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Spoilers follow for The Vampire Lestat Season 3, Episode 4 - “The Devil’s Road,” which is available on AMC and AMC+ now.

Abandonment issues run amuck this week in “The Devil’s Road,” the latest episode of AMC’s series formerly known as Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire , starting with Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) still on the road with his band, but very preoccupied with the sudden mystery trip taken without explanation by his mother/fledgling Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle).

Showrunner Rolin Jones tells IGN that Gabriella’s incestuous yet apathetic dynamic with her son is core to many of his existential problems. “He has mentioned a number of times in Season 1 and 2 that abandonment is a big deal for him,” Jones says. “So you owe a very clear, ‘Where did that start from?’ It started from Mom. That's straight from the book.”

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For this series adaptation of Anne Rice’s book, Jones says he and his writers approached this season as Part 1 and Season 4 as Part 2 to tell the full story of what’s going on with their ensemble. In Part 1, Jones explains that they need Gabriella to be off-screen doing things that will pay off in the future. “We have very deliberately built it that way,” the showrunner says of these mysteries.

Right now, “The Devil’s Road” is Lestat’s point of view on this destructive relationship. “He's finally alone with her in the past, and she's abandoned him for nine days,” Jones says of the flashbacks in this episode that reveal her history of callous, mercurial exits. “He just loses his mind. It's [about] watching those things turn until it brings him to them meeting again and a very big moment happens.”

Louis and Regina

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) continues to haunt a booth in the Brick & Bacon diner where he can observe the British waitress Regina (Delainey Hayles), who is the spitting image of his dead vampire “daughter,” Claudia.

The idea of a doppelgänger Claudia was created wholesale by Jones, co-showrunner Hannah Moscovitch and their writers. Though Louis and Claudia’s story isn’t revisited in Rice’s books until Merrick (2000), Jones says they invented these encounters to keep Anderson and Hayles front and center in the show.

“I have two really, really good actors that I love, and there's been a promise in a weird way, especially with Jacob, to the people who tuned in that he's part of the show and we're never giving that up,” Jones says of their implicit pledge to the audience. “We have the freedom of not having to land on one book, so we had this thing in a later book that we thought was very, very ripe and interesting. And as you're trying to shape something, you're like, ‘Oh, if that's a destination point, what's an interesting way to get there?’”

Jones says they also had some nagging things to follow-up on from Season 2. “The last image of the season, with the dress on the wall, me and Hannah always looked at that and were like, ‘It's beautiful. It's lovely. It's quite neat , isn't it? Hmm .’ And we felt, especially with Delainey’s performance and the impact of it, there was more gas there to go.”

The Armand and Molloy Twist

After appearing in flashbacks and making a surprise appearance in ex-band guitarist Alex’s (Seamus Patterson) AA meeting, Armand (Assad Zaman) weaves back into the main story on an apology tour aimed at his fledgling Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) and Lestat.

“There's a lot of agenda going on with Armand,” Jones admits. “As we get deeper and deeper into writing him, he becomes sort of the mirror for who you are; you can see what you want to see in him. Embracing that mystery on the writing page, then seeing it embodied in what Assad does all the time, it's really, really seductive.”

Jones says they always intended to include portions of Armand’s arc from Rice’s book in this series: “We're just taking our organic time with it.”

The show is also presenting it a little differently by reimagining how and when Armand turns Molloy and not sharing it with the audience yet . In Rice’s book Queen of the Damned (1998), there’s a whole chapter titled “The Story of Daniel, the Devil’s Minion, or the Boy From Interview With the Vampire” about Armand meeting Molloy in 1973, and then stalking him until he falls in love with the human and eventually turns him.

In the book, it's all about a human and a vampire falling in love. We've removed that, and we've also aged [Molloy] up, so we have different circumstances.

Jones says they grappled with how to condense and retell what happens between Queen of the Damned Molloy, a.k.a. the Devil’s Minion, and Armand. “In the book, it's all about a human and a vampire falling in love. We've removed that, and we've also aged [Molloy] up, so we have different circumstances,” he explains. “But we still owe the same sort of a weirdness to their manifestation, of what it's like to be bonded between those two, and that was exciting for us.”

And so the show gives us in this episode Molloy following his sire out of Lestat’s concert and being rendered speechless after Armand professes his love for him going back to Dubai. “We had to do delicate writing there about how do you pull that off and buy that?” Jones says of the shocking moment. “How can you go back and look at Season 1 and Season 2 and go, ‘I can see that.’”

Jones says it works because of Bogosian’s performance where myriad micro reactions play out on the actor’s face. “We linger and we're on camera with Eric [for] 75% of that scene,” Jones points out. “You have to watch his face and he knows that it's truthful. I'd argue it's some of Eric's most beautiful acting.”

Be sure to check back at IGN every Sunday for post-morts of The Vampire Lestat with showrunner Rolin Jones!

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The first time a top-10 drugmaker called AI scientist company FutureHouse, offering $30 million to use the nonprofit’s artificial intelligence agents for drug discovery, CEO Sam Rodriques thought there was a misunderstanding; the offer couldn’t be real, he said.

Then it happened again. The head of AI at another big pharma company came knocking. “‘We could just build our own [AI] agents on top of OpenAI or Anthropic, but you guys are the Ferrari of agents. … What would the point be?’” Rodriques, who formerly ran the Applied Biotechnology Lab at the Francis Crick Institute, recalled the executive saying.

Rodriques and his co-founder Andrew White, a former chemical engineering professor at the University of Rochester, founded FutureHouse in 2023. The goal: scale scientific discovery by giving every scientist AI agents that could reason on their own. But when pharma came calling, they realized there was a demand for a commercial product. So they spun off Edison Scientific as its own company in late 2025, with $70 million in venture funding .

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Weltweit stehen 100.000 Jobs bei VW auf der Kippe, vier deutsche Werke könnten langfristig schließen. Aber ist nur der unfaire Wettbewerb aus China schuld? Gordon Repinski analysiert mit Romanus Otte von Industrie & Handel die toxische Mischung aus hohen Energiepreisen, Bürokratie und der schleppenden E-Mobilitäts-Wende in Deutschland.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview fordert der baden-württembergische CDU-Fraktionschef Tobias Vogt ein sofortiges Eingreifen aus Brüssel bei den strengen Flottengrenzwerten. Laut Vogt dürfe die Politik der Industrie nicht länger vorschreiben, welcher Antrieb sich durchsetzt, sondern müsse Technologieoffenheit zulassen, um die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zu retten. Friedrich Merz beruft das Kabinett in den abhörsicheren Konferenzraum des Verteidigungsministeriums.

Mit Rixa Fürsen geht es um diese Sitzung, bei der zwei zentrale Gesetze zum Bau-Turbo für Kasernen und zur Freistellung von Reservisten auf den Weg gebracht werden sollen. Zudem wird NATO-Generalsekretär Mark Rutte erwartet, um vor dem Gipfel in Ankara Geschlossenheit in Richtung Moskau und Washington zu demonstrieren.

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Jacinta Allan resists calls for royal commission into state’s infrastructure projects as pressure mounts following new reports

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Jacinta Allan has resisted growing calls for a royal commission into alleged corruption on Victoria’s $100bn Big Build, declaring “inflationary pressures on projects is not corruption”.

It comes after an investigation by Nine newspapers and 60 Minutes reported allegations that money from the state’s Big Build infrastructure projects was being paid to gangland figures and that the state government was warned about cost blowouts due to Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) demands.

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SNK told us how they managed to pull off one of Kenshiro's most iconic moves without sacrificing their Teen ESRB rating.

Kenshiro is the latest guest character from an anime to make a splash in a mainline fighting game, punching his way into Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves this June.

We got the chance to sit down with producer Shinya Tamaki and director Hayato Konya ahead of his release at Evo 2026, who explained the difficulties they faced in translating Hoktuo No Ken’s comparatively gory fighting style into Fatal Fury’s decidedly less grisly hand-to-hand combat.

Part of this problem necessitated finding a balance between Kenshiro’s status as a Bruce Lee-inspired martial artist and the use of his special technique, the Hokuto Shinken, which sees him press opponents’ pressure points, causing them to explode seconds later. It’s arguably the most iconic thing about the show, and despite how bloody it is, it’s something the team wanted to make sure they included in the game.

To fix this, they covered the character model of Ken’s opponents in a dark shadow against a deep red backdrop, where they then explode — but no blood is directly shown, and everything is implied. That doesn’t stop it from being any less satisfying, though.

“As you know, Kenshiro’s main fighting style uses channeling points on his opponents, and typically after he uses them, they explode in three seconds,” Tamaki told us. “It's a very striking feature of the show. But he's also a fighter, and for a fighting game, specifically, we wanted him to showcase both features. We wanted him to be a fighter and be able to use the channeling points as an actual gimmick. But of course, we couldn’t have our characters exploding on screen, so we had to balance accordingly and make sure that it's not too gory, but also have these parts that fans are expecting and want to see properly come to life in the gameplay.”

"Of course, we couldn't have our characters exploding on screen, so we had to balance accordingly."

Kenshiro Was a Perfect Fit for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves

Kenshiro isn’t the wildest addition to City of the Wolves by far, following the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci. Tamaki admitted that Kenshiro was an obvious choice for a DLC pick, given his popularity both in Japan and abroad. But apart from being a seriously cool guest character, slotting in a face from such a beloved anime was also a big marketing play from the folks at SNK to help appeal to a broader audience outside of the fighting game community.

“The First of the North Star series and the brand are quite popular in Japan,” he began. “Just looking at that, and the fact that Kenshiro himself was also previously a fighting game character in another fighting game and how the overall aesthetic kind of fits with Fatal Fury, where it's the Wolves fighting for their own cause… it fits. So we just thought, ‘Alright, this is a great fit for our character. Everything aligns correctly, so we should go forward with developing the character, as well.’”

“Fighting games are a niche genre, for sure,” Tamaki continued. “I think one of the biggest hurdles that we need to address is getting people that are not typically interested in the whole fighting game thing to actually turn around and say, ‘Hey, what's that? I want to try that out, I want to play that.’ We want to get new faces, new people to touch these games, and I think this is one of the most popular ways to do it.”

“Our main focus when choosing a new character to join the game is to give the current fans something fun to play with, but also something to get other people that previously would not be interested in the fighting game to give it a look and say, ‘Oh, actually this looks interesting, we want to try this.’ It might be bold, but really, this is our main priority, and we try to achieve that every time we release a new character.”

The Kenshiro Hype Doesn't Mean a New Fist of the North Star Game is Coming from SNK

This is the latest fighting game Kenshiro has starred in following Arc System Works ’ 2005 Fist of the North Star . It’s been over 20 years since then, and the game still boasts a dedicated playerbase of fans who occasionally go viral on social media by sharing absurd clips of the wildly unbalanced but equally fun fighter. Of course, we had to ask the good folks at SNK if they had any interest in creating a new fighting game centered around the iconic eighties anime — and while Tamaki admitted that it's something the team would love to do, it’s not a project the company is looking to pursue.

“Of course, some of the developers at SNK would love the chance to make a First of the North Star fighting game,” he laughed. “Absolutely. But this version of Kenshiro is actually not based on the old anime TV series. This is [based on] the new reboot series. So we were able to have a good synergy with that. We have a new show coming out, and we’ll be in a good place to help support both [the game and the show]. The focus for this game is for the new character and his story, and we hope the fans enjoy that.”

"The Art of Fighting's Story Isn't Finished Yet"

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is the most recent old-school SNK title to get a new game, following Samurai Shodown in 2019. That just leaves the Art of Fighting series without a new iteration, but fans should take heart – Tamaki cautiously confirmed that a new AoF project is, indeed, in the works, but remained cagey as to what exactly that project entails.

“Previously, SNK announced that we are working on something, though we can't go into the specifics of what the plan is,” he said. “But that news is out there, and yeah, we are happy to say that there is something that we are working on. The Art of Fighting’s story isn’t finished yet. Please stay tuned for more information.”

At Evo 2026, SNK revealed The Path of the Warrior: Art of Fighting 3 R, an updated version of The Art of Fighting 3, which is set to release on Steam with rollback netcode, re-balanced gameplay, and two new characters on an as-yet unreleased date.

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze .