‘The Vampire Lestat:’ Star Sam Reid, Creator On Staging Their Favorite Song of the Season and Then Getting the ‘F— Out of the Way’

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Toronto,” the third episode of “The Vampire Lestat,” now streaming on AMC+.

Don’t say Lestat de Lioncourt never gave you anything. He just doesn’t let you keep it.

In the third episode of “The Vampire Lestat,” AMC’s rebranded continuation of “Interview With the Vampire,” aspiring rock star Lestat (Sam Reid) finally sits still long enough to give hungry journalist-turned-vampire-turned-documentarian Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) a real interview with intense depth, vulnerability and even a few bloody tears. It is a soul-beating sequence forLestat, who unspools the long-teased story of his fledgling and first love, Nicolas de Lenfent (Joseph Potter), whom he turned into a vampire only to watch him crumble under the weight of the dark gift.

It’s an admission that leaves Molloy salivating over what he thinks he’s pulled from the unknowable Lestat (more on that later), and it’s something series creator Rolin Jones believes is among the show’s greatest achievements.

“Basically, we just wanted to get the fuck out of the way for Sam,” Jones tells Variety. “I think it is, of all the episodes of all the seasons, just an illustration of what Sam can do as an actor. This is his finest hour in the whole show.”

But it was also the hardest episode to crack this season. “It was the one that took us the longest, and the one where AMC was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” Jones says. “It’s where a little bit of the backlog started to happen, because there were a couple of stabs at it that weren’t making it.”

What ultimately unlocked it was composer Daniel Hart’s song, “The Loneliness,” which closes out the episode and gives Lestat an anthem both to ward off and welcome in the muses that haunt him. While the interview with Molloy is largely about Lestat’s guilt over his failure to save Nicky, it opens the floodgates to more than just a reckoning with his first love. Throughout the episode, Lestat finally rejects the callous taunting of his mother/lover, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), who has animalistic sex with his doppelganger just to disrupt his interview; he sings “Your Biggest Fan,” staged as a campy ‘80s music video about his predatory maker Magnus (Damien Atkins); and he recalls the torture he suffered at the hands of Magnus and the moment he was turned into a vampire.

Lestat tries to run from it all, but Magnus’ ghost continues to poke and prod at him until he can’t take it anymore and he purposefully wrecks his car. From the flames, he emerges like a blond, leather-clad phoenix with an epiphany. Even if he doesn’t sell out arenas, music can be Lestat’s version of ego-driven therapy. He doesn’t have to outrun it if he admits to himself that the loneliness that festers will never go away. “Music, in its purest expression, would make me worse, and then make me better,” Lestat narrates as he takes the stage to debut “The Loneliness.” 

“The song is saying he can’t do anything about the past,” Reid says. “There’s nothing you can do about the loneliness, the suffering, the kind of eternity that you are condemned to wear. It’s always going to be there, so you may as well just link arms with these muses and deal with it.”

The evocative song starts out with Lestat’s signature candor: “You can’t fuck away the loneliness/It’ll wait ’til you’re done/’Til you come/Like a vampire.”

The first time Jones heard the song, he didn’t know how they would even use it in the show yet, but he knew it was everything he wanted from Hart and for Lestat. “When the song came in, I forgot I had done this, but Daniel was at home recording, so we sent him a cake because he just nailed what we’ve been working on for a year and a half in a song,” he says. “It was so perfect that we plastered it on the side of Lestat’s tour bus.”

“Don’t Burn Alone,” a lyric Lestat performs as much for himself as he does for the audience, is, in fact, painted on the side of his tour bus, cementing the importance of the song that both Reid and Jones say is their favorite of the season.

For Lestat, embracing the loneliness has an immediate reaction on the muses lurking in the crowds at his show. Magnus and Gabriella both leave during the song, realizing Lestat is no longer going to let them freely drain his sanity from him, as they have done for centuries. But Nicky stays and watches, amused as Lestat declares his new outlook on life.

“It’s a really beautiful song that can ward them off, yes, but it’s also opening him up in a way and not just letting him move past these demons,” Reid says. “He’s allowing himself to be able to spend more time with them as well.”

In staging it, Jones says they wanted to make it feel like the audience is watching history in the making, not just because Lestat levitates out of musical ecstasy at the end but also because it is one of those you-had-to-be-there moments. To heighten the experience, they turned up the audience’s reaction, even though it competes with Reid’s vocals.

“We mixed it aggressively on the audience’s side, even though it’s probably my favorite song of the year,” Jones says. “It’s an amazing performance, and we wanted it to feel more like something people would ask about years later, like ‘Were you there that night?’ Like the people who follow the world tour of the Grateful Dead.”

The levitation, meanwhile, was a potent nod to something audiences learned when they first met Lestat. “It’s a lovely callback to Season 1, when he’s in pure elation or feeling extreme emotion that he just kind of involuntarily levitates,” Reid says.

Whether it is “The Loneliness” or “Cabbage,” Reid’s other favorite song, Lestat is fully aware he was having a nervous breakdown at this point, and yet he was also sure music could bring him to the other side of it.

“He’s actively going towards the fracturing and the cracking and the snapped-mind mentality because it’s giving him some sense of release or catharsis,” Reid says. “It’s a beautiful way of thinking about it, as opposed to just trying to get healthy. He is trying to get madder.”

That self-awareness is first proclaimed after he stops the interview with Molloy. He tells the journalist that unlike his last vampire subject –– Louis (Jacob Anderson) in Seasons 1 and 2 –– “there are no delusions here.” Lestat knows he’s not selling out stadiums and he’s recklessly speeding down the highway of his own hippocampus on an ego trip. Jones says Anderson has taken to calling it “Lestat’s Id-yssey.” “He’s a very aware creature,” Reid says. “That doesn’t mean he’s not totally arrogant and vain and self-obsessed, but he’s hyper-aware that he’s not all of the things that he wishes he was, and he is willing to admit that to Daniel.”

It’s why he doesn’t give his admissions and vulnerability to Molloy for free or in perpetuity. Ultimately, Molloy learns that what he thought was his greatest interview ever was actually delivered via a vampire wavelength and, therefore, none of it was caught on camera –– something Jones says makes him see Lestat as his enemy moving forward. Reid says that Lestat is playing with Molloy like “a cat plays with a mouse in a cage.” He’s punishing him for publishing Louis’ interview, so he subverts what Molloy thinks he can get out of Lestat by jabbing at his perceived weaknesses, like his stutter. Since Season 2, Reid wasn’t sold on the stutter as a necessary character beat, but came around to the idea when he saw what addressing it in this episode does for Lestat.

“What we discovered, when he finally starts explaining the speech impediment, is that he’s not ashamed of it and he’s not afraid of it,” Reid says. “What he wants to impart and impress on Molloy is how he was able to rid himself of it. He was able to make a change and become somebody else, and do it through hard work and perseverance. ‘It doesn’t matter what I was before, I’m this now.’”