Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire on AMC has allowed Sam Reid to take the Lestat de Lioncourt character to new heights. In just a few episodes, he’s already the best at being horrible.
Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is an enduring tale of eternal love, the woes of immortality, and being frozen in grief. It’s also the story of Lestat de Lioncourt, the worst person of all time and also an eternal object of fascination and adoration.
When I say Lestat is the worst person of all time, I am not exaggerating. He menaces characters as much as he charms them, especially the ones he proclaims his love for. In fact, you’re probably worse off as someone Lestat loves than one he hates: In AMC’s Interview, Lestat is so obsessed with his love Louis, he stalks him, emotionally manipulates him, and murders anyone that gets close to him, and that’s before Lestat makes him a vampire.
AMC’s adaptation of Rice’s classic novel makes several radical changes to Rice’s text. Rather than being a plantation story taking place in the 1800s between the plantation owner Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, the story is pushed forward in time to the early 1900s. Instead of being a plantation owner, Louis is a Black man living in New Orleans as a barely tolerated brothel owner, already balancing his life between two worlds before he meets Lestat. For the large part, fans of the series have embraced these changes because the characters still feel so true to what Rice wrote. In particular, fans have taken to Sam Reid’s portrayal of Lestat, who plays the character with a recognizable, infuriating charm and a barely suppressed capacity for violence.
It isn’t that the fandom excuses or rationalizes this behavior away. To love Lestat is to know that he will disappoint you. Recently, the fandom for the Interview With the Vampire television show found itself at a crossroads over Lestat’s actions in the series. Could you love a character that lies like he’s breathing, doesn’t care if he hurts people, and frequently deliberately causes harm to the people he cares about? For decades, the answer to that question, at least in regard to Lestat, has been yes.
In the novels, which after the first book are told from Lestat’s point of view, he does things so terrible that describing them out of context feels like a joke. When Lestat briefly gains a human body, he immediately sexually assaults a woman. As a young vampire, he turns his mother and makes out with her. All throughout Interview, which is told from Louis’ perspective, he does things specifically to piss Louis off. At one point, Lestat wants to kill someone that Louis declared off limits, but this person has also been challenged to a duel to the death.
