THE VAMPIRE LESTAT: Fuck Yeah, It’s Brat Prince Summer!

It’s AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and It’s the Same Except It’s Completely Different.

FUCK YEAH, subscriberoos! It is officially finally Brat Prince Summer! I.E. time for the season premiere of AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and It’s the Same Except It’s Completely Different a.k.a. the series (?) premiere of The Vampire Lestat! Our chaos himbo undead lord hath risen, except not really, because that didn’t happen because this show is totally not really adapting the book at all. Which is actually totally fine!

But look, when I say to you “chaos,” I speak the lord’s truth, for this show is all over the goddamn shop! Which is also all fine and good because I guess it reflects the demon blood addled, probably in-crisis mind of the world class narcissist from whom’s perspective this story is being told fromst. But also, there are like three (?) framing devises, so it is quite literally unhinged.

Last night’s episode opened on what turned out to be a v somber flash-forward to the future, where all this Lestat memorabilia was being auctioned off to a bunch of shady rich bazillionaire types who were probably all super relieved that their nonsense wasn’t what caused the Recent Terrible Global Almost-Apocalypse (more on that…someday?) Plus Talamascara Secret Agent Ragtime James was there probably for supernatural busy-bodying like usual, and also Armand, minus one eye, and Louis, minus one foot (or possibly whole leg!), so clearly those two got grievously injured at some point. (Except aren’t these undead weirdos supposed to have supernatural immortal healing abilities or whatever?)¹

Anyway, the first item on the block was all the master recordings of Lestat’s debut and only rock and roll album, because, duh, you already know that the whole season is Lestatwig and the Angry Inch, right? But then the auctioneer was like, “I am contractually obligated to troll you all by burning these priceless recordings to the ground right now in front of you.” Which he did, and some cool bitch bid on them anyway and won them for ¥1. Good for her! She seems like someone I would like to do cocaine with!

The next item was a “music box,” which was actually just a big record cabinet filled with more master recording, plus also Lestat’s spoken-word diary on vinyl, which is the main framing device for the show.

Harken! What is that we hear? Why, twas Lestat’s own voice memos cryptically narrating to us all about the Recent Global Catastrophe that almost killed all men all over the world, which was kinda all his fault.

Ooh, say more about that, we all collectively thought. But Lestat’s disembodied voice was fully committed to the show’s chaotic timeline fuckery, and was like, “Let us start nowhere near the beginning…”

Cut to: Spring 2025. Lestat was on tour with his band who were: Patrick from Schitt’s Creek, Alex from nothing, T.C. the lady drummer, and someone called Salamander who was not in the book. They were playing a concert at some club in Detroit, which seemed to be going quite epically, except Lestat was voiceovering about how they pretty much sucked and he didn’t have enough fans yet so probably they should have gotten in touch with Geese’s marketing people.

Meanwhile, Daniel Molloy, newly even more annoying as a vahmpeer, had learned from The Devil Wears Prada 2 that print media was dead and so he had eschewed his career as some sort of journalist to become a documentary filmmaker. And the documentary he was filmmaking was all about Lestat. Which is basically another framing device for all Lestat’s rememberings of things past in this Russian nesting doll of a show.

So, after the concert, Lestat was swanning about backstage doing all kinds of INSOUCIANT diva behavior like signing contracts in blood and picking a groupie to do murder sex with in his dressing room, and also explaining how he had to have a braindead body double decoy (also played by Sam Reid) so that the cops wouldn’t catch onto him eating people everywhere he went and throw him into prison. Then he got on his massive luxurious tour bus — which he could afford even though his band was underpopular due to his vampire millions² — where Daniel tried to interview him, which was Daniel’s only skill.

Daniel: “You are almost 40 250 years old, sir! Aren’t you a little long in the fang to be starting a rock and roll career that no one cares about?”

Lestat: “Blah blah blah, the world is lame, climate change, truth is dead, etc. etc. Plus Louis lied about me in your book, so now I’m acting out.”

See, what Lestat started remembering to Daniel about just then was: Maybe a year ago or whatever, it was Halloween in Montreal, where Lestat was living probably for production tax credit reasons. He and Louis were having a perfectly pleasant FaceCall when suddenly Lestat got a Google alert about the publication of Interview with the Vampire.

“Excuse the fuck out of me right now? What the shit is this???” Lestat screamed at Louis, who was like, “EEEEK! I never dreamed Daniel would publish a book based on the interview I fully agreed to do on the record for the explicit purpose of publishing a book about me! Gotta go! Love you?” And I guess they have not spoken since?

In the grips of a full-on hissy fit, Lestat rushed ragefully to his local independent bookshop, which was staffed entirely by deranged teenagers who read IWTV and thought Armand was so great. (DEE. RANGED.) So Lestat did some satisfying screaming at them and then rushed home to make various insightful and deeply considered notes — such as “FUCK THIS NOISE!” and “LIES, ALL LIES!” — in the margins of said slanderous tome. Then, since it was Halloween, all these gay ass kids came to his house trick-or-treating dressed up as Season 2 (which…SURE), and that enraged Lestat even more.

So much more that he decided to take it out on his neighbors, who were a Canadian garage band starring Patrick from Schitt’s Creek, by playing a guitar at them and then smashing it to bits! But Patrick from Schitt’s Creek was like, “You seem cool, wanna be our frontman?”

And that was how Lestat became Iggy-Pop-by-way-of-Adam-Levine or whatever it was he was now doing.

Back to Present Day 2025: Lestat was in his hotel room listening to everyone on Psychic Vampire Twitter argue about whether he should be unalived due to his middling non-fame. But also, he was meanwhile texting someone MYSTERIOUS on his for real phone, which begged the question: If vahmpeeriata are psychic, why did he need to text that personage? Which immediately begged the answer: Because it was someone whom he converted to vampiracy, because remember how vampires are psychically deaf to their progenies?

“Help! I am sadsville!” Lestat texted. But whoever it was just left him on read.

The next night, it was time for another concert, which was going poorly due to Patrick from Schitt’s Creek REFUSING to play the tambourine or something. That was not his job! He was a guitarman! Lestat was so furious about that that he almost blood sucked poor Patrick right there on stage. But then suddenly he was having some kind of psychotic episode and all kinds of stuff that happened in Seasons 1 and 2 and other stuff that he’d probably tell us about later started flashing before his eyes. Except actually, it wasn’t really a mental breakdown! It was a MUSICAL BREAKTHROUGH somehow? And Lestat realized that actually, the band was really good (?) and they were all having a great time. And then some groupie with Björk buns jumped onstage and Lestat started bloodsucking her right in front of everyone.

What Lestat didn’t realize though, was that Blonde Björk was on all of the drugs, so now he was too due to guzzling her blood. Plus, she was dying now due to blood loss. So, after the show, Lestat took her backstage for his shady doctor friend to pump her full of O Neg or whatever, while he hallucinated that her soul was on the ceiling giving him shit for being so needy and rambunctiously difficult all the time. Also, she was like, “Theeeeey’re coooooming for voooouuuus!”

But before Ghost Groupie could tell him who was coming for him and why, her soul was sucked back into her corpus, and she was alive enough to go to a big fancy party back at Lestat’s bou-chic hotel.

Everyone was having a grand ol’ time at that party, especially Lestat who was still high as a kite from sucking the blood out of Baby Jenks, which was that groupie’s dumb name and also a RED FLAG if you know the books, which I do. So, while Baby Jenks yabber-jabbered about nonsense to Daniel, Lestat stumbled off euphorically to the pissoir, where his voice memos explained about vahmpee-peeing. Then some “regional vampires” [non-complimentary] started piddling next to him, and they were like, “We are the Fang Gang, come hang out with us!”

“Boo! No thanks, poors!” Lestat said, because he was horny now and needed to go fuck Baby Jenks and his drug dealer and a bellhop in the hotel elevator, and also voiceover to us all about how vampire sex is not as good as murder, but still pretty A-okay.

Unfortunately though, it turned out that the whole point of Baby Jenks was that she was a sneaky honey trap to get Lestat all hopped up on her goofball blood so that the Fang Gang could whoop his perfect butt to death once they got to the top floor of the hotel. See, all these too cool for school möterhead vampires without a cause did have a cause! Which was they were ARMAND TRUTHERS for some reason, just like those dumb bookshop dweebs back in Canada, and that meant they wanted Lestat actual-dead instead of just vampire-dead.

And they were doing a real great job of achieving that goal, due to how roofied Lestat was on blood. But then Daniel and the DJ from the party downstairs who was also the only surviving member of the Vampire Community Theatre Club cult (and a character I truly consistently cannot be bothered to remember³) showed up and helped Lestat murder every single one of the Tooth Team.

Except in the midst of all the clobbering, Lestat burst right into the penthouse, where his whole band and entourage were having a VIP orgy. So they all suddenly realized that he was a for-real vampire and not just a weirdo who was obsessed with Interview with the Vampire.

Now, as anyone whose parents discovered their internet browsing history in the 90s knows, being outted is tres tres traumatique, especially when what you are being outted as is a straight-up unholy serial murderer! Lestat was so distraught that he threw himself directly out the window and flew away to a shitty motel to stick his head inside of a toilet.

He was perilously close to actually reconsidering all of his life choices and terrible behavior when his phone bleep-blooped with a text message from his MYSTERY fledgeloin, who was like “I’m here, you up?”

Then the door opened and in strode OG Lizzie Bennet, a.k.a. Jennifer Ehle disguised as Emma Frost, a.k.a. Gabrielle, a.k.a. Gabriella in this show for Italian reasons, a.k.a. Lestat’s mamma, whomst was also a vampire.

“Hiya, ma!” Lestat said, and they immediately started making out because you can’t be a PRESTIGE TV show for grown-ups without at least a smidge of incest ever since 2011.

1. Eyeballs, appendages both canonically v easily re-attachable in Anne Rice.

2. Famously, there are no poor vampires worth discussing in Anne Rice.

3. SAM! His name is Sam. The Vampire Sam.