The Vampire Lestat Season 1, Episode 3
“Toronto”
Writers: Anusree Roy
Director: Claudia Llosa
Cast: Sam Reid, Jacob Anderson, Assad Zaman, Joseph Potter, Delainey Hayles, Jennifer Ehle, Eric Bogosian, Jeanine Serralles, Gopal Divan, Moses Sumney, Noah Reid, Ryan Kattner, Seamus Patterson, Sarah Swire, Damon Daunno, Damien Atkins, Ella Ballentine, Guy Maddin
“You opened the door, counselor” is my favorite bit of Law & Order–speak. Judges say it when lawyers object to statements or evidence that wouldn’t even be in play if the lawyers themselves hadn’t moved the case in that direction. I suppose it’s another way of saying “Hey, you asked for it.” There’s a lot of that going around in this magnificent episode of The Vampire Lestat. A lot of vampires wind up in trouble of their own making.
The central conceit is a simple one. Lestat sits down for a full-color, face-forward interview with Daniel Molloy. Hungrier for his next big success than for blood itself, the vampire journalist is tired of Lestat dancing around his questions. Tonight, in a studio setting rather than a tour bus, is his big chance to poke and prod until he gets the answers he’s looking for about Lestat’s mysterious past.
Boy, does he ever. Extended flashbacks replete with gorgeous period detail take us back to revolutionary Paris, where Lestat, having abandoned his aristocratic family name, runs into an old friend on the street. Nicolas de Lenfent (Joseph Potter) isn’t a great violinist, as he’d be the first to tell you, but he is an enthusiastic one. He’s also a buddy of Lestat’s from their village back home — Lestat comes bearing a gift from Nicolas’ tailor dad — and seemingly a heck of a guy. He and Lestat fall into bed immediately; it’s one of those “love at second sight” deals, and it hits our beautiful blond boy hard.
Unfortunately, he’s not the only person in Paris who’s head over heels in love. A grotesque, goth vampire named Magnus becomes smitten with Lestat after watching him perform as an actor. (Lestat says he cured his stammer through practice and willpower, which Daniel’s dubious about.) Lestat performs a song from his maker’s perspective, an “Every Breath You Take” stalker anthem that sees Lestat sing through his own abuser’s voice.
Lestat hides his vampirism from Nicolas, but not from Armand and his devil-worshipping coven. When Lestat rescues Nicolas from them before they can kill him, Nicolas demands to know what the hell is going on — not with the coven, but with Lestat himself. Gabriella’s appearance only deepens Nicolas’s anguish. He knows there’s no way she could have survived her illness without whatever magic has turned Lestat’s eyes bright blue and enabled him to fly out a window without dying from the fall the night he was abducted by Magnus. And he’s devastated that Lestat would give this gift to Gabriella but not to him.
Gabriella warns Lestat not to do this. For one thing, their relationship is at an end — Lestat has already struck up a thing with Armand — and dragging that energy “into eternity” is an awful idea. Then there’s Nicolas’s mental fragility, clearly exacerbated by his time in the vampires’ clutches. Sure enough, even as the fully dandified Lestat and Armand join forces with Nicki at the Théãtre des Vampires, the fledgling devolves into full-blown psychosis, chopping off one of his own hands and feeding it to the flames.
We don’t see Nicolas’ death, but we hear about it in hideous detail. With tears of blood pouring from his eyes, Lestat mimics the low, awful moan his first love made as he burned to death at the end of Armand’s iron poker — the sound of someone who is seeing the void.
Lestat cuts off the interview and speeds off into the night. In the process he jilts his mother Gabriella, with whom he’s angry for her mind games, if fucking his body double at an ear-splitting volume during the interview counts as mind games. (Jennifer Ehle gets the MVP for this one.) So he’s long gone by the time Daniel realizes he’s been had: The blockbuster portion of the interview was all in his mind, implanted there during half an hour of telepathic hypnosis by Lestat. Daniel’s upset no one thought to say anything to him when they were just sitting there motionless all that time, but at least some of these people are aware that they’ve got no-questions-asked corpse-disposal teams on standby. I wouldn’t interrupt them vamping out either.
In his voiceover narration recorded long after the fact, Lestat refers to Daniel in the past tense and says this incident sparked an unquenchable hatred of him within the journalist that had dire consequences. (Can’t say I like hearing that!) But he’s smug about the prank he pulled, which itself seems to be in retaliation for Daniel’s insistence on asking him about his childhood stutter despite agreeing not to do it anymore.
But Lestat opened the door. In telling the truth about Nicolas — well, mostly; you never get the whole truth from Lestat — he conjured up the mental ghost of Magnus. The nosferatu’s taunting presence forces Lestat to confront the truth about his turning. He was never offered a choice, not even the desperate choice one might make to avoid dying. Magnus snatched him from his bed, dumped him in a dungeon full of dead men who looked just like him, sexually assaulted him, then slit his own throat to send blood pouring into Lestat’s screaming mouth, forcing him to swallow it. Lestat wasn’t made into a vampire, he was raped into one. The memory causes him to flip his car at high speed.
But there’s always the music to pull him through. Who cares that the band isn’t going anywhere? He really loves this stuff. At his next performance he sees visions of Nicolas and Magnus watching as he floats in the air during his guitar solo, amazing the audience and the band alike. “You can’t fuck away the loneliness,” the lyrics admonish.
Magnus, we know, burned himself not long after making Lestat his sole fledgling. But another monster, even by vampire standards, is still out there. Known as Bruce when he abducted, raped, and tortured Louis’s vampire sibling and ward Claudia (Delainey Hayles), he now goes by Killer and runs Detroit’s weak-ass coven. Louis makes mincemeat of the entire crew, rips out a few of Killer’s vertebrae and scatters them across the room, dislocates his jaw, then forces him to sit and listen to the pages of Claudia’s diary in which she describes the horrors she endured at this creature’s hands. Then Louis sets those pages on fire, and sets Bruce on fire with the pages. Like Lestat with his earliest vampire companions, Louis still sees Claudia everywhere he goes.
This episode’s story beats are polyrhythmic. On the surface, this is Lestat at his bitchiest, and Daniel as well, as they spar to come out on top in their adversarial interview-subject relationship. Lestat lies and laughs about it. He pretends to cry, then tears up for real when he hears his mother having sex with his own double. It’s all as catty as his nuke-from-orbit assessment of the Toronto skyline, or his banter with Gabriella and Armand in the theater long ago.
But it’s matched with tremendous earnestness. Lestat’s love for Nicolas is obvious and sincere. In a weird way so is his empathy for his maker: He imagines Magnus singing his song in cheesy music-video form, like he’s Meat Loaf and not the monster who turned Lestat into a monster himself.
Lestat’s victimization is crosscut with Louis’s narration of Claudia’s even more horrible experience, weaving together the two very different vampires in a darkly intimate way. Similarly, Killer’s demise offers us a sense of vampiric justice denied Lestat by his own maker.
Even Daniel gets in on the daddy issues. He was turned by Armand in revenge for outing him as the architect of Claudia’s death, then immediately abandoned. Fortunately, he’s a freelance journalist, so he’s used to it, but it still sucks. Armand, meanwhile, has tracked down the band’s ex-guitarist Alex at a 12-step meeting, and ends the episode staring right into the camera just as Lestat and Daniel had been doing all episode long. The effect is disarming with those inhuman eyes shining at you.
This is challenging, layered material, written like profane poetry and glittering like Lestat’s eyeshadow. A show like that doesn’t come around often, not even during this very strong year for TV. There’s something special in this combination of glitter and gore.
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
