‘The Vampire Lestat’ Costume Designer on Rockstar Wardrobe and Easter Eggs

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “New York,” the fifth episode of “The Vampire Lestat,” now streaming on AMC+.

When costume designer Lex Wood started planning the wardrobe for “The Vampire Lestat” — or Season 3 of “Interview with the Vampire” — she had one word in mind: color. And lots of it, to reflect the mania that is Season 3 narrator and the newly-formed rockstar version of Lestat de Lioncourt, played by Sam Reid. 

Straying away from the red and black typically associated with vampires, Wood, who joined the Anne Rice adaptation’s costume department at the end of Season 2, viewed the shift in narrator as a chance to expand the AMC+ show’s aesthetics. 

“Lestat is a musician,” Wood tells Variety. “Everything is through the lens of the music, so I spent lots of time researching and listening to music by artists that felt like they fit into our vibe, some that were directly referenced by Daniel Hart when he was composing.”

While Wood and Reid were clear that they didn’t want to model Lestat after any one rockstar, to give him the space to be “as individual as he can,” Iggy Pop, David Bowie because of his “changeling and chameleon effort,” and Freddie Mercury were all inspirations when Wood began designing pieces for Lestat and his wayward band members. 

“A lot of the actual design we were doing as we were going,” Wood explains. “We had some pieces I designed before we started, but a lot of it, we’re doing on the hoof, because we’re responding to the script.”

Wood, who says about 75% of the show’s costumes were handcrafted, was also deliberate in the fabric choices. Take Lestat and his mother Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) for example; “They are both made in the 18th century, and I wanted to incorporate as much silk as possible to keep on giving those little pulls of physical thread joining them back to their past. There are a couple of Easter eggs in terms of the use of those fabrics as well,” Wood hints, hoping that the show’s eagle-eyed fans will catch on as the season progresses. 

Much of the rest of the clothing pulled was archival pieces, selected to look a little unique. When it came to dressing the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), Lestat’s other half and the show’s previous narrator, sourcing became slightly difficult. 

“Jacob and I had spoken a lot about Louis’ transition post Armand (Assad Zaman) as we were finishing Season 2, and we wanted his costume to fit in with that,” explains Wood, adding that “he’s no longer being restrained by Armand anymore, and a physical manifestation of that is his use of color and pattern.”

“He’s a very tricky character to achieve, because in theory, he is incredibly rich,” she adds. “He’s a billionaire, and sadly we do everything within a television budget, so we couldn’t always find the most expensive version of everything, but that was really the aim: to have a billionaire look and feel.”

With Season 3 taking place in the aftermath of Louis finding out his lover Armand — and not Lestat as he’d originally thought — was responsible for the death of his adopted daughter Claudia (Delainey Hayles), Louis is “kidding himself, thinking he’s fixed” according to Wood. 

“We wanted to have layers on him, so that we’re showing that bit of hiding,” says Wood, whose team bought and tailored fabric for his outfits, including his trousers and cardigans. “How is he trying to show that he is integrated into society? He’s no longer hiding in a Dubai apartment; he’s walking around and being successful. How does he try to fit into this world?”

Louis’ wardrobe choices are also in part due to his “trying to make himself look normal in front of Regina.”

Regina — a dead ringer for Claudia, and also played by Hayles — takes on impersonating the deceased vampire for a fee, but first encounters Louis while waitressing at a diner in New York. 

Regina’s waitress uniform is a nod to the yellow dress Claudia died in, the similar hue a deliberate emotional choice that also helps her stand out when she’s first introduced through the window pane of the diner. 

“Regina is a bit of an enigma, so we wanted her to feel like every girl you know; you wouldn’t look at her twice when you’re walking down the street, and that’s kind of the point,” says Wood. As Regina begins impersonating Claudia properly, her wardrobe reflects that decision. 

“Regina is pretending to be somebody that she has read about in a book, but she hasn’t seen the vision of Claudia as we’ve seen it, so we wanted to have some very clear nods to some pieces that would have been described by Louis or in the book,” says Wood. “When they go for dinner, she’s purposefully wearing yellow, but she’s not getting the style of the dress exactly right. She wouldn’t have read that in the description.”

Not much is known about who Regina really is, and Wood decided to play it safe and steady with her jewelry. Louis’ jewelry too, remains consistent, with a few incorporations for the new season. 

“We wanted Louis to have a bit of silver, a bit of bling, because we thought that was a choice he would make. He wears a particular bracelet that has notches on it, as though he’s counting his kills that he’s been doing for the Talamasca while being employed by them,” says Wood.  

Lestat, on the other hand, uses his jewelry to “try and toy with people”:  “Maybe that ring means something, and he’s trying to wind up Louis by wearing it. ‘I’m wearing someone else’s wedding ring, not yours,’ kind of vibe.”

“We’ve got various colored stones, which have different meanings, depending on what’s going on for Lestat,” Wood adds. “It’s the exploration of trying to work out who he is in that particular moment, and so we wanted that element of changeability about everything, while everyone else is a little bit more constant around him.”

Various silhouettes through the season depended on Lestat’s many moods, some mimicking his 18th-century origins, some with corsets incorporated to add an element of playfulness. 

“We wanted to accentuate features at different points, such as a softer shoulder when we’re leaning into the emotion of him feeling something, or giving him a stronger shoulder to make him see more other points,” says Wood. 

Part of Lestat’s character arc this season is the incestuous journey he goes on with his mother. Appearing onscreen for the first time in the show, Gabriella is described to appear more androgynous in Anne Rice’s novels. 

“Our writers will exclude or include some things within our script, so we wanted to use androgyny in her style, and used quite a few 18th-century tailoring techniques for the tailoring of her coats,” says Wood, who adds that the audience is “seeing Gabriella through Lestat’s eyes.” “Exploring the masculine and the feminine made significant choices about the kind of fabrics that we used, or how soft of some of her pieces were.”

“Everyone’s deceiving somebody in some way or another,” says Wood, but when it comes to lies and secrets on the show, Armand tends to be the clear forerunner.

“He’s being full-on gremlin when we first see him, and so his style does develop over the series a bit,” says Wood, who promised Zaman they’d work their way to Armand’s famous black coat by the end of the season. Armand shifts towards “softer layers, earthy tones, more defined shapes and more tailoring,” as he sheds decades of lying to Louis and begins drawing closer to his first-ever fledgling, journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), responsible for writing and publishing the novel that has upended Louis and Lestat’s lives.

Molloy, despite having recently transformed into a vampire, appears to be the most emotionally balanced on the show. 

“We didn’t want to move too far away from where we’d left him at the end of Season 2,” says Wood. “He’s a bit bolder, and a bit more laissez-faire. He also hasn’t really come into money in the same way that everybody else has. It hasn’t been that long since his book’s come out, that he decided to pick up a bag and go with Lestat on his tour bus. We wanted to give a semblance of a limited wardrobe for him, because he doesn’t really care, but didn’t have that much room to pack stuff in anyway.”

Don’t think the season’s on-the-road nature limits all of the characters: “We imagine that behind the tour bus is an extra bus just bringing all of Lestat’s wardrobe.”