We've heard Akasha's name mentioned a few times at this stage (Lestat has her blood, you know?), but the ancient blood-sucker/demon finally made her debut during this week's fifth episode of The Vampire Lestat, "New York."
When the episode begins, Lestat says he is finally going to talk about "The Queen," before a flashback shows us Armand’s maker, Marius (Christopher Heyerdahl), pulling our humble narrator from his grave (Lestat chose to bury himself after being abandoned by his mother).
Marius tasks a reluctant Lestat with looking after Akasha and her lover Enkil, who are both frozen as stone statues, but still "very much alive."
Lestat performs this duty for 10 years, until he inadvertently restores the Queen of the Damned with a single drop of his blood. When Marius returns, he finds Lestat floating in mid-air, having drank the blood of the first vampire, as Akasha unleashes an incredible monologue (see below).
“There is something really interesting that happens to us when we’re physically incapacitated,” Atim tells TV Insider. “The force with which she expresses herself in that moment, it’s the cork popping out of the bottle. But there’s still a lot of questioning because she hasn’t been out of that space for so long, so she needs to go out there and see exactly what the answer is to all of these questions that she has about what she’s been sensing, observing, seeing over the millennia.”
“I wonder even thinking about it now how much powerlessness she’s felt over the millennia, not just frustration at what’s happening but also I could be out there rectifying it all, doing something about it,” Atim continues. “She hasn’t been able to be an active participant in any of it, and there’s been a reason for that: for the protection of vampire kind.”
We will almost certainly be seeing Akasha again in the present day, as her return is expected to be the catalyst for "The Great Conversion."
Season 3 finds Lestat de Lioncourt on the warpath after vampires were outed by Daniel Molloy in the book he wrote after interviewing Louis de Pointe du Lac. Ever the opportunist, Lestat ultimately decides to take advantage of the situation by embarking on a multi-city tour while being haunted by “muses” from his past.
"As his band’s popularity and star power rises," reads the show's official synopsis, "so does Lestat’s influence over vampires and humans alike, leaving others to contend with Lestat’s power in the face of the Great Conversion, an unnatural surge in the vampire population."
“Resentful of the perfunctory portrayal in the trashy bestseller ‘Interview With The Vampire,’ the Vampire Lestat sets his story straight in a way only the Vampire Lestat can — by starting a band and going on tour. Gabrielle. Nicholas. Magnus. Marius. Those Who Must Be Kept. They join Louis, Armand, Molloy, Sam, Raglan, Fareed and others we can’t tell you about yet on a sexy pilgrimage across space, time and trauma. No Auto-Tuning. No Trigger Warnings. All Feels Amplified.”