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Spoilers follow for <\/strong>The Vampire Lestat<\/strong><\/u> Season 3, Episode 5 – \u201cNew York,\u201d which is available on AMC and AMC+ now.<\/strong><\/p>\n In \u201cNew York,\u201d this week\u2019s new episode of AMC\u2019s series formerly known as Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire<\/u>, Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) is in auteur mode recording his magnum opus \u201cposthumous\u201d album which triggers memories from the time he spent a decade gently awakening Akasha (Sheila Atim) from her slumber with his music. <\/p>\n For fans of Anne Rice\u2019s books, or even Aaliyah\u2019s performance as the \u201cGreat Mother\u201d in the 2002 movie Queen of the Damned, this is a big moment for the AMC series: We\u2019re finally getting deep enough into the canon to introduce this seminal character. <\/p>\n \u201cWe took a hard look at the Lestat, Enkil, Marius, Akasha text from the book and did our usual jack hammering,\u201d showrunner Rolin Jones tells IGN about figuring out the best way to bridge multiple books and introduce the story of the first vampire. \u201cFind the emotional essence of the scenes, look at your budget and see what you think you can pull off, look at the story you\u2019ve told up to that point and then take your nastiest swing at it. Akasha bounced around \u2018tween episodes four\u2013six, and eventually we found a lot of wonderful things in merging the events of the book with Lestat\u2019s origins as a musician. Thus, episode five.\u201d<\/p>\n Jones says they structured \u201cNew York\u201d as the telling of two momentous, music-centric periods in Lestat\u2019s long existence. In the past, after Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) left him, Lestat is pulled from the grave by Marius de Romanus (Christopher Heyerdahl) and remanded to the \u201chonored\u201d job of being the Keeper of the deep-sleeping first vampire Akasha and her husband Enkil. In the present, Lestat terrorizes his band to rise up to his impossible standards of recording the \u201cperfect\u201d album, as he wrestles with many regrets that fester inside him. <\/p>\n