As Rolin Jones so eloquently put it in his letter to critics ahead of The Vampire Lestat premiere: “Embrace the weirdness. Wash your bodies in our failures. But never let it be said we didn’t throw everything at the problem.”
Indeed, The Vampire Lestat does throw everything at the problem. And for better or worse, it leaves an impression.
As the first episode reveals, Lestat is a very different problem from Louis de Pointe du Lac. Interview with the Vampire, as the series was formerly known, met with its people and acknowledged that in order to give itself over to Anne Rice’s Brat King properly, Season 3 would have to shed any tatters of decorum or elegance that pretend to exist within Louis’ narrative.
Louis’ version, shockingly tame in comparison to the inner workings of Lestat’s mind, could have continued as the staple tone of the series, and we wouldn’t have blinked an eye. After all, this is Season 3 of an established show and has every right to continue on with a formula that has proven to be widely adored. So what if Lestat’s thoughts are a little more linear? At least we’ll be comfortable.
Alas, when faced with tackling literature’s greatest vampiric enigma in Lestat de Lioncourt or making a comfortable show, Jones boldly chose to risk it all. The series doesn’t just get a title makeover; it decimates the Immortal Universe and rebuilds it in Lestat’s image.
The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 1, “Detroit,” is the result of a mad man. However, it’s not all drugs and sex and undiagnosed personality disorders, not at first.
The premiere treats us to an opening scene that may just be one of the best introductions from the series yet. It is a silent masterclass in telling the audience everything and nothing without saying a word.
The jump into the future establishes that Lestat has mysteriously vanished and his belongings are being posthumously auctioned off to private bidders. The main item up for action is a collection of tapes and recordings detailing Lestat’s documentary he was filming with the help of first-time director Daniel Molloy. As questions of what happened to Lestat arise in that moment, the scene assaults us with shocking frames of Louis and Armand, sporting visible scars from the carnage that is to come.
The flash forward is a chilling way to set up the season’s stakes. It also acts as a formidable farewell, not to Lestat, but to Interview with the Vampire as we knew it.
Because Lestat’s narration quickly overtakes the calm, haunting presence of the auction. In that moment, the show we fell in love with back in New Orleans dies, and an entirely new one is reborn in its place. A show that is somehow more bold and presumptuous than its origin.
Episode 1 spends its time on the road with a modern-day Lestat and the mediocre garage band he has repurposed to serve his newest rock star ambitions.
Unsurprisingly, Lestat isn’t super cool with Louis and Daniel publishing a tell-all expose without his consent. He seeks revenge with a scathing album that will top the charts and ensure Louis cannot escape Lestat’s scathing rise to fame.
In reality, Lestat’s spite tour is a front for an existential crisis that does not exist within such a neat little synopsis. Lestat isn’t telling his story with the familiarity of linear flashbacks and poetic voiceovers, so much as he is throwing us into the blender that is his mind and turning it on.
The first episode is overwhelming and disorienting, no doubt by design.
Everything from the editing to the lighting throws us viciously to the wolves. Lestat’s memories collide with violent force, twisting and turning in on each other until they become unrecognizable. His hallucinations and flashbacks share space, making trips down memory lane feel like an overdose of media rather than a straightforward documentary.
Many plot developments coincide with drug-induced trips and sexually explicit orgies. The show doesn’t just embrace the explicit, perplexing being behind those wicked eyes. It becomes a recreation of Lestat’s mind, plunging us into a kaleidoscope of hallucinations and headache-inducing rants.
Much like Lestat, it’s a lot to experience. For those who fell in love with the darker, gothic vampire drama he once inhabited, it will often be too much.
There’s no shame in yearning for simpler times when all we had to do was start the tape and listen to a story. A fictitious, unreliable story, but a story in all the traditional senses. This season is a drastic change in format, and at times it is bordering too close for comfort to the cringe horror that hollowed out American Horror Story.
The Vampire Lestat is not immortal. It stumbles, and it loses itself in the absurdity of this experiment often. Overlapping visual and audio cues can be difficult to take in, and the drug-fueled benders superficially scrape the surface of Lestat’s backstory.
Yet, the premiere’s scope still demands excellence, even as the show reinvents what excellence will have to look like in this new rock and roll era. For every misstep, there’s a leap in storytelling somewhere else in the script.
The result of living in Lestat’s world is a mixed bag — for now.
With time, we will no doubt come to appreciate the grungy back alleys and seedy drug dens of Toronto as much as we did the cobblestone streets of Europe. But appreciating the actions of a mad man takes time and development. It did with Louis, and unsurprisingly, it will take even longer with Lestat because of all the illusions he has created to avoid who he truly is.
Thankfully, a show like this can afford to reinvent itself and to stumble throughout that process because it has an unwavering cast of professionals at its fingertips. The Vampire Lestat wastes no time dispatching familiar faces while assembling its most diverse supporting ensemble yet to keep this gig in check.
It’s impossible to overlook Sam Reid’s portrayal of Lestat in the premiere. He is a steadfast presence and forever reliable in his genius understanding of what this character demands physically and vocally. Reid handles Lestat with the same effortless, in-depth understanding he always has — with the dial turned all the way up this time. Lestat’s comedic charms wrestle the camp-heavy scenes into digestible drama, and when he gets on stage, it’s pure magic.
And as you will see in the final moments of this premiere, the immortal gift has not affected Daniel Molloy’s comedic timing.
The premiere effortlessly transports him back into the familiar and trusted interviewer role, anchoring us in Daniel’s line of questioning for his documentary. And the episode wastes no time putting him at the center of the action as a newly indestructible vampire. It’s truly magical to watch Molloy run his mouth while punching vampires in the fangs.
Additionally, Noah Reid’s Larry is a standout from our first glimpses of the band. He is the mundane comedic foil to Lestat’s homicidal outbursts, and if he makes it through the season alive, it will be a miracle.
With Claudia gone, The Vampire Lestat is also rectifying the issue of a male-dominated cast with a whole new chapter of captivating female characters. Jeanine Serralles’ lawyer to the stars, Christine Claire, is reminiscent of Season 1 Daniel Molloy. She’s a no-bullshit, straight-talking powerhouse, and it’s going to be a joy seeing her try to rein Lestat in this season. And the definition of scene stealing, Baby Jenks, makes a memorable appearance all too worthy of her book counterpart.
Get a recurring guest role for Baby Jenks immediately!
The Season 3 premiere stares into the eyes of a lunatic and ponders how he truly sees the world. It’s a captivating experience and an uncomfortable one all the same. Wonderful to watch, yet grating to experience.
Everything is on the table, mystery or subcontext be damned. You want to know if vampires pee? Here you go. You want to see how vampire orgies work? You’re in luck. In the absence of Claudia and her childlike innocence, the grieving father turns to an explicit life of incest-ridden benders to cope.
Fascinatingly enough, Lestat through this distorted looking-glass only grazes the weaknesses of other AMC series like Talamasca or Mayfair Witches. Even when muddled in the inventive thralls of drugs and lunacy, Lestat’s story is still miles above the other series attempting to capitalize on Anne Rice’s world.
This first stop on the tour offers up some of the most enigmatic performances on TV, with the promise to continue filling our time with rotten-to-the-core rock and roll chaos. There will be sex, drugs, vampire terf wars, and broken-hearted ballads. Because this show doesn’t just throw everything at the problem, it embraces the problem and all its conflicting, endearing baggage.
For fans ready to buy a ticket to the show, know this: Interview with the Vampire is dead. Long live The Vampire Lestat!
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The first episode of The Vampire Lestat premieres Sunday, June 7 on AMC and AMC+.
