Let’s talk about the demon twink introduced in the season finale of ‘Interview with the Vampire’

The season finale of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire ended with a big twist and the introduction of a major character in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Spoilers ahead for both the series and the books!

The show’s penultimate episode ended with the reveal that Rashid (Assad Zaman), the frostily loyal, seemingly human servant of Louis (Jacob Anderson), was actually present at the San Francisco gay bar where boy-reporter Daniel Molloy (played in the show’s present day by Eric Bogosian) first met the undead chatterbox in 1976. Making him… What? Also a vampire? Some other kind of immortal who can hang out in the sunshine, as Rashid has conspicuously done this season?

The answer came at the end of last night’s finale, as “Rashid” removed his contact lenses and floated into the air, revealing himself to be–pause for dramatic effect–The Vampire Armand! (A.K.A. the love of Louis’s life—according to Louis, who has an extremely terrible track record of vampire boyfriends.)

That twist is a big deal for fans of Rice’s vampires, and marks another significant departure from the books, in which Louis and Armand part ways decades before either of them ever meet Daniel. But without much build-up in the show itself, some casual viewers might be left wondering who, exactly, this “Vampire Armand” is.

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Answer: he is possibly the very gayest, and certainly one of the most devious, of all Anne Rice’s gay vampires!

Fans of the 1994 film version will remember Armand as portrayed by Antonio Banderas, but that version of the character was another reinterpretation. Aged up significantly and bearing little physical resemblance to the character as described in the novel, he’s also—despite getting awfully close to smooching Brad Pitt’s Louis—mostly de-gayed in a film that did its damnedest to pussyfoot around the story’s queer subtext.

Then there was this dude who showed up in 2002’s Queen of the Damned looking like Giovanni Ribisi got caught in a storm drain while cosplaying as Robert Plant. But this version of Armand did so little that he may as well have been called “The Vampire Steve” or something.

Related: These ‘Interview with the Vampire’ stars got hickeys while “draining” each other on set

Neither film version quite captures Rice’s original version of the character. In the books, Armand is described as having the appearance of a 17-year-old boy with cherubic auburn curls, and in a fictional universe of miserable immortals with traumatic backstories, Armand’s has got to be the most traumatic.

In a nutshell, Armand is born somewhere in late 15th Century Kievan Rus’—which I think is in the general vicinity of modern Ukraine? As a young teen, he’s kidnapped and sold to a Venetian brothel, where he is eventually found and adopted by Marius, a 1500-something-year-old vampire.

These two fall head-over-heels in “love,” which for Marius means training Armand to be the perfect little vampire heir while also encouraging him to go out and constantly have tons of sex with adult men. Yeah… It’s all very… ancient Roman or something?

All this is fleshed out in Rice’s 1998 novel The Vampire Armand, parts of which read like softcore gay erotica that would give Chaya Raichik an aneurysm. Is Armand’s sexual dynamic with just about everyone troubling? Why yes, it is! And not just because Marius looks 40 and is actually a century and a half old, but because Armand is a literal teenager at this point, not to mention a victim of child sex trafficking!

But one thing about Anne Rice was she sure did love some luridly troubling sexual dynamics for her fictional characters, and I am not here to justify them, so… shrug?

Anyway, Marius eventually turns Armand into a vampire when he is 17—which is apparently problematically young for vampires and one of the sources of a lot of Armand’s future angst. You know, along with all of his childhood sexual trauma, one would assume. But that is not the end of Armand’s trauma, because soon he is kidnapped again! This time by a cult of satanic vampires who basically indoctrinate him and make him the leader of their satellite coven of cemetery-dwelling ghouls in Paris for several hundred years.

That’s where he meets the young Vampire Lestat in the mid-to-late 18th century. Lestat convinces all Armand’s followers that their satanic schtick is real dumb, and they all decide to go start an improv troupe at this theater Lestat owns instead.

This annoys Armand to no end, but also he was kinda bored with satanism anyway and is like, “What the hell else am I supposed to do?” So, he takes over the Theatre des Vampires when Lestat peaces out of Paris for various other adventures.

Which is where Louis and angel baby vampire Claudia meet Armand roughly a hundred years later. Things do not go well for Claudia, because Armand, the eternal demon twink, is bored again and wants to seduce Louis away to be his new boyfriend. Which he does by murdering Claudia, partly at Lestat’s behest (revenge for Claudia trying to kill him; it’s a long story, but basically it boils down to what happened in the season finale of the show). But also, Armand still pretty much hates Lestat and in a way Claudia is just collateral damage in his effort to steal Lestat’s ex-boyfriend.

So, in the books, Louis and Armand stay together until some point in the 1920s, when Armand gets pretty much bored (again!) with Louis’s endless untreated depression and breaks up with him.

Obviously, this is where the show departs most notably from Armand’s story as told by Rice, because he and Louis are still together right up to the present day, with Louis all “this is the love of my life” rather than just kind of glumly tolerating Armand’s presence.

Also notable, in the books, Armand meets and seduces the 30-something Daniel on his own sometime in the 1980s, eventually turning him into a vampire.

All of which, naturally, begs the question: How will Interview With the Vampire, the show, deal with and reinterpret all that in future seasons?

Season 2, which was greenlit by AMC in September, will reportedly largely take place in Europe, and in all likelihood will show Louis and Claudia meeting Armand and the other denizens of the Theatres des Vampires. And we’ve already gotten hints of Armand’s duplicity and sinister control over Louis in Zaman’s performance, while Louis’s whole vibe is giving a lot of Stockholm Syndrome energy.

My best guess is that Daniel’s suspicion of Rashid/Armand and his general skepticism of the story Louis is telling will ultimately lead to some revelations about Armand’s true role in Claudia’s demise that may spell the end of his relationship with Louis. But in a show that has taken so many liberties with the source material, it’s hard to make predictions at this point. We’ll just have to wait and see.