THE VAMPIRE LESTAT: Oh Nicki, You’re Not So Fine!

"Nobody cares about my period drama backstory" could be the stealth thesis for this show.

Last night on Lestat: Behind the Music, our hero was blah blah blahing v floridly about how he and Gabriella had been murdering their way around the Great Lakes or whatever and had finally landed in Toronto to insult the good people of that city’s skyline and chow down on some basic Canadian newlyweds. But right in the middle of that, Christine called and was like, “Get your marble sculpted butt to studio so Daniel can aggressively interrogate you about your songs!”

See, Lestat was on Vampire Standard Time, which is only slightly less awful than Drag Queen Standard Time, so he was heinously late to film an Interview with Two Vampires, one of whom was now Daniel. And Daniel was big mad about it, ranting and raving about how ungrateful Lestat was that he — Daniel — had recently heroically besaved his life from being beheaded by the Detroit Dental Damned¹. Then Lestat’s Chekov’s staff doctor was intriguingly like, “Actually, according to SCIENCE, vampires can survive decapitation for many hours” — a random factoid I’m sure will neeeeever come up again.

So, Lestat and Gabs finally showed up to Documentary Now all blood drunk and unmanageable, and all the while Future Lestat voicovered pointedly about Daniel’s “brief life as a vahmpeer” in the past tense, so that guy’s stock seems to be swiftly falling.

For now tho, Daniel was using whatever was left of his brief life to finally get Lestat sat down for an on-camera sit-down and immediately started badgering him about his childhood stutter, which he cared about a lot for antagonism reasons.

Actually, the whole interview was v hostile in manner of respectable journalist grilling war criminal, Trump admin official, mass murderer, or similar. Which, I guess Lestat was an actual mass murderer, so, fair.

Lestat just pretended to be unbothered and started paraphrasing the opening lines of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat. But before the show could start fully adapting the book like it kinda did in Season 1, Daniel was like, “No no no, we are not doing that” and switched to making fun of Lestat’s songs and pumping him for intel on what they all meant vis-à-vis his traumatic backstory. (Key initial takeaway: “Black Licorice” = 100% not about Louis’s ween, according to Lestat.)

Of course, Lestat got abruptly annoyed by Daniel’s annoying questions and was like, “NOBODY CARES ABOUT MY PERIOD DRAMA BACKSTORY BECAUSE I’M DOING ROCK AND ROLL NOW AND WE DON’T HAVE THE BUDGET FOR BOTH!” (Which could maybe be the stealth thesis statement for how this show is approaching the book?) Then he started fake crying and was like, “Look at me, I’m Louis! PSYCHE! You can’t Interview with the Vampire ME, Danielle!”

Speaking of Louis, Raggedy Jim and the Talamascarpone had sent him off to murder the Toof Teem, especially Killer Bruce for crimes against Claudia. When he got to their haunted mansion, he went all about place going, “Yooooo-hooo! Killlllleeerrrr!” and beheading everyone the whole time. But Killer Bruce was nowhere to be found, since he was probably out doing cool vampire gang stuff like motorcycles and hassling the town soda jerk. So, for extra Talamasca credit, Louis freed the Fang Wangs’ whole basement blood farm — which, unlike (?) Lestat’s, really was actual human trafficking! — and then just set about sitting around waiting for Killer Bruce to return.

Back to Lestat, who had finally admitted that he had a stutter from ages 9 to 29. HAPPY NOW, BOGOSIAN??? But no, Daniel needed more trauma plot for his documentary, so he was like, “Anything awful happen to you when you were 9?”

Lestat: “My mom took me to see some witches get burnt alive. Effed up, right?”

Daniel: “What about when you were 29?”

So, Lestat told him all about how he moved to Paris back then and one day ran into some dude playing a violin in the street and was like, “Hey, weren’t we both closeted in high school together?” And the guy was like, “Yeah! It’s me, Nicki Lefontfontfont [Frenchly], wanna do gay sex with me now?”

And that was how Lestat fell in love for the very first time with the very first other gay dude he ever met. Nicki LeFontenfont got him a job in THEATRE which cured him of his stutter, and everything was going great for these two gayboneses in 18th Century France until Nicki started being all bipolar all the time (according to Lestat). And then suddenly Lestat was a vampire and lying to Nicki about it, which put a further strain on their relationship.

Which, in present-ish times, was Daniel’s cue to start asking all about how traumatic it was to be turned into a vampire, because back in Season 1, Louis said that Lestat said that his creepola maker Magnus had snatched him out of his bed one night and locked him up with a bunch of dead dudes who looked exactly like him for weeks and then non-consensually converted him to immortal homociduality and then immediately burned himself alive.

Magnerds.

“Hahaha, Louis didn’t know what he was even talking about,” Lestat sweatily said. “It was actually more like a hilarious high concept 1980s-style music video for my power ballad ‘Your Biggest Fan.’”

See, what had happened was Lestat had gotten ever so famous for his ACTING upon the stage. He was basically the Connor Storrie of 1770-whatever gay Paree, and wherever he went there were mobs of fans throwing flowers and their undergarments at him, and he was forever bathed in the rosy glow of celebrity. But among those adoring crowds lurked a shadowy figure cloaked in a fog of desperation farts. It was Magnus, a sad Phantom of the Opera-looking loser with a methed-up mouth who had gotten all obsessed with Lestat’s gorgeous self but was too tragically ugly and stink-ridden for him to even notice. When he wasn’t hanging around the Theatre des Alive Humans trying to get Lestat’s autograph, Magnus spent his nights decorating his room with corpses that looked like his golden-haired idol and pretending to have dinner with Lestat’s headshot. Eventually, he advanced to full-on stalking, and would sit outside Lestat’s window touching his no-no parts to the sweet music of Lestat and Nicki Lefleufleuflue arguing and having make-up sex.

Poor, poor sad disgusting Magnus! If only there was a way to get Lestat to notice him and be his bosom blood buddy! Oh, wait! There was! Because Magnus suddenly remembered that he was a vampire and could do whatever crazy shit he wanted, like turn Lestat into a vampire also and then throw himself into a bonfire for no reason! And that was exactly what he did do.

And according to Lestat, it was all totes NBD to him, because Magnus left him all his vampire treasure so he could be rich forever without having to deal with a moldy old fanboy. “And actually, DANIELLE,” Lestat said in 2025, “It is you who have maker-abandonment issues thanks to Armand, NOT ME!”

Which reminded Daniel of how Armand told him in Season 2 all about how Lestat kept dating Nicki even after he was a vampire, which was illegal, so Armand stole Nicki and tried to feed him to his Satanic cult blah blah blah, you can read all about that here.

“So what happened after all that?” Daniel asked, and Lestat started remembering how Nicki went all sorts of crazypants after he got rescued from the vampire sewer and basically badgered Lestant into making him a vampire because he was so jealous of Lestat’s new vampire gal-pal Gabriella who was also his mom.

At this, Daniel was like, “RECORD SCRATCH!” Because, recall, Daniel thinks Jennifer Ehle’s name is Sophia, etc. So, Lestat had to be like, “Oh yeah, I totally told Louis all about Gabriella, who is dead now and definitely not in the toilet loudly fucking my body double currently [which she super was]. Weird he never told you about that!”

Anyway, back in 1770-whatever, Gabriella was very anti-Nicki becoming a vampire because Lestat was clearly already over his Pick-Me Boy bullshit and who wants to deal with a mentally unsound ex-boyfriend for eternity? And she was right! Vampire-Nicki was getting on everyone’s nerves, including Armand, who was fully dick-matized in love with Lestat by then and was v concerned Nicki would find out and make a whole Fatal Attraction fuss about it.

Lestat, meanwhile, was like, “Calm down, gurl, we are casual at best,” and Gabriella just wanted Armand to tell them all about his own maker, Marius — who I guess Armand had mentioned already? — and all the vampire hotspots all over the world.

But Armand’s No. 2 priority — No. 1 being Lestat’s dong — was getting this Nicki sitch under control. So, one night they all decided to have an intervamption, and Nicki was like, “BAAAAAGGHGGHHH, Let me just chop off my hands real quick!” Which he did, and that was just about the last straw for Lestat, who officially had to accept that Nicki was too bonkers for life. Luckily, Armand was there to crumple poor Nicki up and throw him into the fireplace off camera. (So much telling, so little showing this season!)

Which was also the last straw for present-day Lestat. He was so tired of having to remember all this Masterpiece Theatre des Vampeers stuff, so he cut his interview with Daniel short and blew off Gabriella to go driving around Toronto with the ghost of Magnus harassing him in the backseat.

But TWIST tho! When Daniel asked to review all the interview footage of him bullying Lestat, he discovered that it had all been just a classic vampire telepathy prank, and all he got was hours of Lestat staring hornily at the camera. That pissed Daniel off greatly, so now he for realz hated Lestat’s guts and probably would never again rescue him from being beheaded.

Over at Tooth Team headquarters, Killer Bruce finally arrived home from his shotgun wedding to Baby Jenks only to find all his vampire bronies horribly deceased and Louis waiting in the basement to torture him to death. The torturing went thusly: First, Louis relieved Killer Bruce of several of his vertebrae, because he wouldn’t need those anymore! Then, as ol’ Boneless Bruce flopped around, Louis read to him from Claude’s truly distressing diary of all the heinous things Killer Bruce did to her back in 1930-something. Lastly, Louis burned Fang Gang manor to the ground with Spineless Bruce inside of it, leaving the Widow Jenks to morn her despicable husbarf.

Meanwhile, Lestat was careening through the streets of Chrono [Canadianly], with Magnus’s gross fangirl ghost being like, “Hahaha, I really effed you up, huh?” Because unlike how Lestat described it to Daniel, getting turned into a vampire was actually a lot less like a 1987 MTV Video Music Award-deserving music video and a lot more like all the terrible things that happened to Claude at the hands of the now-burnt-to-death Killer Bruce. But instead of dealing with any of that, Lestat just totaled his car to shut Magnus’s ghost up.

Fortunately, as an unstoppable immortal sex-machine with supernatural compartmentalization powers, Lestat was totally unscathed enough to go do more rock-n-rolling the next night, because it was MUSIC and not therapy that would save him!

Of course, Lestat wasn’t the only one badly in need of therapy. There was also Louis, who was not at all cured of his grief by de-boning Killer Bruce and was now fully stalking Delainey Hayles, who’d had to get a job as a waitress ever since Claudia died.

And then there was Alex, that guy who quit Lestat’s band last week. See, he was starting to have regrets about being stuck at an endless AA meeting in Nowheresville, U.S.A., while his band was doing rock-n-roll with Lestat. He was whining about all that one night when some guy across the prayer circle or whatever was like, “For sure, I totally get it.” And then that guy was like, “Hi, I’m Arma— MARK. Yeah, that’s it! Armark! And I am addicted to ruining everything for my ex-boyfriends, which I will probably just continue to do even more next week.”

1. TM Ivan Hernandez of Boars, Gore, and Swords.