
• The runway: season three, The Vampire Lestat, just wrapped its finale, and AMC says it ranks among the year’s highest-rated shows on Rotten Tomatoes. It streams on AMC+.

As for what actually happens next season, AMC is keeping it to a logline: content chief Dan McDermott called Queen of the Damned “one of the most iconic stories in Anne Rice’s mythology,” and promised the show’s established characters would face Akasha with, in his words, “their world, and ours, very much hanging in the balance.” That is marketing-speak, but it is also a fair description of what the book does.

No premiere date yet — and with roughly two years between each of the previous seasons, this is not a show that turns around quickly.