Throughout the third season of AMC's Interview with the Vampire, characters speak with equal parts dread, anticipation, and awe of something called "The Great Transformation." The phrase has its own meaning in the lush, grandiose world of bloodsuckers and spellcasters created and depicted by Rolin Jones, as interpreted by creator and showrunner Anne Rice. But it's also a meta-description of a series that has undergone a restructuring befitting a shift in perspective so profound that it extends to the very title. Interview with the Vampire is (un)dead. Long live The Vampire Lestat!
Reimagining popular and well-known series is a risky business. Last week, HBO's Euphoria ended on a sour note: the high school drama was unsuccessfully reimagined as a neo-Western. But turning Interview with the Vampire into a mockumentary centered on a protagonist (Sam Reid) determined to become a rock star in his third century isn't as big a leap for the series as it might seem. Interview has always been distinguished by its excess and flair for the dramatic, qualities equally at home in the former French aristocrat's portrayal of Iggy Pop and last year's vampire theater troupe. Perhaps even better: as The Vampire Lestat reaches new heights of operatic emotion and gleeful depravity, music begins to feel like a way to express what mere words and images cannot.
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The first two seasons of The Interview, of course, centered on the dialogue between journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, enjoying life) and Louis de Pointe-du-Lac (Jacob Anderson), whom Jones and his colleagues reimagined as a Black gay man from World War I-era New Orleans recounting his seduction by a charming European. The second season, set in 2024, introduced Armand (Assad Zaman), who had recovered from his breakup with Lestat, and moved the action to the present, where Louis and Armand's relationship had begun to crumble, and Armand had transformed Daniel into yet another immortal creature of the night.
The Vampire Lestat still moves through time, but even more freely and less predictably than its predecessors. It includes flashbacks to Lestat's childhood in 18th-century Europe, in which we learn that he suffered from a crippling stutter and once killed eight wolves with a musket with his bare hands. But between this origin story and Lestat's North American tour with his reluctant band, captured by Daniel, who interviews Lestat as a documentary producer just as he once peppered Louis and Armand with intrusive questions, there are cutscenes to the band's formation a couple of years earlier and Lestat's emergence from 80 years of exile after his breakup with Louis. In keeping with the show's maximalism, it even employs another framing device: the opening flashforward shows the (implied) posthumous auction of Lestat's possessions, including a sort of audio memoir called "Failures." Oh, and there's incest.
Lestat's mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), is the kind of auteur creation a more conservative adaptation might have eschewed, just as Denis Villeneuve's Dune films are unlikely to turn Timothée Chalamet into a giant sandworm. But we live in a post-Game of Thrones world, and besides, Jones has never sought to smooth out Rice's rough edges to make her work more franchise-friendly. (That strategy is counterproductive, as we saw last year with the pedestrian and quickly canceled The Talamasca.) If anything, The Interview—and now The Vampire Lestat—are loved strengthen Rice's world. Just as the homoerotic tension between Louis and Lestat here represents a full-blown, long-term love affair, the Oedipal trepidation between Lestat and the parent he saved from consumption by giving them what vampires call "the gift" is, er, explicit.
Ele is a wonderful addition to an already stellar cast, sporting a perfectly coiffed bob and continuing the show's proud tradition of questionably precise but undeniably entertaining accents. (Sometimes Gabriella speaks with an Italian accent, as expected; sometimes she adopts an Eastern European accent, like Countess Dracula.) And as the new lead, Reed maintains Lestat's ostentatious vanity—as a perfectionist frontman leading his bandmates through marathon recording sessions, he's now almost a diva—while imbuing the character with a previously hidden vulnerability and pain.
But when it comes to the new characters, it's the music that makes the biggest impression, much of it original songs by staff composer Daniel Hart. (You can listen to "Butterscotch Bitch" online right now!) Lestat, strutting onstage in front of fans he calls "Beautifully Sick" (a nickname I hope will quickly translate to the show's online evangelists), belts out lines like "What a long face you have, pretty girl / I've got long fangs, come check me out." As Molloy gradually chips away at Lestat's aloof, arrogant exterior, his sound shifts accordingly, from aggressive punk to more contemplative ballads.
«Interview with the Vampire has always been a meticulously crafted play, and The Vampire Lestat remains so today, with scripts full of complex, difficult-to-pronounce dialogue, often delivered at the top of his lungs. (One of Lestat's monologues begins with a description of "the vain homogeneity of the Toronto skyline.") But the music gives the play another way to convey the deep emotions of characters whose passions are as strong as their blood. The songs help Lestat navigate the ups and downs of a life he calls "a three-century train wreck": his rebirth through kidnapping and attack by a creepy, lonely old vampire; the loss of his adopted daughter, Claudia (Delaney Hales), who continues to haunt him and Louis; his protracted and complicated breakup, in which the vampire version of divorce lawyers engages in some hilarious bickering.
Moreover, with its surreal fantasy and twisted sense of humor, Interview with the Vampire already had the spirit of a musical. In The Vampire Lestat, the songs fit seamlessly into a world that already allows for various possibilities, such as the ghost of a woman overdosing on drugs lecturing Lestat while hovering on the ceiling. Lestat justifies his, er, connection with Gabriella by claiming that vampires transcend such petty human notions as conventional morality. This is certainly true in the sense that the interactions between ancient telepathic beings unfold on a timeline difficult for us humans to comprehend. But if Interview with the Vampire's goal was to make these interactions understandable to those of us with limited lifespans, The Vampire Lestat adds a new weapon to that arsenal, one that strikes with the force of a stake through the heart.
The Vampire Lestat premieres on AMC and AMC+ on June 7 at 9:00 PM ET, with the remainder of the series airing weekly on Sundays.
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