The Vampire Lestat Season 1, Episode 1
“Detroit”
Writers: Hannah Moscovitch & Rolin Jones
Director: Craig Zisk
Cast: Sam Reid, Jacob Anderson, Assad Zaman, Joseph Potter, Jennifer Ehle, Eric Bogosian, Justin Kirk, Jeanine Serralles, Gopal Divan, Noah Reid, Ryan Kattner, Seamus Patterson, Sarah Swire, Amaka Umeh, Ella Ballentine, Christopher Geary, Elise Baumann, Dorian Grey, Guy Maddin
There’s a great bit in The Three Amgos when studio executive Harry Flugelman explains a little about how show business works. His company has been cranking out action-adventure pictures set in Mexico, starring a trio of wealthy Spanish landowners who dress up in flashy costumes and fight evil as vigilantes. The studio erred, he says, in making a film called Those Darn Amigos!
“A box office failure,” Flugelman recalls. “Nobody went to see it, because nobody cares about three wealthy Spanish landowners on a weekend in Manhattan.
“We strayed from the formula,” he concludes, “and we paid the price.”
What The Vampire Lestat presupposes is…what if you didn’t?
Lestat — billed in the “previously on” segment as “the show formerly titled Interview with the Vampire” — isn’t even the first show this season to use its third outing as a dramatic rebrand. Sam Levinson’s Euphoria always had crime-thriller elements as an outgrowth of its addiction-related content, but its final season was a full-blown genre epic — Kill Bill rather than Kids. Even so, it still retained much of its identity, from its title to its likeable narrator, Zendaya’s troubled teen turned hapless drugrunner Rue Bennett.
Meanwhile, though Interview was never the subject of Euphoria’s buzz, nor was it the target of its critical distaste and audience opprobrium. (All undeserved, that show ruled, but whatever.) Rather, reviews (mine, anyway) singled it out as one of the best literary adaptations in the medium’s history, capitalizing on all the strengths of novelist Anne Rice’s source material while giving it all a makeover that improved upon its weaknesses. Anchored by a half-dozen killer performances, Interview now felt gayer, Blacker, and more about America, while sacrificing none of the original’s dark romance. Particularly during Season 2, which featured an elaborate stage show within the show, it was a period piece that looked as lush and lavish as anything on TV.
We’re a few thousand miles and several decades removed from that place now. We’re no longer immersed in evocative recreations of 1910s New Orleans or 1950s Paris — we’re in Detroit 2025, at a time when America is readying to “make itself great again, again.” This is according to our narrator, who is no longer the loving, tormented vampire and New Orleans native Louis (Jacob Anderson), but Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), Louis’s Eurotrash maker and ex.
They’re getting along fine now though, actually, now that the complicated plotlines of the first two seasons have resolved in the extremely, occasionally violently estranged former couple’s reconciliation. The real heavy in the lethal events that tore them apart forever turned out to have been Armand (Assad Zaman), the ancient lord of Paris’s vampire coven. He deceived his lover Louis for decades, convincing him Lestat was responsible for torturing him and executing his fledgling, the eternal teenage vampire Claudia (Bailey Bass in Season 1, Delainey Hayles thereafter, both excellent), when in fact it had been Armand himself all along.
The crime was uncovered by Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), a cynical ex-junkie gonzo journalist with Parkinson’s who’d tried to interview Louis some 50 years before, only to be nearly killed until Armand (of all people) intervened. Furious at having his years-long ruse exposed, Armand converts Daniel into a vampire. Daniel publishes his interview as a book without Louis’s permission, but Louis welcomes dragging his people into the daylight, so to speak. Ready or not, here they come.
Lestat has turned to music as the primary (non-bloodsucking) outlet for his passions by now, but when Louis and Daniel’s book breaks unexpectedly big, he becomes cattily furious with Louis’s depiction of him as a mercurial dandyish psychopath. Mercurial and dandyish sure, but a psychopath? Bah! His hair was different too. And he has gruesome scars on his chest, not like Monsieur du Lac would deign to mention those!!!
It all comes to a head on Halloween night, though not in the Bela Lugosi way you’re expecting. Still furiously annotating his copy of Louis’s book, he’s interrupted by children in period-inaccurate Halloween costumes, complaining about their peanut allergies. Meanwhile, the godawful garage band in the building across the street from his Montréal digs is driving him crazy with their terrible playing.
So Lestat basically decides fuck it, if you want anything done you have to do it yourself on two counts. He’s going to counter Louis’s narrative with one of his own, hiring Louis’s own chronicler, the now vampiric Daniel Molloy, to serve as a documentary filmmaker. And he’s going to whip that godawful garage band into shape by bursting through their front door, breaking a guitar with his bare hands, and drilling them into shape for a full year before setting out on the road as a glam-revival act.
Well, the glam revival bit only really goes as far as Lestat himself, and maybe his wildcat drummer TC (Sarah Swire). Guitarist Larry (Noah Reid), the group’s former frontman, resents Lestat’s violin-playing eccentricities. Alex (Seamus Patterson), Larry’s more talented brother, doesn’t partake of the rockstar lifestyle and is thus of little interest to Lestat. The bass player is is a galoot who goes by Salamander (Ryan Kattner), which kind of says it all, really. Lestat’s beautiful androgynous girlfriend Dee (Amaka Umeh) and tough-talking manager Christine (Jeanine Seralles) — along with a body double to convince the public Lestat’s vampire act is just that even as he’s out there killing people — round out the crew.
Things take a turn at a fateful gig in Detroit. During the concert, Lestat imbibes from a fan (Ella Ballentine) who’s taken a cocktail of hallucinogens, leaving Lestat barely in touch with reality. (He’s in touch enough to fuck her and Dee on the elevator, at least.).
But it’s all a trap to lure him into the clutches of Detroit’s coven, the ridiculously titled Fang Gang, led by a pair of vampires (Dorian Grey and Elise Baumann) he meets in the men’s room. (One of the vampires is nonbinary, leading Lestat to note that using people’s proper pronouns is respectful, as is shutting the fuck up when you’re at a urinal.)
The hallway fight that follows is brutal, and while the drugged-up Lestat is still more powerful than multiple vampire’s combined, the numbers game and his own intoxication leave him about to lose.
(Dee isn’t much help: Standing in the corner per Lestat’s instructions, she recites a series of affirmations about how this will all ultimately be good for her career.) Lestat is saved at the last moment by Daniel and the tour DJ, the vampire Samuel (Christopher Geary), a former member of Armand’s coven who escaped Louis’s revenge attack. Samuel says that back then he was working for the Talamasca, the same paranormal investigative society that employs the rogue agent Raglan James (Justin Kirk), who outed Armand’s deceptions to Daniel last season.
But all this is already in the past. The episode’s cold open takes place in the near future, after an unspecified global conflagration springing directly from Lestat’s musical career leaves both Louis and Armand visibly maimed and countless people (and presumably vampires) dead, and resulted in some sort of campaign to “exterminate the Y chromosome.”
Louis, Armand, Raglan, and a cadre of global elites have come together in an undisclosed location to bid on a series of vinyl recordings dubbed “The Failures” — the Vampire Lestat’s complete recordings, plus an audio diary of recent events from his perspective.
With all of his masters, notebooks, and unreleased recordings torched in the auction’s opening act, this is presumably all that remains that can tell interested listeners why whatever happened happened. We don’t get to see who wins the auction yet, but the recordings, plus Daniel’s video interviews, provide us with Lestat’s perspective throughout.
We do, however, learn who’s been texting, half flirtatiously and half disdainfully but obviously romantically, with Lestat during most of the episode. It’s Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), whose white-blonde hair matches his own, as well it should: In addition to being both his fledgling and his lover, Gabriella is Lestat’s mother. The episode ends with them having kissing passionately.
Just to reiterate: We’re watching the queer glam rock incest vampire show. This one’s for the sickos, and brother, that’s me.
Lestat is for anyone who’s ever wanted to watch a show about gay draculas who sing “The Jean Genie” knockoffs into a camera dripping with human blood, then go bitch about it to Eric Bogosian. It’s for anyone who loves The Lost Boys and Velvet Goldmine and Cabaret and Bram Stoker’s Dracula and has ever thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if all those were the same thing at once?” It’s for people who know that even if that dark spot on Lestat’s pants at the end of one his performances isn’t his vampire blood-semen from ejaculating on stage, the fact that it’s even a question is a very good sign indeed.
Lestat loses Interview’s gorgeous recreations of other times and places, and from costuming to set design to even casting (Lestat’s band are supposed to be nobodies, not Jazz Age vampires), that’s a loss. Daniel Hart’s superb songs, however, are a marvelous substitution. So far, they riff equally on the artsy, trashy side of 1970s glam rock and on glam-adjacent musicals and movies. There’s plenty of Bowie and Bolan and Iggy in Lestat, and plenty of Hedwig Robinson and Brian Slade and Dr. Frank N. Furter. There’s the real stuff, and the theatrical version of it.
Indeed, this first episode hinges largely on just how real Lestat wants to make his act. So far, he’s been play-acting the vampire, fronting a largely checked-out band to small crowds. But his murderous on-stage impulses towards Larry trigger a flood of rapid-fire memories and images from his past (I’m not capable of trainspotting them all, but the mother of all vampires, the Queen of the Damned herself, is in there somewhere). This triggers him into actually putting his all into his performance for the first time, realizing he was holding the band back, not the other way around.
But Lestat doesn’t really have any choice but to be himself anymore. The evening ends with that hallway fight against the Detroit coven bursting into the middle of Lestat’s entourage just as he delivers the coup de grace against one of his foes. Having torn someone’s neck out with his teeth in front of his band, his manager, and various hangers on…well, there’s no walking that back. So Lestat truly vamps it up, flying out the window, outing himself as a real vampire and not just a cosplayer for the first time.
It’s a pattern worth noting. His psychological breakthrough with the sudden flood of memories leads to an artistic breakthrough with his performance, which leads to a personal breakthrough as he decides to own being a vampire. It’s a virtuous cycle, or at least it would be if it didn’t involve dozens of dead bodies. Maybe that’s what The Vampire Lestat will be about in the end: the price of self-actualization. What good does it do you to find and liberate yourself if your self is a real piece of shit? Who will pay the price for Lestat’s quest to Make Lestat Great Again?
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