Women's Lifestyle July 20, 2026 0 Comments

Sam Reid’s Vampire Lestat Shocker: How Self-Love Transformed a Dark Icon Forever

Ever wonder what happens when a brooding vampire swaps brooding for backstage passes and amps up the drama to rock star levels? Well, AMC’s take on Anne Rice’s vampire saga just flipped the script like a pro wrestler pulling off a surprise move. For two seasons, we watched through Louis’s eyes, as his love-hate saga with Lestat unfolded like a gothic ballad. But season three—now flashy titled The Vampire Lestat—throws the spotlight firmly on the vampire himself, turning our suave antihero into the frontman of a wildly erratic, even chaotic, tour documentary-style thrill ride. It’s kinda like if your favorite vampire suddenly decided to chase stardom instead of eternal night—and things got messy. From irreverent mind games to deep regrets over a world left in ruins, this season packs surprises that pull you right into Lestat’s complex, tormented psyche. Curious how this all came to be? Ready to unpack the layers behind the glam and the grit? Dive into my chat with Sam Reid, who’s taken the helm as this chaotic vamp-rocker, and let’s unravel what makes The Vampire Lestat both a headbanging romp and a somber reckoning. LEARN MORE

12 min read

Warning: Spoilers for the entire third season of The Vampire Lestat ahead

In its first two seasons, AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire largely kept Lestat de Lioncourt on the sidelines. Back then, the show took on the perspective of Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), who, in an “interview” with reporter Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), told the sometimes romantic, sometimes harrowing tale of how he was turned into a vampire. In that story, Lestat (Sam Reid) was both Louis’s greatest love and his greatest tragedy, a charismatic vampire who nevertheless ended up ruining Louis’ life. But in its third season, everything about this story has shifted—even its name. Now retitled The Vampire Lestat, the Rolin Jones-created drama puts Lestat center stage, giving the vampire we thought we already knew a chance to tell his side of the story. Needless to say, it’s a far cry from what came before.

While Interview with the Vampire fully embraced the gothic melodrama origins of its source material, The Vampire Lestat ramps up the energy, taking on the frenzied format and pace of a coked-out tour documentary, with Lestat (and his mates in the band The Vampire Lestat) as its central rock star. Taking place in the present day, the season finds Lestat reeling from his less-than-flattering portrayal in Daniel’s in-universe book. In some twisted mind game, he hires the author to film him as he parades across the United States claiming to be the real vampire unveiled in the book (even if the Americans who fashion themselves “fans” believe it just to be an act). The result is a show that’s “very erratic and very irrational and full of discombobulated thoughts,” as Sam Reid puts it.

And yet, by the end of Sunday’s season finale, we have learned that the hard-partying rock star persona was always just an act. In “The Failures”—a group of recordings taped by Lestat sometime in the future and used as voice-over narration throughout the course of the third season—the vampire expresses regret for how he’s behaved, especially now that his actions have led to the destruction of the world as we know it. The season’s penultimate episode ends with Lestat’s beheading and the finale largely follows the Brat Prince on an existential trip through a quasi-purgatory, as he’s forced to sit at a long table with all but one of his fledglings (including his first love, Nicolas de Lenfent; his mother-cum-lover, Gabriella; and Louis himself), confronting head-on all the ways in which he has harmed those he claims to care for most.

It’s a surprisingly melancholic end for such a raucous season. But it feels appropriate for a story that, at its heart, was always about one vampire’s fruitless attempts to ignore his traumas until he was left with no choice but to face them all at once. Though it may not conclude the way Lestat would’ve wanted—he was against society’s destruction, all things considered—it does offer him some semblance of absolution. After all, Lestat only ever wanted to be understood.

Ahead of the season’s July 19 finale, Harper’s Bazaar hopped on Zoom with Sam Reid to talk about taking the reins as the show’s new central character, embracing his character’s new identity as a rock star (live singing included), what it was like to build sexual chemistry with a character who’s also his mother, and why he’s happy to see how engaged The Vampire Lestat fandom has become.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt, Jennifer Ehle as Gabriella, Sarah Swire as TC, Maura Grace Athari as Antoinette Brown, Christopher Heyerdahl as Marius and Christopher Heyerdahl as Marius

What was your first reaction when you found out that Season Three was going to be told from your perspective and that there were going to be these huge stylistic changes?

I sort of knew it was going to be like this because we were always following the books in a chronological way. But it’s a very big book, so there was a lot of conversation about how we were going to frame it and what the distillation of the story was going to be.

The way we’ve adapted these books, we’ve pulled from different books at different times. Even though the first two seasons of the show were called Interview with the Vampire, we still pulled from The Vampire Armand and The Vampire Lestat and [Tales of] The Body Thief and stuff like that. But this book—and potential subsequent seasons—is probably where they’ve amalgamated different plots and pulled in from different books the most. And so, for me, it was more interesting to think about how they were going to distill a very dense book into a seven-episode arc, what they were going to take from it, and where they were leading to.

Though this season takes on the visual aesthetic of a rock documentary, it’s really framed around this recording of “The Failures,” which appears to be Lestat’s self-narrated memoir-on-tape, in which he tells the story behind the documentary that’s also being made at the same time. What did you think of that approach?

The concept of “The Failures” and the recordings required a lot of interrogation and discussion. One of the most interesting things about Lestat as a character is that he is adamant about washing off any trauma that he carries. Anything traumatizing that he might have experienced, he refuses to let that be his defining characteristic. That’s really built into the structure of the character, both from Anne Rice and the way that Rolin [Jones] and Hannah [Moscovitch] have taken him forward. But obviously, eventually, that’s going to pull you down until you can’t keep going anymore, and you will have to accept a few things. So it was really interesting to see how this character is examining how he has fully failed and how his failures have led to … you know … the destruction of the world.

In the season premiere, “The Failures” is sold at auction to an unknown buyer. A lot of the circumstances around its recording are still quite murky. How much is the audience really meant to know about what’s going on with these mysterious tapes?

So, Lestat is making these recordings for whoever he’s narrating to, and he’s trying to give them a sense of what it actually felt like for him during these events leading up to this destructive event. Therefore, “The Failures” should give the audience a point of view of going into this very mentally unstable creature’s mind and being pulled in one million ways, where certain things aren’t taken as seriously as they should be and other things hit you very hard and very fast. It’s slowly unraveling until he completes his recordings and then does whatever he’s going to do with them. But that’s part of the joy of the show, is that it is a sort of puzzle piece. Once the larger context of it all comes together, I think it will be quite cool.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt and Steven G. Norfleet as Paul De Pointe Du Lac

What was it like stepping into the shoes of a rock star? It’s a much different Lestat.

It’s wild, isn’t it? I always knew we were going to go there, but I didn’t know we were going to go as heavily into it as we ended up doing. It was a totally different mindset and way of approaching the material, but I thought it was so much fun. When you’re in a series for a long time, you want different things—and this definitely provided that in spades.

Was there anything difficult about that transition?

We started working on the music first [before filming], but some elements were hard because the show is not a musical. Where you’d sometimes have a huge amount of dialogue to convey a whole bunch of emotions, now you have a song to do that. So we were thinking, How do you make it not feel like musical theater? Obviously, the songs helped because they’re not really [rooted in musical theater], but it was still complex. For better or for worse, I fought sometimes to make sure that I was singing them live so that it felt more like a real scenario of a real character having to sing to try and process their emotions.

But it was a lot of work. I had to deliver all these amazing things, and in doing so, try to honor [music writer] Daniel Hart and the gigantic breadth of work that he put into these songs. The songs got better and better because Lestat becomes a better musician, and there are so many songs that I think are insanely good that have never seen the light of day but that we might see later.

At least part of Lestat’s motivation to become a rock star is in response to the release of Daniel’s Interview with the Vampire book. He doesn’t like how he was portrayed in it because, of course, the book made him look really bad. In your opinion, does Lestat think of himself as a good person? Or, if not, does he think of himself as being worthy of salvation? Why is he so surprised about how Louis recounted their history?

Fundamentally, no. He doesn’t believe that he deserves salvation. I think that’s the core of the long table [scene in the finale], is that he fundamentally has a lot of self-loathing and unresolved issues in his life, which he has not allowed himself time to process and understand.

With the rock star thing and his anger at the portrayal of himself in the book, it’s not necessarily that he feels betrayed. I think there are a couple things he’s upset about. But also, it’s just a very confronting thing. He loves Louis more than anybody in the world. That’s his soulmate. There’s so much of Lestat that wants to be seen by Louis and wants to be loved by Louis, but he fundamentally feels unlovable. And he is a brat. He is very narcissistic. But once you get to the core of the narcissism, I think it’s just pure self-loathing—it’s a front upon a front.

But at the long table, right at the end—right at the point of his death (and whether it’s his mind or a real space is inconclusive)—Louis’s brother Paul says to him, “He does love you. He has difficulty saying it, but he does love you.” It’s very important that it is Paul [who says it], because that’s the last person that Louis says he loved, and then he killed himself.

Lestat can hear that and see and understand that this person whose love he’s actively sought so hard—and [who he] then felt so rejected by with the release of this book … actually does love him. The reason why Louis can’t say it is because he’s got his own issues about saying that, because the last person he said it to was his brother, and his brother committed suicide. So Lestat now has an understanding about why he can’t receive that from Louis.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt, Gage Munroe as Young Lestat and Shepherd Munroe as Young Lestat

Soulmates or not, Lestat and Louis spend quite a bit of this season apart. Instead, we see this very different dynamic play out between Lestat and Daniel Molloy as Molloy gives Lestat his own “interview” for the tour documentary. Though Interview with the Vampire was still subjective—we were hearing Louis’s side of the story—I was fascinated by just how much The Vampire Lestat played with the concept of truth, since we, as the audience, can see just how much Lestat is lying to Molloy, even though Lestat hired him. What was the motivation there? How do you see their relationship?

Lestat doesn’t care about Daniel. I mean, he cares about any vampire trying to understand their vampire nature. … But he’s not necessarily ever going to give Molloy anything truthful. … He’s just a cat playing with a mouse with Molloy. But he also acknowledges how that was such a failure in itself, right? Because the way that he plays Molloy leads to his own beheading, and leads to Louis’s beheading, and leads to Molloy taking sides with Armand—and that beheading, somehow, leads to the destruction of the world.

That’s what he’s doing with “The Failures.” From the beginning, he’s stacking up all of these horrible things that he has done—all of these mistakes that he has made—that led to the destruction of the world. And I think he is quite a self-aware character. He can acknowledge fault. He does that over and over again. He doesn’t try to justify his decisions. He doesn’t say, “This is why I did it.” He says, “I was wrong. I made a mistake. I have regrets.”

That’s why that line “serving cunt has its consequences” is much more deep than it may appear. Because Lestat [knows he] was being a brat. He was annoyed with Molloy about the way he wrote the book, and he was acting out in his own self-interest. Also, he can see that Armand is heavily glorified within the book, because it was written by Molloy. He knows there’s a complexity in that relationship, and he’s always digging at Daniel to try and get to the bottom of that.

Because Interview with the Vampire was largely told through Louis’s eyes, we didn’t really get to learn much about Lestat’s previous lovers. In The Vampire Lestat, however, we see who he was with people like Nicky and Armand, and it reveals a different side to him. How did you calibrate how Lestat would change as a partner from person to person?

Well, he has a lot of relationships, but they’re always different. And obviously, these are also different points of his life. Nicky, [for example], is his first love, so there was a lot of young naivety and a lot of hope in that relationship. He was still a human being with Nicky, and there’s this fiery love there. It’s a very beautiful relationship, but one that hurts him a lot. And retrospectively, you’re able to show that Nicky is very linked to Claudia for Lestat. A lot of his anxieties and concerns about Claudia were shaped through how his relationship with Nicky was built. Nicky had bipolar [disorder]. He had a lot of issues and did not take to being a vampire, so Lestat was very concerned about that happening to Claudia.

With Armand and Lestat, I think there’s so much left to explore. They have a much more complicated relationship than either of them are willing to show yet. I don’t even think Lestat is able to really explain his relationship with Armand yet. I hope we get to see that in more detail later because their relationship is pretty wild.

But Louis is his soulmate. That’s where you see him the most “himself.” His guards are always down because his heart is always wide open with Louis. He’s not trying to protect himself around Louis. He’s always open to being destroyed. And that’s where you get to the center of it, since his self-love comes from understanding Louis better, right before he dies.

This season also notably introduces Gabriella, who we find out is both Lestat’s birth mother and his on-again, off-again lover. What was it like diving into this incestuous dynamic?

Well, Lestat loves his mother so deeply, as most people do. But he’s also villainized her in his mind—in his story—because she has destroyed that sacred union of mother and child by sexualizing it. He doesn’t get there until the very end of episode seven, but he does eventually realize that she’s using him vicariously to kind of live out this whole other world and that his best interests were never at the center of hers. So I think he can now reexamine. But, yes, it’s a really messy relationship. When you look for maternal love and it’s given back as sexual love, all sorts of chaos ensues. For Lestat, it has obviously linked back to his fear of abandonment.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt and Jennifer Ehle as Gabriella

During the three seasons that you’ve been embodying Lestat, you and the show have amassed a rabid fan base. That’s not always guaranteed, especially when you’re working from source material as beloved as Anne Rice’s novels. How does it feel to be living up to those expectations? What do you hope fans continue to get from your performance?

It’s a huge gamut of emotions, really. I try to keep that separate in my mind as much as I possibly can, because for every person who is happy, there’s always somebody who’s not happy.

But I’m doing a play in Sydney at the moment, and at most performances, there’s always a group of people who love the show. I don’t know what they thought about the play, but they love the show. [Laughs.] I’ve gotten to see so much art and see how it inspires people. Just last night, I met this young person who had written an entire analysis, by hand, of the show, in this beautiful book. It was just pages and pages of analysis. I think it’s astonishing that it can inspire other people to make their own art in whatever way they want. I’m very happy for that to be there. But I can’t let it infect the work that I do. Whether they love it or they hate it, it’s not for me to take that on. It’s for them. And I want them to have it and I want them to engage with it.

After making such a drastic stylistic leap from the first two seasons of the show formerly known as Interview with the Vampire, would you be willing to switch things up again?

It makes it fun for us, and if the show goes on, we’ll continue to do that. I think each season should feel like an entirely new show in itself. It makes it a very engaging thing to go to work every day and be like, “What now?”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.