“It Now Belongs To Them”: Sam Reid & Jacob Anderson On How ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Pushes Their Characters Into The Public Eye

“Memory is a monster,” the first two seasons of AMC’s beguiling Interview with the Vampire warned, and the third season, rechristened The Vampire Lestat, introduces a new and potentially even scarier monster: public opinion. In a press conference for the Television Critics’ Association, The Mary Sue contributer Leah Marilla Thomas asked the cast of The Vampire Lestat how having a public narrative shapes each of their characters.

While it’s not the Big Bad or anything, how other vampires and ordinary mortals respond to Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) in-universe book Interview with the Vampire and the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt’s (Sam Reid) in-universe music is an important theme to track this season.

In the premiere episode, “Detroit,” a devoted fan follows Lestat to his tour bus and whispers that he knows he’s the real deal. Several vamps debate the dangers and merits of his music. And Lestat watches a stranger gush over how much she prefers his ex-boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend to him. That’s a nightmare for anyone, much less a vampire with a flair for the dramatic. They don’t call it the court of public opinion for nothing.

“This is something that you say, Eric,” Reid says in the press conference, turning around in his chair to face Bogosian, “in the first season when you’re talking about Claudia, which is such a great line. I don’t know if you remember it. But you’re talking about–I mean, you probably do [remember.]–Molloy says… Louis is trying to protect Claudia and [Molloy’s] like, no, this is my big character. You know, you put these things out in the world and the audience make of it what they will.”

Interview With The Vampire tried to warn us this might happen.

The episode Reid’s referring to is Season 1, Episode 5, “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart.” After reading her diary, Daniel Molloy does, in fact, talk about how Claudia will likely be a popular and marketable character in his book. “She’s the single-shooter, Xbox, mouth-breather shit they crave,” he says. Louis (Jacob Anderson) asks that he put her words in a proper context so that she won’t be posthumously exploited.

“Context,” Daniel replies. “Sure. Warn the world about a forthcoming apocalypse. Or maybe inspire a line of sexy Claudia Halloween costumes. Or a cool dismemberment trend amongst the suburban Sylvia Plath set. Once you put it out there, they decide what it is. It can get away from you.”

Sure enough, Reid’s character does see a girl dressed as Claudia for Halloween in “Detroit.” It’s on a child, and the costume is not sexualized, thankfully; but still jarring to Claudia’s vampire father.

It’s one of two times in the TVL premiere that a character’s prediction comes true in a perverse, fun house mirror sort of way. The other happened 52 years prior in San Francisco. After listening to Daniel Molloy (Luke Brandon Field) and Louis’ first interview, in Season 2, Episode 5 “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start The Tape,” the vampire Armand (Assad Zaman) probes Louis about why he really wanted to tell his story.

“Did I catch you in a fantasy,” Armand suggests, “where the boy somehow fumbles his way to publication? Where Lestat strolls past a bookstore, your book displayed in the shop window? Where he buys himself a copy, reads your nasty embellishments, and comes chasing after you again?”

As fate would have it, in “Detroit,” the newly titular immortal does see Molloy’s Interview with the Vampire displayed in a shop window as he is, more or less, strolling. He buys two copies. He reads how Louis described him to Daniel (now Bogosian). But Lestat does not come chasing after him. Instead, he spectacularly crashes out and commandeers the garage band across the street.

Next thing we know, he’s on tour with said band and his ex’s biographer is making a documentary about it. Not exactly the rom-com scenario Armand described to Louis in 1973. But how would you feel if you learned you were the least favorite character in someone’s book?

Lestat may be in pursuit of a rewrite in The Vampire Lestat; however, he might be able to do that much better to control the narrative. We live in an era where fans of musicians take their song lyrics at face value. All the literary devices in the world are secret code and puzzle pieces, to them, towards understanding their idol’s personal life and history better than anyone else. They claim to know the irrefutable truth.

“Regardless of how these characters feel about these very personal details,” says Reid, “now that their information is out, and is public fodder, and is in the kind of cesspool of social media and interpretation [from] the wider audience, it now belongs to them. And they have to deal with the reality of that.”

Lestat’s not the only character who has achieved notoriety.

“I feel like for Louis it’s sort of a ‘be careful what you wish for’ type thing,” says Anderson about how his character responds to having his story out there. “He obviously solicited Molloy into the interview, but I think he is also… is he a private person? Sorry, I was just realizing I was kind of lying mid-answer. He’s a private person, but he’s turning vampires into an industry. He’s like a big capitalist guy. But then, he does it under a pseudonym and an alias.”

Without giving too much away, you’ll see a little bit this season how Louis–ever the entrepreneur–uses Molloy and Lestat’s work to aid his own ventures. But that doesn’t mean he’s soaking up the spotlight.

“Louis is fittingly contradictory about his relationship to his public life, I think,” says Anderson. “He sort of wants to get all the glory but he sort of doesn’t want anyone… it’s ‘look at me, don’t look at me,’ classic Louis sh*t, stuff, in terms of how he’s perceived.”

Meanwhile, Daniel must have painted quite the picture of Armand in his book, because there appears to be a growing truther movement in his name. The first preview showed an ominous “Armand told the truth” tattoo on an unidentified forearm. A coven called the Fang Gang in the premiere share both the ink and the Children of the Darkness’ ideology. Told the truth about what, exactly? Unclear. Your guess is as good as Lestat’s and mine. Armand also has at least one horny fangirl, the afore-mentioned bookshop gusher. It will be interesting to see what he thinks about all this, or if he’s even aware that it’s happening.

It helps steer The Vampire Lestat into the modern era.

So much of the first two seasons of Interview with the Vampire was about how memory and perspective make finding a singular truth impossible. The introduction of media, and interpreters of this media, blow that exploration of truth into the stratosphere. It’s also appropriately modern. Interview with the Vampire had immortals on iPads and conversations about Google and the Covid-19 pandemic in the Dubai sequences. But The Vampire Lestat grabbles with the 21st century in a different way.

“There’s so much misinterpretation,” says Reid. “There’s so much sort of backwash that comes from one single piece of information. I mean, that’s what it is to live in the post-modern world, I suppose. I think vampires are a great way to explore that. Rolin [Jones] and Hannah [Moscovitch] have done this amazing job of doing that. There’s this great speech at the beginning of episode one, [where] Molloy is saying you’ve lived through all of the incredible things through humanity and Lestat is like, yeah, but also, humanity is full of guys who eat hog dogs for competitions and make money from it. And we’ve got weird Cybertrucks that run through the city. It’s just a great way to sort of explore that in that capacity.”

Post-modern truth and vampirism. And here you thought you were watching a gothic romance. As we crowd-surf into The Vampire Lestat, I ask you… why not both?

(featured image: AMC)

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