From the first frames of the new opening titles, The Vampire Lestat announces itself as something tonally distinct from its predecessor. But make no mistake: The Vampire Lestat is, in every way that counts, the third season of the show formerly known as Interview with the Vampire. So if you haven’t seen Interview, turn back now! Go watch two of the best seasons of television made this decade and get back to me. Like the novel of the same name, The Vampire Lestat is Lestat de Lioncourt’s (Sam Reid) attempt to set the record straight after Daniel Malloy (Eric Bogosian) publishes his interview with Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) as a book.
We eventually get a hilarious sequence where Lestat buys a copy of said book then furiously annotates it in a frenzy of disbelief at how he’s portrayed. But the premiere episode, titled “Detroit,” doesn’t begin there. Instead, the episode jumps around in time, piling flashback on flashback as Lestat weaves and wends his way through his story one tangent after another.
The episode opens at an auction in the present day, or perhaps the near future, where the bidding for a music cabinet specially designed by Lestat starts at 50 million yuan. The cabinet contains the following items: the only copy of the complete recorded works of Lestat de Lioncourt, a nineteenth-century bottle of wine, a bottle of the vampire’s own blood, and the single vinyl pressing of a collection of records called “The Failures,” in which Lestat recounts the story of his apparently near-apocalyptic 2025 band tour. The value of this lot implies Lestat’s death, real or assumed.
Three familiar faces show up in the room of potential buyers, including two of Lestat’s vampire exes. Armand (Assad Zaman) and Louis appear the worse for wear, literally missing body parts. Also present is Raglan James (Justin Kirk), of the Talamasca. The mystery of who purchases the cabinet remains unsolved by the end of the premiere, but Lestat’s story begins when the unidentified buyer drops the needle on the first volume of “The Failures.”
Going into this season, I knew that Lestat’s voiceover narration would be a treat; Reid’s precisely calibrated vocal work forms a foundational pillar of his characterization(s) of the vampire. And, oh, how Reid delivers. His Lestat has always spoken in a bit of a hypnotic flow, each sentence unspooling like a ribbon. Here, his French-accented baritone drawl instantly lures us into his recollections. His smooth, detached tone belies the chaos about to ensue.
“Spring of 2025. A good nation was making itself great again. Again,” Lestat says as he sets the scene. We find Lestat on stage in Detroit, performing “Long Face” with his band, The Vampire Lestat. The audio alternates between Lestat’s narration, in which he cuttingly describes each of his human bandmates, and the original song. Reid, his shirtless torso covered in sweat and glitter, absolutely owns Lestat’s rockstar era from the jump. As a friend of mine live-texted me at this point: “I want to lick him.” Lestat explains that his band has found some moderate streaming and touring success after a few months, but that they are already “resting on the Alps of adequacy,” much to his chagrin.
After the performance, Lestat swaggers backstage, holding a limp woman in his arms and bossing his bandmates around. The footage switches from color to black and white. The black and white footage comes from a tour documentary. This adds yet another narrative perspective, as well as another stylistic flourish in an episode chock full of them. For the rest of the episode, montage and quick cuts abound. Everything arrives in snippets and flashes, juxtaposed and overlapped to create a visually staggering collage. The overall, dizzying effect feels like flipping through the junk journal of Lestat’s memory.
By all appearances, Lestat is trying to hide the truth of his vampiric nature while touring. Later in the episode, Lestat nicely summarizes his stage persona as “a bawdy burlesque of is-he-or-isn’t-he.” He plays up the vampire drag, but he hasn’t told his bandmates that he’s actually a vampire. He sends out a specially procured “Neanderthal” doppelgӓnger named Jarda (also played by Reid in humorous prosthetics) after shows to throw the public off of his scent while he commits vampiric acts of murder. Lestat says in his voiceover that Daniel’s book didn’t incite a wave of vampire truthers. Since most humans got over vampires astonishingly quickly, it was easy to hide.
In contrast to Louis’s solemnly timeless literary stylings, Lestat litters his narration with current cultural references. He mentions TikTok, swiping left, Taylor Swift, the algorithm, and baby formula locked up in cases at the drugstore. He imagines the youths dismissing a fad as “cheugy” and adds French flair to his pronunciations of “Reddit” (ruh-DEET) and Lululemon (lu-lu-LEH-mohn). He’s on a roll as we watch him exit the concert venue through the stage door and hop onto his waiting tour bus.
Inside the bus, newly-made vampire Daniel Malloy waits for the lead singer. Daniel has been hired, perhaps at Lestat’s request, to conduct the interview portions of the documentary. In what seems to be a routine, Daniel peppers Lestat with personal questions which the vampire playfully evades. Daniel asks whether Lestat is in contact with Louis as Lestat (“Moi”) texts a mysterious recipient (“Toi) on his phone. After sparring back and forth for a while, Daniel finally lobs Lestat “an easy one.” “Is it true your band was formed on Halloween?” Daniel asks with a simper.
Cue a flashback to the Halloween night crash out that started it all. Now living in Montreal, Lestat amiably chats about his new music with Louis via video call. Then a notification pops up on the tablet screen that changes the tenor of their conversation on a dime. Interview with the Vampire has been released, and Lestat can’t believe Louis let it happen. Lestat storms down the block to a bookstore, where he picks up a copy of the offending tome. Adding insult to injury, the shop girl spouts her lusty opinions about Armand to her coworker as Lestat makes his purchase. (She, too, wants to lick, lick, lick a vampire.) Back at home, Lestat tears through the book, feverishly marking it up with such trenchant observations as “NEVER HAPPENED.”
Reading Louis’ story completely unsettles Lestat, to the point that he can barely keep it together while he hands out candy to trick-or-treaters. At the end of his rope and completely overstimulated, Lestat can no longer handle the sound of his neighbors’ band practicing their mediocre music. So he snaps. He books it across the street to destroy a guitar and give his neighbors some pointed songwriting tips. But Lestat’s neighbors, the little freaks, like it. Lestat takes over the band, and The Vampire Lestat officially forms.
Back in 2025, the band takes the stage for their second night in Detroit. Lestat has his violin out for “Black Licorice.” Move over, slutty little glasses; it’s slutty little fiddle’s time to shine. In the middle of his performance, Lestat has what he characterizes as a “nervous breakdown” on stage. He tells of how his music wrapped around him, paralyzing him, as memories suddenly overwhelmed him. A barrage of images from Lestat’s history flash across the screen, in and out of focus. Ghosts from his past, “muses” as he calls them, appear before him to “[hammer] away at the performative vampire persona I had welded into armor.” Lestat recovers, grabs his violin, and unleashes himself as a “bona fide vampire.”
Finally, Lestat and his guitarist lock in, playing together rather than competing for a solo. The energy picks up. The crowd’s in a frenzy. A young woman (Ella Ballantine) climbs up on stage to offer herself to Lestat, and he bites into her neck. Turns out the woman has taken MDMA and LSD, and the drugs transfer from her bloodstream to Lestat’s. Backstage, as Lestat’s crew works to keep the girl alive, the vampire has a hallucination. He sees the woman’s ghost, floating on the ceiling above her body. She taunts Lestat. She reminds him that even immortals can die and asks him why he makes it so hard for people to love him when all he wants is to be loved. Before she disappears, she foreshadows the arrival of more ghosts coming to haunt him. The doctors revive the girl, and she wakes up on the floor.
Once Lestat gets high, the story really starts looping. Here, too, his narration gets a little less calm and cool. “Never play two nights in Detroit,” Lestat warns from his perch in the future, as we get a glimpse of 2025 Lestat slumped over a toilet in a blood-covered motel bathroom. He quickly rewinds his story several hours, back to the immediate aftermath of his second show. The band’s been invited to attend the opening of a new goth chic hotel called Dracula’s Daughter as minor celebrity guests. At the party at the hotel, Lestat rides the high and struggles to compose himself after his unnerving experience.
Naturally, Lestat decides to have three-way sex in an elevator about it. He calls sex “the fourth best thing a vampire can do to avoid thinking about the past”—after taking life, completely draining a body, and the “little drink” (of blood). A devastatingly hot visual mélange of sex and murder cuts between the action in the elevator and Lestat’s erotic memories. Lestat asserts, in direct response to Louis’s dour depiction of the subject, “Sex is fuuun.”
Narrator Lestat clearly can’t wait to get to the sex part, because he jumps ahead to talk about it a couple of times before correcting himself. Before the threesome, he has a run in with two regional vampires in the hotel bathroom. The representatives from the Detroit coven think that Lestat’s theatrics are going to get them in trouble, and they want a fight. Lestat brushes them off, but he runs into the “Fang Gang” again in the hallway when he steps off the elevator of carnal delights.
In voiceover, Lestat brags that on a normal night, he could have taken out the coven without breaking a sweat. On drugs, though? He needs a little help. Daniel and a friend swoop in to save the day and take out most of the coven. At the end of the hallway, Lestat bursts into the main party and kills the leader of the Detroit coven in plain sight of all the human guests. Lestat escapes through a window before he can think too hard about the ramifications of what he’s just done.
This brings us back to the grimy motel room where Lestat’s coming down. His phone lays discarded on the bed, the screen displaying a string of unanswered text messages to “Toi.” The phone dings, and Lestat crawls to the bed to read the message. “I’m here,” it reads. The door clicks open, and Lestat looks up. He tries to be seductive as he greets his guest, but he’s on the verge of tears the whole time as he confesses that he’s “not really at his best.” Lestat fully breaks down, unable to stop himself from stuttering, as he tries to say his mother’s name. Gabriella. Lestat’s narration deftly undercuts the surprise of the moment, insisting that it’s “not much of a reveal” since everyone already knows the incest gossip. The episode closes as Lestat and his mom (Jennifer Ehle) enthusiastically make out.
There’s no doubt this season is for the sickos, or, as Lestat calls them, his Beautiful Unwell. Count me in.
Liner Notes:
- In The Tale of the Body Thief, the fourth of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels, Raglan James and Lestat swap bodies. The “Lestat’s gone” vibes of the opening auction, paired with the lingering shots of Raglan, set off some alarm bells in my head. Is the Raglan we see in the opening scene really Lestat?
- Vampires in Detroit will always remind me of my beloved Only Lovers Left Alive. I wonder what Adam would think of The Vampire Lestat.
- I couldn’t help but read the Jelly Roll name drop as a little reference to the Jelly Roll Morton incident at the Azalea in season one.
- While both seasons of Interview with the Vampire sport an impeccably dry sense of humor, The Vampire Lestat has so far veered into much more explicitly comedic territory. I’m not the only one to point this out, but something about the faux-documentary aspect, the present day setting, and Lestat’s complicated desire to be part of contemporary life, combined with the more clearly comedic set ups, makes it feel spiritually akin to What We Do in the Shadows. Oh, and the drug blood, of course.
- Now tell me how Sam Reid can take the phrase “immortal erection” and make it sound genuinely sexy. This man’s powers remain unmatched.
- We’re putting a pin in the Talamasca stuff with Daniel and the familiar DJ, but I didn’t miss it.
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