Interview With the Vampire stars break down the truth of what happened in San Francisco (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Interview With the Vampire season 2, episode 5, "Don't Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape."

The truth has finally come out on Interview With the Vampire.

AMC's TV adaptation of Anne Rice's novels reached a fever pitch in Sunday's pivotal episode, as vampire Louis (Jacob Anderson) and human journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) worked together to uncover both of their manipulated memories of what really happened 50 years ago in San Francisco.

By the end of the emotionally brutal episode, they successfully helped each other remember that Louis had attacked Daniel and then tried to kill himself by walking into the sun, but he was stopped by a furious and frustrated Armand (Assad Zaman). While Louis painfully recovered from his near-fatal burns, Armand angrily found and spoke to Lestat (Sam Reid) in his mind, alerting him of Louis' tragic choice but refusing to repeat Lestat's declaration of love to Louis. And while Louis was bedridden and depressed, Armand kept Daniel in the apartment, torturing him for days and ultimately almost killing him until Louis stopped Armand and saved Daniel's life. By the end of the episode, Louis and Daniel formed a tentative alliance in the present-day Dubai storyline as they suspect Armand altered both of their memories.

"I was really excited — this was the second script that I read this season," Anderson tells Entertainment Weekly. "And [showrunner] Rolin [Jones] said to me at the beginning of this season, that is going to be the hardest bit, because we're going to shoot an action movie and a play within the space of like a month. It was a challenge."

This episode was actually the first one to be filmed this season, and Zaman was shocked to find out he was jumping into the deep end after reading the script. "Oh my God, I was blown away, but then I thought, 'I am never going to be able to do this. I can't do it,'" he tells EW. "But it's such a brilliant, brilliant episode. I had an inkling that we were going to revisit San Francisco after the mic drop at the end of season 1, and it's like a movie in its own right. And for Armand, you see every facet of him, every desperate facet, and that was really fun to play. It was the first episode I shot, so that was scary, but I'm glad I did."

Interview With the Vampire has deviated from Rice's novels many times already, but the reveal of what happens in San Francisco is perhaps the most shocking left turn from the source material yet. "The biggest change is that you've got me there, whereas the book, he's not part of that," Zaman says of Armand's impact. "That is already an enticing question as to how does that dynamic play out? The first half of the episode is more true to how it would've looked in the book, and then, what changes is, and I think cleverly, Louis' decision to attack Molloy and then Armand stepping in. That creates a whole new dynamic."

Anderson was "excited" to finally unpack the truth of what happened in San Francisco in this episode, and he says the reveal is even more shocking and powerful than what he had imagined. "I was really looking forward to dig into that more," he adds. "And the stuff he says to Armand, it's mad to say that to somebody, let alone somebody that you're in a relationship with. It is insane. It's a very dark episode, and where Louis takes himself is obviously very heavy. But there are other things that were in it that were unlike anything I've ever seen before."

The actor also loves how much there is to read between the lines. "In addition to what's in the episode, there's also just more implied because there's only so much you can do, there's only so much you're allowed to do," Anderson explains. "But Louis is essentially a heroin addict at that point. He's getting secondhand highs from people, and that's what he's seeking. That's really the darkest point in Louis' story. The thing that takes him where he goes is connected to the other darkest point in his life. The writing in that episode is just incredible. It's amazing. It's really the best."

But when it was time to bring that writing to life, Anderson wasn't prepared for how much it would take out of him, particularly Louis' suicide attempt. "It was a lot," he says with a sigh. "It was hard. Emotionally, it was quite taxing. I take a lot of Louis to heart, and that was a tough day. And I didn't really know it was going to be like that." 

Anderson pauses before continuing, "I don't know, I'm trying not to be too personal because I'm always talking too much about myself, as if we're the same person. We're not. But the writing is so good that it requires you to dig into your guts and the darkest recesses of your brain, and episode 5 was full of that — and later episodes too."

Zaman feels the same way, especially about the moments when Armand is taking care of Louis while simultaneously punishing him with the threat of Lestat. "Oh, it's so tragic," Zaman says. "You think in that moment that he might be true to himself and let Louis go. And maybe if he had let him go and was honest and said what Lestat had said to him, things might have been different. Maybe Louis might have chosen to come back to Armand. But we don't know. He robbed Louis of that choice by not saying it."

With the amount of gut-wrenching monologues Armand delivers in the episode, Zaman is grateful that he had a lot of time in between getting the script and when they began to film to properly prepare.

"If we had gone and done that a couple of days after I got the script, I think I would've crumbled," he admits with a laugh. "I would've been a mess. But I had decent time to prepare for all of those scenes and speeches. I wasn't sure really what was going to come out. I wasn't sure how my Armand was going to manifest itself. You close your eyes and hit and hope, and that's kind of what I did. I just sort of went with it, and that's what came out. I don't know how much control I had over it, really, if I'm honest."

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

That's why he's hesitant to comment on whether or not Armand is intentionally messing with Louis' memory in the same way he's altered Daniel's.

"When we remember particular moments in our lives, I think we all are capable of embellishing and also omitting parts of our stories," Zaman says. "I find that my memories of things, of particular events, are really led by the emotion of it and how I felt at the time, and sometimes those emotions make the event bigger or smaller, and sometimes they play out in our heads like movies. Armand is also capable of that, capable of re-remembering things in his own way, depending on his emotions."

Zaman points out that there is also "the element of preservation of this interview itself and what that means for Armand and Louis, but also him as a vampire and the sacred way that they've been living and how it might impact if this story comes out."

"Armand is a very protective person because he's suffered a lot, so he tries to protect whatever reality he has going, whether or not that reality is good or bad for other people," Zaman adds. "I think he's incapable of seeing something that might be toxic, but he just wants to keep the reins in, so that he can survive."

But Armand's reality is falling apart, and he has no idea yet, thanks to Louis and Daniel letting down their walls and working together in this episode. "They go on such a see-saw journey — it's their old adversarial relationship coming back and this new allyship with each other which is really nice and something I always wanted to see with them," Anderson says. "I hate competition between men — I just hate it so much. I have no energy or time for it. It creates interesting drama but it's also the thing that is destroying the world, and there's something I really love in that episode between Daniel and Louis where their egos are checked at the same time and they actually meet each other and get real with each other and work together."

Anderson adds that it's "a really beautiful and rare thing to see two men confide in each other emotionally and get vulnerable with each other in a way that's not competitive or sexual. It's just vulnerable, and it's lovely. I really love that scene where they're sitting in the zen garden and I remember thinking, 'This is a really sweet, rare moment in modern storytelling. What an honor to get to do this.'"

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