***Spoilers for Interview with the Vampire season 1&2 and The Vampire Lestat***
His momma named him Interview with the Vampire, I’m gonna call him Interview with the Vampire! Though the show’s first two seasons are superior—I maintain that IWTV’s premiere episode is one of the best pilot episodes of all time!—the newly-titled third season The Vampire Lestat has finally won me over in its third episode. And let me just say, it took a lot.
After two brilliant seasons starring Jacob Anderson as a Black creole Louis de Point du Lac (genius choice to make him and Claudia Black. Genius!!) I was pissed to find that the third season would be an adaptation of Anne Rice’s very unpleasant book The Vampire Lestat, and would center on him, with the actor Sam Reid as number one on the call sheet as the titular vampire.
Suddenly, the AMC channel, which couldn’t muster a fuck to promote the brilliant Jacob Anderson for two seasons, can now put Reid on the cover of Rolling Stone, do a live promo concert for Reid for the season premiere and do almost a year’s worth of promo leading up to the season three premiere. Needless to say, I’ve been salty. It smells racist AF and follows a long-held tradition of Black actors and characters in genre being sidelined for their white co-stars (i.e. Abbie Mills and Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow). While promoting season three, AMC executives also had the nerve to tell audiences they could “skip” seasons one and two if they wanted because TVL would stand on its own. First of all, absolutely not. The show makes zero sense without the context of its first two unsurpassed seasons. Second of all, go to hell, I knew y’all were racist and I wasn’t trippin!!
Also, and I understand I’m in the minority here, but I absolutely hate Lestat. He abused two Black vampires in the Jim Crow South, and The Vampire Lestat is his redemption arc. Hearing Lestat’s side of the story is like submitting myself to hear about slavery from George Washington’s perspective. Does anyone want to know how hard desegregation was on the Klan? Hard fucking pass. And it’s no shade to Reid, he is the best Lestat we’ve seen on screen and the fact that he happens to be an amazing singer too, as Lestat reemerges this season as a wannabe rock star, is fantastic luck. Reid was, perhaps, born for this role. I would just love to see him…less.
“Let the tale seduce you,” Louis told journalist Daniel Molloy (who is sadly not played by Anthony Bourdain) during the titular interview in season one. And I was seduced. Louis is artful, contemplative, smooth, self-reflective, near-meditative at times in his storytelling. He’s performing without being performative, and as authentic as he can be while still maintaining a façade of control. He clearly had an agenda in both his telling and re-telling of his life through the interview with Molloy. His is a beautiful, captivating style that, yes, is all Anne Rice and showrunner Rolin Jones, but is immensely deepened by Jacob’s embodiment of Louis. Making him a Creole pimp in New Orleans instead of a racist white enslaver as Rice envisioned him was inspired! But that choice complicates Lestat’s come-back story, which was bad enough when Lestat was abusing two fellow white vampires and draining enslaved Black people in the background for fun. Now Lestat is a racial abuser of the main characters and there are zero Black writers in the writer’s room for season three. Let the redemption begin.
Angry about Molloy’s book Interview with the Vampire coming out and being a huge success, Lestat decides to reclaim the narrative by writing songs and touring to combat Louis’ version of events. He also hires Molloy to film a documentary about the tour. But Lestat’s storytelling is the opposite of seductive. It’s manic. It’s scattershot. It’s sometimes black and white and then color, as the first three episodes mix Lestat’s retelling of his life on vinyl records with Molloy’s documentary footage of his (modest) world tour. It’s over the top. It’s too much. It’s annoying—just like Lestat.
But Jacob as Louis and Delainey Hayles (who replaced Bailey Bass as Claudia in season two—damn you James Cameron, and that cursed Avatar franchise!) both return for season three, so I decided to stick it out. And episode three got me.
Unlike the first two seasons, where each episode title is fantastically poetic (the pilot episode is “In Throes of Increasing Wonder,” pour example), Lestat’s are simply the names of cities detailing where his band is playing that episode. The third one is “Toronto,” where Lestat is forced to confront his past abuse when Molloy hammers him about what the lyrics to his songs mean.
For Lestat, these songs reframe some of his most harrowing experiences. When Lestat was alive, he was a star on stage at the theater with many fans. His maker, Magnus, became obsessed with him, stalking him, until one night, he kidnapped him through the open window of Lestat’s apartment, kept him in a dungeon tower for a week with blonde-haired rotting corpses who all looked like him. In his song “Biggest Fan,” Lestat regains control over the abuse by putting himself in Magnus’ shoes, singing the song from Magnus’ perspective and turning something horrific into a tame, Fabio-esque music video about an adoring fan. But it’s not until Lestat is broken down in Molloy’s relentless questioning and the real memories of that week of torture are juxtaposed with Louis reading Claudia’s diary to her rapist, Bruce, before Louis kills him, that we understand the full horror of what Lestat went through with Magnus. Like Claudia, Lestat was kidnapped, raped, and tortured. We see Lestat’s cPTSD take over as he crashes his car to get away from the visions of Magnus sitting next to him in the car, taunting him. Hundreds of years later, he cannot escape the memories of monstrous abuse. And we feel bad for Lestat. And that sucks! Because fuck Lestat!!!
Using rape as a trope for an awful character’s redemption is usually something reserved for women characters on screen. Think Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones or Charlotte King on Private Practice. Lestat being a man might have been a spin on this despicable trope, except as a bisexual man, the use of this trope seems to be one of the many ways homophobia and misogyny are fruit of the same patriarchal tree. Yet, it doesn’t feel cheap like Sansa’s or Charlotte’s storylines. It’s not merely a plot device, it’s a window into Lestat’s self-reckoning.
There are people in the world who go through bad things and say, “Well, I went through it, so you will too,” and then there are people that say, “I went through it, so I want to make sure nobody else ever goes through it.” Lestat is the worst kind. He tortured and abused Louis and Claudia. He threatened Claudia with rape, whether he wants to believe that about himself or not, it was true. He knew she was already Bruce’s victim and he used that to threaten and control her. And then he participated in her murder. And Lestat was a victim of his makers, several times over. Lestat’s father was horribly abusive. Magnus was horribly abusive, and his first fledgling, his own mother, Gabriella, began an incestuous sexual relationship with him that’s continued for centuries. His one supporter became yet another abuser. He only knows a maker as an abuser; he only knows love that is perverted, controlling, manipulative and deadly. That explains why he treated Louis and Claudia the way that he did, giving them illusions of choice, illusions of love, at different turns while still fighting to maintain his control over them. But it doesn’t excuse it.
The songs he writes are self-aware, to a degree, and wrestle with the reality of who he is and who he has been. “Unlike your last vampire, there are no delusions here,” Lestat tells Molloy, and it’s again partly true.
His final song of the episode—and the best of the show so far— “The Loneliness,” is Lestat’s version of Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky.” It’s him coming to terms with the undead life that was created for him and what he’s allowed his trauma to shape him into: a lonely monster who does monstrous things to connect with others and still winds up alone, just like his makers.
“You can’t fuck away the loneliness / it’ll wait til you’re done / til you come like a vampire…Don’t hide it away / Don’t bury those feelings / Don’t worship that grave / Dug on your own / Don’t burn alone.”
As he performs this song, his abusers appear in the crowd, first Magnus, then Gabriella. But as he sings, and addresses his pain head on, instead of ignoring it, they leave him, one by one—the haunted apparition of the long-dead Magnus and the very-real Gabriella too. He sings and he heals from them a little more each time.
“Perfection,” he says, the moment the song ends. It’s done his good work in and through him.
Molloy and other characters mock Lestat for his songs being “bad,” or simplistic, but unfortunately, I really like Lestat’s songs! And Reid has a gorgeous voice, best displayed on “The Loneliness.”
“You’re confused about the pursuit, Dan,” Lestat tells a bullying Molloy. “It is not about asses in seats or streams on Pandora. It is about pure expression!” And, like all artists trying to make a living, it’s fine if he’s only being half-truthful. The spirit of what he’s saying is correct and would be the only motivator in a world built on soul-connection instead of the soul-death of white supremacist, capitalist, cishetero-patriarchy.
“I loved the music,” Lestat said of why he got on that stage even after his mental breakdown, flipping his car, haunted by Magnus, Claudia, and his first love, the tragic Nicky. “It was compelling me forward, pulling me through the perennial walls of my psyche. And I thought, ‘why not ride it to blindness?’ Cause it seemed possible that this was the muddy bottom, and on the other side, a marble floor, polished to the horizon. Music, in its purest expression, would make me worse, and then make me better.”
This is what resonates most about Lestat’s journey as an underground rockstar: that music, art itself is what connects our souls. And not just for humans—many non-human animals also make music and art. That, I think, is the biggest point of author Anne Rice and showrunner Rolin Jones making Lestat a rockstar and Louis an oral historian in the first two seasons. Humans have believed for far too long in the modern era that there is a hierarchy of life atop which they sit. Vampires then, in humanity’s undead, basest form, have placed themselves even higher, with living humans reduced to mere food, pets or entertainment. Music and art remind Lestat and Louis and therefore the audience that being alive to each other is the point. Feeling alive with each other is the point. And sure, we all want to survive, but there are ways to survive that don’t require us to treat our fellow alive beings—even our food—as less deserving of life than we are.
Through music, Lestat is reconnecting to the part of himself that is alive (if still undead). In episode two, “Toledo,” we see Lestat surrendering his ego to his human bandmates. His soullessness was getting in the way of the music he wanted to create and perfect. It’s only when he allows what remains of his soul to connect with the souls of his bandmates, and relinquishes control of the narrative, and performative humanity that they can create impactful art together.
This is why I love vampire stories, and Interview with the Vampire (and fine, The Vampire Lestat) is at the top of the list. Vampires are one of the greatest literary and philosophical vehicles for contemplating what it means to wrestle with death, destruct, grief—what it means to be alive.
After the death of her young daughter from a disease, Anne Rice wrote a grieving Louis de Point du Lac and gave him an immortal child, Claudia. She modeled the Brat Prince Lestat after her charming husband. She wrestled in the mud with God over the loss of her daughter and her own mental health struggles throughout The Vampire Chronicles. This is what we were meant to do.
In Toni Morrison’s 2015 essay for The Nation “No Place for Self Pity, No Room for Fear,” she writes of something her friend told her after George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Louis and Lestat, in their oral histories and lyrics to love songs, have turned to art as healing. Just as their maker, Anne Rice did. Just as Toni Morrison did. Just as we are all called to do. This is the power of cinema and TV at its absolute best. And in episode three, The Vampire Lestat lives up to the calling.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
Leave a Reply