‘The Vampire Lestat’ Cranks Up the Volume for a Bloody Good Time
- Ethan Kaufman
- Jul 24
- 9 min read
The following review contains major spoilers for AMC series Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. Trigger warning: reference to sexual assault.
“This isn’t just sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and sucking blood out of people’s necks.”
That’s a quote from series regular Eric Bogosian in the “Backstage Pass” behind-the-scenes segment for the first episode of AMC’s The Vampire Lestat. And honestly, he’s selling it short. I didn’t know what to expect from the Interview with the Vampire sequel series (I’m generally unfamiliar with the Anne Rice novels that the AMC team is slowly adapting), but would be remiss not to mention how quickly I fell in love with the original show. It put a dark, supernatural twist on an otherwise grounded historical relationship drama with enough artful dialogue and well-defined conflict to ensnare even a greenhorn viewer like myself.
The twisted, decades-long entanglement between Louis and Lestat was nuanced and magnetic, brought to life by indelible performances from Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid. The toxic pairing culminated in extensive abuse against Louis, which he strikes back against in the season one finale by attempting to kill Lestat and then fleeing to Paris with their adopted daughter/vampire companion, Claudia (Bailey Bass, recast with Delainey Hayles for season two). The two find a home with a theater-based coven before Lestat eventually returns – destroyed by the betrayal – landing both of them in a show trial that climactically ends with Claudia being burned alive. Louis recounts everything to a journalist, reconciles with Lestat (though their wealth of baggage is too much to spur a recoupling), and now Lestat is going on tour... which is where The Vampire Lestat picks up.
If I had a nickel for every season 3 I’ve reviewed here that featured a self-destructive queer narrator and a massive tonal shift, I’d still be dirt poor, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Unlike Euphoria, though, Interview with the Vampire actually had the balls to rebrand itself. And as many grievances as I have with Lestat’s pivot from deeply charming abuser to flamboyant Bowie-esque rock icon, I admit much of that stems from the source material and overall change in perspective. It’s not full-blown character assassination, just handing the first-person POV keys to someone else.
Much of Lestat’s reason for going on tour is to set the record straight. He read what Louis thought of him and their relationship in Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) tell-all book – based on the titular interviews from the first two seasons – and simply won’t have it. The first episode sees him go full man-child, tearing out pages or scribbling “lies” across the ones he leaves on the spine. It’s like a more melodramatic take on Before Sunset, where the literary interpretation of a character from their supposed lover completely ruins them.
This manifests in some truly catty moments during Lestat’s narration where he seeks to editorialize Louis’ account. The best of these red-pen moments is Molloy noticing Lestat’s chest scars, which hark back to a notably intense moment in his human childhood that Louis deliberately left out in order to avoid exposing his partner’s distressing past. And that vulnerability is just the tip of the iceberg, for Lestat is a deeply broken character. His narration this season originates from “The Failures” – a 111-volume audio collection recounting his rock tour and the destruction it left in its wake – which gets its title from his own shame and inadequacies as a vampire and lover.
Lestat’s pain is the burgeoning spark from which the most unwieldy fires of the season’s drama are lit. Episode 3 is an early highlight, as it sees Lestat sitting down with Molloy to unpack his deeply upsetting vampiric origin. Through the glossy coping mechanism of 80s-inspired music videos, we see how Lestat spent months being stalked by the vampire Magnus before getting kidnapped and forcibly turned. Within this sequence, vampirism is a clear metaphor for sexual assault, and the show expertly deploys its supernatural elements to euphemistically dissect devastating trauma.
What makes this episode even stronger is the B-plot, wherein Louis seeks retribution against Bruce (Damon Daunno), a vampire who raped Claudia back in season one. He reads aloud Claudia’s diary entries detailing the assault to Bruce before executing him, which, when paired with the Magnus story, draws clear and heartbreaking parallels between Claudia and Lestat. As Lestat is indirectly responsible for Claudia’s murder by Armand (Assad Zaman) and the Paris Coven, breaking down that tension between them by blatantly displaying their shared suffering is crucial for what comes next.
Louis and Lestat’s respective guilt surrounding Claudia’s death is, for me, the beating heart of The Vampire Lestat. Even from beyond the veil, her presence haunts them in unexpected ways. In a particularly dark plotline, Louis stumbles upon a diner waitress named Regina who bears uncanny resemblance to Claudia (she’s also played by Delainey Hayles). Plagued by grief and loneliness, Louis begins paying Regina to act like Claudia and spend time with him, a misguided attempt at therapy that ultimately sinks him deeper into his pit of despair. His long-anticipated reunion with Lestat finally comes in Episode 5 when he reaches out for help, recognizing the self-destructive nature of his actions.
To help Louis accept reality, Lestat enters the diner to confront Regina, but he too is captured by the mirror of his deceased daughter. Inspired by the encounter and still tormented by the fact that she never broke her gaze with him even as she burned, Lestat composes a gut-wrenching ballad in the studio (“Stained Glass Eyes,” which I’m not ashamed to say made me sob like an infant) that’s to be the new musical direction for his band. The sequence is emotionally harrowing and topped only by the following episode.
In Episode 6, now reunited, Louis and Lestat hash out much of their past and ultimately arrive on the doorstep of a witch to contact Claudia’s spirit via seance. Led by a powerhouse performance from Hayles, the moment presents Claudia as a rage-filled ghost from the past who berates the couple for using her to band-aid their relationship problems. She chides them for saving her from a fire and trapping her in a 14-year-old body against her will just to burn decades later.
She scolds Louis for reverting to a “slave” under Lestat (a direct jab at his African-American heritage) before lamenting that she can’t find Madeleine (Roxane Duren), the lover she took during season two who was executed alongside her, in the afterlife. The scene is incredibly tragic, compounded by the real-world fact that Anne Rice initially based Claudia on her own daughter who died of leukemia. As a devoted fan of what Claudia brings to the story, to realize she’s still suffering beyond the grave was a massive gut-punch.
Louis and Claudia’s continued inclusion in the story is wonderful, but it’s undeniably Lestat in the spotlight for the sequel series, and Sam Reid is utterly mesmerizing in every second of his increased screentime. He brings a brilliant combination of multifaceted insecurity and theatrical extravagance, matching Lestat’s androgynous swagger on stage while comfortably sitting in the awkward instability and sensitivity of the character’s more grounded moments. He even brings his musical theater background to the vocal sequences, singing live and thus bestowing upon the tracks a raw authenticity. It’s a truly captivating turn and the season is worth watching for Reid’s performance alone.
The aforementioned plotlines made for emotionally investing television that, at times, matched the preceding installments in heart and dramatic gravity. But I fear with how much of a staunch departure The Vampire Lestat looked to be (“it’s my era,” Lestat declares in the trailer), this new agenda was always doomed to complicate things. The middle of the season is a triumph, but it’s bookended by misguided decisions that bog down the final product.
Most of my issues are apparent in the first episode. Whereas Interview was a rich, immaculate period piece, Lestat is aggressively contemporary to the point of cringe. Within just the first half hour, we get mentions of Taylor Swift, Post Malone, TikTok, and so much more (did you know Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars?). To have a centuries-old Lestat whining about Lababu dolls is amusing, sure, but at a certain point it crosses into nauseating attempts for social media hubbub. The production value also felt like it took a hit, as it trades delicate sets and costuming for drug trip sequences that clearly just slapped the Premiere Pro bulge effect onto the footage to mimic psychedelics.
via: The Movie Database
The supporting characters also don’t have any of the heft of Louis and Lestat. This season introduces Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), Lestat’s mother and first fledgling with whom he shares an intimate relationship. Ehle nails the tone of the character, but there’s enough incest in House of the Dragon right now that any more on my screen is overkill, and Lestat is complex enough that this whole new dynamic is an overcomplication. At the very least, I really enjoyed Louis appropriately losing his mind when he finds out Lestat has been sleeping with his mother.
Lestat’s bandmates barely even qualify as characters, which makes sense when the frontman is so magnetic, but for how committed the season is to depicting Lestat’s foray into the glam rock scene, I’m surprised by just how inconsequential they are. Granted, they aren’t generationally talented. Pitchfork gives Lestat’s album a 3.1/10 in an in-universe review that lampoons him as a “hot dog embalmed in hair gel.” The dramaturgical purpose of Lestat making music outweighs the need for said music to be good. Rock is an immaculate vessel for further exploring his pre-existing emotional volatility and need to be loved, and there’s some fun to be had in Lestat quite literally feeding off the crowd. Music has and will always be a supernatural force.
Daniel Molloy is also a huge low point among the core players. Through the first two seasons, Molloy played the audience surrogate as the mortal journalist who listened to (and occasionally commented on) Louis’s woe-mantic escapades. But now he’s been turned into a vampire by Armand (whose obsession and pursuit of him is also a little underdeveloped) which strips the show of an essential human anchor. Eric Bogosian’s neurotic tendencies are still ever-present, which made him perfect casting for the cynical, Bourdain-esque everyman... although less so for a creature of the night who’s supposed to be defined by macabre elegance.
I’m less negative on Armand, but it seems like the writers were struggling with where to place him in the narrative. He and Daniel unexpectedly decapitate Louis and Lestat at the end of Episode 6 just as they’re envisioning a future together – an admittedly excellent cliffhanger – but prior to that, he made little more than small foreboding appearances at the end of select episodes. I suppose he had a meatier role in Episode 4, where he makes his way around the cast, atoning for his season two actions in a glorified humiliation tour. He eventually gets to shine in the finale, when he tortures Regina and begs Louis for an apology (Assad Zaman masterclass), but it takes a long time to get there, and I question if the plotline is earned given the flat buildup.
The Armand plot is one of the only aspects of the finale I found truly worthwhile. While Louis’ severed head is being reprimanded, Lestat finds himself halfway to the afterlife, surrounded by his fledgings at a dinner table in a sequence suspiciously close to BoJack Horseman’s “The View From Halfway Down.” He performs some music, confronts his love for Louis and explores aspects of his damaged psyche, all of which he’s been doing throughout the season.
It’s a very self-indulgent way to leave off, with an extra slap in the face being that we never return to the cryptic auction sequence from the beginning of the first episode. Instead, we flash forward to Lestat overlooking a world destroyed, presumably after the Great Conversion: the series’ impending armageddon spurred by a rapid increase in the vampire population and the awakening of the vampire queen, Akasha (Sheila Atim).
It’s less of a conclusion than a temporary bookmark, only rewarding fans of the books familiar with the lore (not me). The first two seasons were always morsels of a larger story, but they at least managed to resolve their own major narrative arcs. The Vampire Lestat resolves one thing that happened suddenly at the end of the previous episode; the rest, we’ll have to wait for.
I will admit that I’m being very harsh on a season of TV that I generally found quite enjoyable, even at its worst. It’s decidedly a step-down from previous Interview with the Vampire chapters, but I credit many of my problems to the source material, as it’s tough to know what rests purely on the fault of the adaptation. The overarching tonal adjustment can be loud and messy, but it’s all deliberate spectacle that masks a wholly flawed individual.
Louis and Lestat are still two of the most compelling characters on television right now, the dialogue (while more modern) remains deftly written and engrossing, and the newfound maximalist flair takes the story in an alluring stylistic direction that I’m stoked to see more of. The Vampire Lestat is a fascinating continuation of a narrative that might be imperfect, but never fails to bring the electricity. Long live these mercurial, wounded boykissers and their blood-sucking proclivities!
All episodes of Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat are now streaming on AMC+. ‘Interview with the Vampire’ is also available on Netflix.
-Ethan
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