‘Interview with the Vampire’ Finally Gives Us the Real Lestat

Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Interview with the Vampire.

If Interview with the Vampire has a best friend, it’s ambiguity. Based on Anne Rice‘s bestselling The Vampire Chronicles series, subjectivity is the thematic name of the game in this adaptation: examining how our preconceived notions and self-serving biases influence the ways we interpret events and individuals, and how such tendencies intersect with trauma. Since Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), a vampire trying to both heal and run from his violent past, serves as Interview‘s unreliable narrator, every character finds themselves filtered through his viewpoint — and none more so than his direct counterpart, Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), a subject of equal ire and adoration. For two seasons, Interview has avoided showing Lestat through an impartial lens. He’s always presented via someone else’s eyes, and we’re meant to question a framing device tainted by the observer’s emotional baggage. Once the Season 2 finale concludes the interview for which the series is named, Interview embraces objective truth for the first time. The series finally shows us its most mercurial figure, and the answer is the last thing viewers, or Louis, might expect.

‘Interview with the Vampire’ Season 1 Makes Lestat a Mystery

Louis has spent two seasons and many interview sessions mythologizing Lestat with a menacing yet irresistible mystique. To hear Louis tell it, he falls in love with a charming predator capable of both exquisite tenderness and appalling violence. Addressing a character as compelling, contentious, and complicated as Lestat, however, opens the floor to other opinions. Once Armand (Assad Zaman) joins Louis’s modern-day interview with Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) and the latter reads through Claudia’s (Bailey Bass, Delainey Hayles) diaries, Interview assembles a larger picture. If Louis wants Lestat to suffer but can’t seem to permanently cut ties with him, then Claudia adores her vampire sire until their similar personalities clash to the point of no return. Ultimately, she casts Lestat as her story’s recurring villain.

In the past timeline, coven leader Armand fixates on Lestat because the latter’s flagrant disregard for rules sets him apart. Yet Armand’s account of Lestat as a devilish cad is almost too extreme: a romanticized figure elevated into theatricality. And when it comes to the Lestat that Louis hallucinates, Sam Reid merges his regular performance with Jacob Anderon’s mannerisms — indicating a Lestat born straight from Louis’s mind. Even though every version of Lestat is similar, when compared and contrasted, they ring suspiciously discordant; almost as if Louis, Claudia, and Armand bend him into the shape they desire. The only point upon which all three agree is how well Lestat weaponizes his enthralling presence; he’s the undead equivalent of an emotional black hole.

Once Season 2, Episode 7 arrives, the existing cracks in Louis’s story split wide open. Louis admits that he either misremembered or lied about pivotal Season 1 events. The confession casts doubt on Lestat’s culpability in those tremendously influential moments. Viewers already know Louis has obfuscated the truth and shifted blame onto others, but Season 2 forces us to recontextualize our assumptions by emphasizing that no one’s account is trustworthy; Lestat is still an unknown.

Lestat Saves Louis’s Life in ‘Interview with the Vampire’ Season 2

In one of Interview with the Vampire‘s many refreshing twists, Daniel provides the on-ramp that leads to the genuine Lestat. Like every good reporter who fact checks his sources, Daniel provides the receipts and successfully exposes Armand’s 77-year-long lie. As Louis confirms the truth about the events preluding Claudia’s death, Interview interrupts his distress with two brief but telling flashbacks. For the first, the Théâtre des Vampires rehearse the upcoming trial. Lestat participates, obeying Armand’s directions with a disdainfully mocking physicality, until Armand intimates that Claudia will be easily overpowered. Enraged, Lestat shouts, “You have no idea of Claudia’s strength,” and flings the script at Armand in a heartbroken and ultimately futile gesture.

The second objective revelation concerns who actually saved Louis’s life during the trial: Lestat himself. His stricken expression makes his fear for Louis’s safety obvious, as well as the considerable willpower it takes to psychically sway a crowd. Viewers don’t yet know why Lestat cooperated in this sham, but if he can’t save Claudia, at least this act of love won’t be futile — because in Lestat’s mind, this story is a tragic romance.

‘Interview with the Vampire’s Real Lestat Is Haunted

Sam Reid’s exclusive interview with Collider confirms that Louis’s return to New Orleans is the first full scene where Interview with the Vampire assumes a traditional series’ non-partisan viewpoint. “You’re now out of the narrative,” Reid said, “and you’re in real-time. [… Lestat is] told without any sort of subjective or narrative point-of-view framework there.” Compared to the glamorously volatile figure Interview built across two seasons, the reality is starkly different. Louis finds Lestat sitting in a dreary, rotting house one hurricane away from collapse. Lestat plunks at a fake wooden piano in time to a recording, a worn-out robe slung over his hunched shoulders. He looks unkempt and ragged, his thick blonde hair gone lank, his angular cheeks more hollow — probably because Lestat is drinking feral rat’s blood like Louis once did.

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When Lestat stands to talk with Louis face-to-face, it’s almost like something leeched out his charm and left a corpse behind. His eyes are vacant, his depressive and petulant voice a scratchy murmur. He addresses Louis with reserved caution; any muted shades of his familiar joie de vivre rapidly descend into snarling self-loathing and even fear, skirting away from Louis’s approach like a cornered animal. Perhaps worst of all, Lestat claims that his obvious misery isn’t “enduring,” but “living.” That’s quite the sentiment, since he taught Louis that vampiric existence amounts to endless enduring. Lestat also calls New Orleans his home. But, chosen sanctuary or not, who can call this living? Isn’t Lestat enduring the very thing he called a vampire’s worst fate and destroyed lives to avoid: loneliness?

Expecting Louis to rub salt into his wounds, a stunned Lestat’s defenses fall when Louis takes responsibility for his ugliest wrongs. Lestat then crumbles into distraught tears once Louis confirms that he ran into the sun in 1973, a moment Lestat has memorized down to the time difference between San Francisco and New Orleans. Barely able to speak, the symbolic hurricane gathering intensity around them, he confesses how Claudia haunts him. It shows; he’s worn down to bone marrow after spending almost 80 years poisoned by remorse. He overflows with self-loathing and “lives” to punish himself. Why else does he practice for his upcoming tour by playing a fake piano? He’s forbidden himself from indulging in music, the thing that most positively “pierces his soul.”

‘Interview with the Vampire’ Season 3 Could Lean Into Lestat’s Past

Interview with the Vampire‘s finale reveals that Lestat is more deeply broken than anyone could imagine. He knew the consequences of loving Claudia and did so anyway, a feeling Louis and Claudia’s stories hinted at but buried beneath their growing contempt. When Lestat agrees to turn her for Louis, he warns his lover that “you will regret this for the rest of your life.” The prophecy comes back on Lestat as much as Louis. Her betrayal didn’t matter once she was burned alive; Claudia will always be the daughter Lestat failed to protect.

Earlier in the finale, Louis — fresh off murdering the entire coven — corners Lestat inside a tower that once belonged to Magnus, Lestat’s sire. Infamously, Magnus had chained Lestat to the wall for days before forcibly turning him into a vampire. Months after Claudia’s death, Lestat crouches against Magnus’s wall, talking to himself and reflecting on what made him the way he is. The real Lestat isn’t glamorous. He loves too deeply and clings too hard, his trauma manifesting via profoundly toxic and destructive means. “It’s a story of love, not butchery,” Lestat insists during Episode 7’s trial, correcting one of Santiago’s (Ben Daniels) falsehoods. The truth’s been there all along. Since no other character could see it through their respective pains, neither could we.

Maybe the absolving catharsis Lestat and Louis shared in New Orleans will guide Lestat toward an antihero’s redemption. No matter what Season 3 holds, not only does showing a truthful Lestat align with the series’ themes and its approach to Rice’s work, it assembles the stage (pun intended) for the third season’s adaptation of the next two novels, The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned. In Rice’s universe, Lestat sets the story straight with his own memoir after Louis and Daniel publish Interview with the Vampire. In AMC’s world, Lestat’s full story is yet to come — and certainly carries its own subjectivity. Reid told Collider, “Lestat is probably a bit messier than we’ve seen. I think he’s brilliant, and there’s a lot of room to explore him.” Until then, Interview has finally played out its long game: making its most elusive character tragically tangible.

Interview with the Vampire is available to stream on AMC+.

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