Interview With the Vampire stars break down fiery season 2 premiere ending

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season 2 premiere of Interview With the Vampire.

Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia's (Delainey Hayles) exhausting search for other vampires ended in a fiery blaze in the bloody good Interview With the Vampire season 2 premiere.

The pair spends most of the episode traveling across Eastern Europe in the post-WWII devastation seeking clues that indicate there are others like them. But when they finally encounter some, they're not exactly the kind of peers Claudia had hoped to find. The feral, desiccated monsters attack them in the woods, and then their maker throws herself onto a fire, right in front of Louis and Claudia.

After that tragic end, Louis and Claudia decide to head to Paris to continue their search for more "good" vampires, but Claudia is still reeling from the emotional roller coaster of finally meeting another female vampire only to lose her so quickly.

"It's devastation," Hayles tells Entertainment Weekly of what Claudia is feeling by the end of the premiere. "I think she's been crawling to this idea of finding others. She's clinging to it with everything she has, and she's finally found one, and she jumps into the fire in front of her."

A big theme of the series is "vampire loneliness," and Hayles says that this moment only "reinstates that" further for Claudia. "It's that idea that it's not worth life — this is not worth it," she adds. "It's the first female vampire that she's encountered and she does that in front of her, so it's extremely heartbreaking. It all plays out in Claudia's face because it is truly devastating, and since she is still this child, she can't help but show everything."

What Claudia feels in that moment is what Louis has been feeling throughout their travels. Claudia is still giving him a version of the silent treatment after what happened with Lestat (Sam Reid), and their environment isn't helping things.

"Louis just gets increasingly worn down by Eastern Europe," Anderson tells EW. "He's really going through it. Initially, he's just trying to people-please with Claudia and is trying to find any way to reconnect with her, and he does that by just following her, essentially. But even though their goal is very much to find vampires and their vampire ancestors, he's still always drawn to the humans."

But since the particular humans they encounter are suffering, Louis needs a change of scenery. "That part of the war reflects the mind state of Claudia and Louis, like the war is ending, and then they're having to pick up the pieces of this hugely destructive period in their life, and Eastern Europe's doing the same, but it's not quite able to progress at that point," Anderson explains. "It's sort of eating itself from the inside, which is a really great metaphor that reflects them. By the end, he's very ready to get out of Eastern Europe immediately."

The decision to go to Paris "is scary, but really exciting," Anderson adds. "It's like we're going towards life now, where this has just been death and degradation."

One of the turning points for Louis comes when he begins to hallucinate Lestat — the reunion fans have been waiting for gets a twist, since Lestat isn't actually there.

"It was actually like a really nice sort of family reunion," Anderson says of filming that scene with Reid. "It felt like slipping back into an old routine rather than jarring or anything. It's pretty funny as well, to see the things that Sam did that didn't make it into the episode, like where Lestat writes a piece of music that he starts playing on his neck wound. Watching that in real time is one of the most surreal things I've ever seen in my life. I'm very disturbed that I can still see it and hear it."

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