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 within Anne Rice’s lush, grandiose world of bloodsuckers and spell-casters as interpreted by creator and showrunner Rolin Jones. But it’s also a meta description of the show, which has undergone a remodel to accompany a change in perspective so total it extends to the name. “Interview With the Vampire” is (un)dead. Long live “The Vampire Lestat.”
Overhauls of established, well-liked shows are high-risk endeavors. Just this past week, HBO’s “Euphoria” ended on a sour note, having taken a high-school show and unsuccessfully reimagined it as a neo-Western. But turning “Interview With the Vampire” into a mock documentary centered on the title character (Sam Reid), who’s simply decided to become a rock star in his third century of existence, isn’t as big a leap for the series as it sounds. “Interview” has always indulged in excess and a flair for the dramatic, qualities channeled just as well by the onetime French aristocrat’s new Iggy Pop persona as they were by last season’s vampiric theater troupe. Perhaps even better: as “The Vampire Lestat” reaches new heights of operatic emotion and gleeful depravity, music starts to feel like a way to express what mere words and images cannot.
The first two seasons of “Interview,” of course, were framed as a dialogue between journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, having the time of his life) and Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), reimagined by Jones and his collaborators as a gay Black man from World War I-era New Orleans recounting his seduction by a certain beguiling European. The second installment, which aired in 2024, incorporated Louis’ post-Lestat rebound Armand (Assad Zaman), and shifted more of the action to the present tense, where Louis and Armand’s relationship began to fracture and Armand made Daniel another immortal creature of the night.
“The Vampire Lestat” still hopscotches around in time, but even more freely and less predictably than its predecessors. There are flashbacks to Lestat’s childhood in 18th-century Europe, in which we learn he had a traumatic stutter and once killed eight wolves with just a musket and his bare hands. But between that origin story and Lestat’s North American tour with his reluctant human band as captured by Daniel, who interviews Lestat in his capacity as the documentary’s producer the way he once peppered Louis and Armand with invasive questions, there are cutaways to the band’s formation a couple years prior, and to Lestat’s emergence from 80 years of exile following his breakup with Louis. In keeping with the series’ maximalism, there’s even a framing device layered on top of this framing device: an opening flash-forward depicts the (posthumous, it’s implied) auctioning off of Lestat’s estate, including an audio memoir of sorts dubbed “The Failures.” Oh, and there’s also incest.
Lestat’s mother Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) is the sort of authorial creation a more conservative adaptation might shy away from, the way Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” movies seem unlikely to turn Timothée Chalamet into a giant sandworm. But we live in a post-“Game of Thrones” world, and besides, Jones has never been in the business of sanding down Rice’s edges to make her work more franchise-friendly. (That strategy is counterproductive, as we saw last year with the generic and quickly canceled “Talamasca.”) If anything, “Interview” — and now “The Vampire Lestat” — loves to heighten Rice’s world. Just as the homoerotic charge between Louis and Lestat is here a full-blown, decades-spanning love affair, the Oedipal frisson between Lestat and the parent he saved from consumption by giving what vampires call “the gift” is, uh, explicit.
Ehle is a wonderful addition to an already stacked cast, swanning about in a razor-sharp bob and operating in the show’s proud tradition of questionably accurate but undoubtedly entertaining accent work. (Sometimes, Gabriella sounds Italian, as she’s supposed to; sometimes, she’s got an Eastern European, Countess Dracula thing going on.) And as the newly centered protagonist, Reid keeps Lestat’s peacocking vanity — as the perfectionist frontman frogmarching his colleagues through marathon recording sessions, he’s now an almost literal diva — while imbuing the character with previously obscured vulnerability and hurt.
But in terms of new characters, it’s the music, much of it original songs by in-house composer Daniel Hart, that makes the biggest impression. (You can stream “Butterscotch Bitch” online right now!) Preening onstage for fans he deems the Beautiful Unwell, a moniker I hope quickly transposes onto the show’s online evangelists, Lestat howls lyrics like “Why the long face, pretty baby / I’ve got long fangs, come appraise me.” As Molloy gradually succeeds in puncturing Lestat’s aloof, arrogant outer shell, his sound correspondingly shifts from assaultive punk to more contemplative ballads.
“Interview With the Vampire” has always been a writerly show, and “The Vampire Lestat” remains so, with scripts full of dense, tongue-twisting dialogue often shouted at full volume. (One Lestat monologue begins by describing “the vainglorious homogeny of the Toronto skyline.”) But music gives the show another medium with which to channel the deep feelings of characters whose passions run as hot as their blood runs cold. The songs are how Lestat processes the highs and lows of a life he deems “a three century train wreck”: his rebirth via kidnapping and assault by a creepy, lonely older vampire; the loss of his and Louis’ adopted daughter Claudia (Delainey Hayles), which continues to haunt them both; his messy, protracted breakup, which involves the vampire version of divorce lawyers squaring off in a highly amusing negotiation.
Besides, in its surreal fantasy and perverse sense of humor, “Interview” already operated like a musical in spirit. In “The Vampire Lestat,” the songs slip neatly inside a world that already allows for possibilities like the ghost of a woman in the midst of a drug overdose lecturing Lestat while she floats on the ceiling. Lestat justifies his, uh, connection with Gabriella by arguing that vampires transcend petty human concepts like conventional morality. That’s certainly true, in the sense that entanglements among ancient, telepathic beings play out on a time scale us humans struggle to comprehend. But if the project of “Interview With the Vampire” was to make these interactions legible for those of us with finite lifespans, “The Vampire Lestat” adds a new weapon to that arsenal, one that lands with all the force of a stake through the heart.
“The Vampire Lestat” will premiere on AMC and AMC+ on June 7 at 9 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.