It finally happened. “Interview with the Vampire” has become “The Vampire Lestat.” Season three of the AMC series goes wild with a full transformation into the long-awaited, much-anticipated adaptation of the second book in The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. Books 1 and 2 have seen feature film renditions, but no one knew how to make the wholly villainous Lestat’s heel turn work. It took creator, writer, and showrunner Rolin Jones to envision a storyline that requires the Vampire Himself (Sam Reid) to narrate the events of his pseudo-punk, alternative rock-god era. He’s on tour and on the road to a collision with the Vampire Queen, Akasha (Sheila Atim), but first, he has some emotional baggage to unpack. To paraphrase our complicated protagonist: This is the story of how Lestat woke the Queen of the Damned and unleashed her wrath upon the world.
Wait a moment. Before I attempt to explain the blood-fueled, sensually sardonic madness you’re about to witness, there’s something you must understand. With “The Vampire Chronicles,” Rice has written a series about a toxic, romantically incestuous, overpowered group of immortal “friends” who snipe at each other throughout the centuries while falling desperately in and out of love. And yes, that is the franchise’s charm. Whether on the page or the screen.
Secondly, Jacob Anderson’s Louis is still very much a major player in Lestat’s story, but he has a B-plot (literally called Side B) of his own. Anderson is gravitational, making Reid’s supernova brighter. Thus, more time with Louis is for the better. Now let me tell you how it all goes down.
Lestat and Louis have formed a lovers-to-friends camaraderie until the former learns that Louis confessed their secrets to Daniel (Eric Bogosian), who turned their story into a book. A best-seller that reads more like creative non-fiction than a balanced perspective. It turns out that Louis, but also Daniel, might be unreliable narrators. Friends, Lestat is not the character we met in the first two seasons. That was Louis’ interpretation—both villainized and idealized. From the start of S3, we realize we’re meeting the Vampire Lestat for the first time. While his biographers didn’t lie, they never knew the entire story. Lestat feels attacked, and that’s never good, but he vents his rage by taking over a rock band.
Daniel is making a documentary, following Lestat and his band on a cross-country tour. The first three episodes are as campy as you’d expect from the musings of a self-deprecating narcissist, but the added humor of the mock-rockumentary styling gives an allure that’s “This Is Spinal Tap” mixed with “What if Billy Idol was a vampire?”
Yet the new POV and campiness aren’t the only reasons “The Vampire Lestat” is a departure from “Interview With the Vampire.” Do not doubt it’s just as depraved, soaked in unceasing obsession, violence, and emotional overkill as before. However, when you reach Ep 4, something deeper emerges from the thrills and the winkingly self-aware humor. The loneliness of being a vampire and the centuries of shameful secrets begin to burn brightly.
That’s when this re-envisioned series really starts to cook. The music takes a turn (for the better), mirroring Lestat’s changing awareness of who he is and what the past has cost him. The confessions and reveals are as rattling as they are gleeful. Most of all, the truth about these vampires emerges to a finer degree. They want desperately to be loved, but love is only meant to last a hundred years or so, and then to persist in absence. That truth is their torture, and it’s what makes “The Vampire Lestat”—the man and show—such a perverse delight.
Throughout the first two seasons, we are meant to believe these vampires are monsters divorced from their humanity. Yet, during the first six episodes of the 7-episode season, we learn that they may be more purely human than we are. Humane? No, but they are overwhelmingly human; every emotion and foible is ratcheted up into overflow. Until everything they feel pours out in unfiltered and frightening forms. It’s not that they’ve lost the sense of what it means to be mortal; it’s that the absence of mortality intensifies every emotion. That’s why they’re uncontrollable beings of lust, love, lechery, cruelty, compassion, and yearning. The funhouse mirrors the series holds up to our humanity, which is what makes “The Vampire Lestat” so compelling, even as it taunts us with our taboos.
It’s both wicked and charming while remaining unrepentantly dangerous. That’s hard to look away from. As a gothic alt-rock opera caught somewhere between an ’80s that never was and a ’90s that will never be, “The Vampire Lestat” outdoes season 2. The actors seem to have more fun, spinning their characters in new directions. For example, the resentful Daniel or Armand (Assad Zaman). What are we going to do with Armand?
Of course, the history of Louis and Lestat can’t be relitigated without their guilt towards Claudia (Delainey Hayles). We also meet the Vampire Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), who has twists in store for us. This season seethes in its savagery and a spiraling understanding of everything that made Lestat who he is—setting us up for who he will become when the Queen of the Damned rises. Can he evolve into more than “a three-century train wreck”? We’ll see.
Season three of “Interview with the Vampire” is reborn as “The Vampire Lestat,” an eternal playground for the malicious gods of rock and ruin. Get ready for another ride on their mood swings. Big swings, big feels: a bloody good time.
Six episodes screened for review. Premieres June 7th on AMC and AMC+.
