The Vampire Lestat is here, and it’s as chaotic as the mind of its narrator. Narrator Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) delivered prolonged, heady thoughts in Interview With the Vampire Seasons 1 and 2. Narrator Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) has little interest in investigating the past like his ex in Season 3. In fact, he’s actively fighting against it. Vampire documentarian Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) won’t let him get away with this, but Lestat’s own psyche is even more of an obstacle.
After centuries of running from his trauma and conflating ignoring your problems with endurance, Lestat is being forced to take a long, hard look at the formative events of his immortal life. And this new narrative structure will result in a lot more present-day scenes in this adaptation, which is a departure from the source material. Here, The Vampire Lestat cast and creators explain the premiere in our video series called Backstage Pass: The Vampire Lestat Aftershow. Warning: The Vampire Lestat spoilers ahead!
The episode opened in a flash forward to an allegedly posthumous auction of valuable items in Lestat’s possession, the most important part of the collection being the only recordings of his album called “The Failures,” on which he details how he woke “the queen” and triggered the string a catastrophic events that followed. Armand (Assad Zaman) and Louis are in attendance at the auction, but worse for wear. Armand is wearing an eye patch that barely conceals what’s sure to be a nasty ocular injury. Louis, meanwhile, is walking with his cane and has a prosthetic foot. Lestat is presumed dead and narrated this album in an unknown location at an unknown time. One of the two copies of the album were destroyed by fire at the auction, by Lestat’s own design, and the other is how we’re hearing the story of Season 3.
The events of Lestat’s life after his 2022 New Orleans reunion with Louis leading up to the awakening of the queen are told in jagged, non-linear flashbacks, and they all begin with a record scratch to signal a change of scenery. After some disappointing performances with his self-titled band, Lestat’s memories suddenly hit him like a freight train, triggering the sudden introductions of hallucinatory “muses.” Louis, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle, who makes her eerie debut in the episode’s final scene), and more important figures from Lestat’s past start popping up without reason. It makes Lestat realize that he was the one holding the band back, and that these muses could be the key to unlocking better music. They’re also the key to seeing Lestat’s human life and his early years as a vampire, which often come to him in fast flashes rather than fleshed-out scenes.
Executive producer/writer Hannah Moscovitch tells TV Insider why The Vampire Lestat TV show will have so many present-day scenes when The Vampire Lestat novel is predominantly told in flashbacks.
“It felt important to be in the present and to have the rock ‘n roll concert be of the now and to show his full subjectivity through what was happening in the present,” Moscovitch says of their Lestat’s tour. “And because what we’d done with Season 1 and Season 2 involved this massive ongoing love story with Louis, it felt important to be in the present to bring in all of the characters that we’ve been creating with Anne Rice over the years, and so we didn’t want to leave them all behind.”
Intrusive memory was a big thing for the writers.
“We talked a lot about intrusive memory in the room,” she says. “We talked about what it would mean if you had been going on and on and on for hundreds of years and you were Lestat and you go forward relentlessly, because that is who he is. But then what if you started to make music, and then the music forced you to consider for the first time or retrospect. And then you were starting to use your own life to make your art, and then it was starting to undo you at the same time that you loved making music. All of that felt important if we were going to access the past, as opposed to just telling a story, like, ‘And now for Lestat’s past!’ We all wanted to have it be linked to psychology.”
Speaking of psychology, why would Louis exclude some details about Lestat, such as the huge scars on his chest and abdomen, from his interview with Daniel? Anderson says he wants viewers to feel free to interpret that as they wish, but he offers one hesitant theory.
“Whatever makes it more fun for the person that’s taking it in, I suppose,” Anderson says. “There’s an argument to say that he was trying to airbrush Lestat. I don’t think it’s that. I think sometimes Louis is trying to take certain kinds of pain out of things. He tries to remove an aspect of Claudia’s [Delainey Hayles] pain and what she was going through before they met, her living situation. You have to shine it up a little bit. I think it’s probably the same for Lestat.”
Reid doesn’t think it was necessary for Louis to share all of the tiny details.
“He’s telling his story. He doesn’t need to tell Lestat’s entire backstory,” Reid says, adding, “There’s a lot of stuff that he doesn’t need to do. What he does do is tell a very explicit version of his creation from a place that was considered a private, sacred conversation, which does really piss off Lestat, but Louis uses that to navigate his own story, and positively so. But yeah, I don’t see why he would mention the scars.”
Learn more about The Vampire Lestat premiere in the full video interview above.
The Vampire Lestat, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+
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