With Season 3 of Interview with the Vampire, series creator Rolin Jones switches perspectives from Louis and Armand to the eponymous Brat Prince in The Vampire Lestat.
As I noted in my review, this season will leap from 18th-century Auvergne, where Lestat spent his mortal life, to 2025 America, where he’s on tour with his rock band, The Vampire Lestat.
In tow, he’s got Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), the journalist and vampire who published Louis’ recounting as a book called Interview with the Vampire. Cameras roll on Lestat and the band for a behind-the-scenes documentary that Daniel is directing with Oscar ambitions. But the Brat Prince taunts that this doc is the “liner notes” to his songs, which offer a “rewrite” of Louis’ version.
What’s Lestat’s beef with Interview with the Vampire?
Well, in the voiceover — courtesy of the vinyl records auctioned off at the top of the Season 3 premiere episode, “Detroit” — Lestat regards Louis’ version of him as “a mayonnaise villain with psychopathic tendencies.”
From there, Lestat’s new look for Season 3 reveals that he has longer hair than Louis recalled, and that his torso is striped with pink, meaty scars from fighting a wolf pack when he was a mortal.
The Brat Prince also chides Daniel and Louis from treating vampire sex as an often-traumatic thing in the book. In his record The Failures, Lestat says, “The fourth best thing the vampire can do to avoid thinking about the past is sex,” adding, “Sex is fun, like the fun I sing about in ‘Long Face.'”
How is Lestat different in The Vampire Lestat versus Interview with the Vampire?
Sam Reid is “The Vampire Lestat.”
Credit: AMC+
In “Detroit,” Lestat lays out some clear differences between how he sees himself and how Daniel and Louis’ book represents him.
In the band’s tour bus, Lestat has a tense exchange with Daniel that reveals several discrepancies. While the human camera operators roll, Daniel asks, “Were you a stutterer as a child?” When ignored, he presses, “Louis said you were.”
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Lestat looks up from his texts with “toi” and tartly asks, “Was he there in 18th-century Auvergne?” From there, he goes on to list several inaccuracies he found in Molloy’s book, Interview with the Vampire. “Did I threaten Claudia with rape on a train? Was I in the room when Donizetti wrote Don Pasquale? No, no, and impossible, because I had buried myself underground for the vast majority of the 1800s.”
In flashback, Lestat will reveal how he first heard about Dan and Louis’ book. While buying a copy at a bookshop in Montreal, he’s annoyed to overhear the shopgirl lusting after Armand, and denouncing him. Not long after, he will be plagued by trick-or-treaters dressed as Louis, Armand, and Claudia. But his real rage is reserved for the book itself. This book has made a mockery of him.
In an amusing montage, “Detroit” has Lestat reading in between outbursts like, “I know what infinitesimal means!” and “It was raining!” and “No. Never fucking happened.”
He seems particularly annoyed that his time on the stage as an actor was misrepresented. “I’m not a harlequin,” he seethes in the episode. In Reid’s live performance in New York City, The Vampire Lestat: One Night Only – LIVE, where he took to the stage as Lestat, he repeated this clarification, insisting to the crowd he was Lélio, not Harlequin.
The distinction here is that Lélio is a lover, refined and elegant in commedia dell’arte theater. Harlequin is more of a comical and mischievous character. Considering that bit of Lestat’s story came from Armand, it might be that Lestat’s seething ex purposefully misrepresented his stage persona to get under his skin. And he did.
But his biggest issue with Interview with the Vampire deals with his relationship with his fledgling daughter, Claudia.
Did Lestat threaten Claudia with rape on a train?
Sam Reid and Jennifer Ehle in “The Vampire Lestat.”
Credit: AMC+
No. Lestat challenges Daniel directly about this in the aforementioned bus scene. When he scribbles “never fucking happened” into the book, it’s over that section. How do we know?
AMC previously released a clip of Daniel talking about Lestat’s reaction to the book. In it, Daniel holds up Lestat’s copy, showing the furious writing, and says, “He didn’t like the part about Claudia and him on the train.”
Teaser trailers for Season 3 assure that Delainey Hayles will be back in Claudia’s yellow dress. So, we can assume this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this train scene.
How to watch: The Vampire Lestat debuts on AMC and AMC+ June 7, with new episodes weekly.
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