Interview With the Vampire lets Sam Reid’s Lestat be absolutely the worst

Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is an everlasting story of everlasting love, the woes of immortality, and being frozen in grief. It’s additionally the story of Lestat de Lioncourt, the worst individual of all time and likewise an everlasting object of fascination and adoration.

After I say Lestat is the worst individual of all time, I’m not exaggerating. He menaces characters as a lot as he charms them, particularly those he proclaims his love for. The truth is, you’re in all probability worse off as somebody Lestat loves than one he hates: In AMC’s Interview, Lestat is so obsessed together with his love Louis, he stalks him, emotionally manipulates him, and murders anybody that will get near him, and that’s earlier than Lestat makes him a vampire.

AMC’s adaptation of Rice’s traditional novel makes a number of radical adjustments to Rice’s textual content. Relatively than being a plantation story going down within the 1800s between the plantation proprietor Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, the story is pushed ahead in time to the early 1900s. As a substitute of being a plantation proprietor, Louis is a Black man residing in New Orleans as a barely tolerated brothel proprietor, already balancing his life between two worlds earlier than he meets Lestat. For the big half, followers of the collection have embraced these adjustments as a result of the characters nonetheless really feel so true to what Rice wrote. Specifically, followers have taken to Sam Reid’s portrayal of Lestat, who performs the character with a recognizable, infuriating attraction and a barely suppressed capability for violence.

It isn’t that the fandom excuses or rationalizes this conduct away. To like Lestat is to know that he’ll disappoint you. Lately, the fandom for the Interview With the Vampire tv present discovered itself at a crossroads over Lestat’s actions within the collection. Might you like a personality that lies like he’s respiration, doesn’t care if he hurts individuals, and often intentionally causes hurt to the individuals he cares about? For many years, the reply to that query, at the very least in regard to Lestat, has been sure.

Photograph: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC

Within the novels, which after the primary e-book are instructed from Lestat’s viewpoint, he does issues so horrible that describing them out of context seems like a joke. When Lestat briefly good points a human physique, he instantly sexually assaults a girl. As a younger vampire, he turns his mom and makes out together with her. All all through Interview, which is instructed from Louis’ perspective, he does issues particularly to piss Louis off. At one level, Lestat needs to kill somebody that Louis declared off limits, however this individual has additionally been challenged to a duel to the loss of life. Louis tackles Lestat within the mud of a Louisiana swamp whereas his sufferer wins the duel, after which within the break up second that Louis relaxes his grip Lestat wriggles free and murders the poor mortal. His pettiness and theatricality are as pleasant as they’re horrifying. As Lestat’s father dies, Louis asks that Lestat not play the piano, so Lestat resorts to banging on pots and pans.

Lestat is only a form of character that individuals grow to be obsessive about. Anne Rice clearly did, and she or he was the one who made him up. He’s a blorbo from my exhibits — a fictional character one might speak endlessly about as if they’re an actual individual, even when they’re each faux and have, of their fiction, dedicated battle crimes.

Lestat isn’t the one or most vital morally poor blorbo, however for a lot of different blorbos he would possibly as properly be the blueprint.

Followers of Home of the Dragon have additionally grappled with one the present’s characters rising up into an evil blorbo. Aemond Targaryen, as soon as he misplaced a watch and grew out his hair, turned a licensed heartthrob amongst some Home of the Dragon followers, however greater than his seems, it’s the truth that he’s evil and loopy. Vriska, from the webcomic Homestuck, felt like she was designed in a lab to be infuriating, with the energetic and vocal fandom arguing about her actions for months at a time. Even the extra definitively evil Kilgrave from Jessica Jones had a fandom that loved him, if not regardless of then due to his evilness. Like Lestat, these characters have a theatrical nature and an virtually admirable potential to carry a grudge, and likewise a capability to commit acts of violence that they only barely attempt to conceal. What makes these characters fascinating is how, even after you’ve seen what they’re able to, you continue to wish to have them round.

Picture: Warner Bros.

Picture: AMC

When Lestat lastly emerges within the current day within the earlier film adaptation of Interview With the Vampire, he calls Louis an enormous whiner. You possibly can’t assist however snigger, as a result of after two hours of Louis you could be anticipating a change of tempo. It seems like a trick — even after watching every thing that Lestat has put Louis by, it’s important to admit when he’s making factors. It’s not simply that Lestat says the issues all of us lengthy to say however don’t, attributable to well mannered society. As followers of Rice’s novels know, the attraction of Lestat is that he was wounded by the world in mundane methods like so many people are, and in response he’s determined to take revenge on every thing, in every single place, with each second of his remaining time on Earth. Lestat is so wrapped up in his personal ache — his wounds festering into selfishness — that it offers him a form of readability one might mistake for empathy. He doesn’t like or belief different individuals, however he understands them, or at the very least understands methods to act in order that they offer him what he needs. Watching him is a lesson in actually understanding what it means to place your self forward of every thing else. He’s the reply to the query, “Aren’t you bored with being good? Don’t you simply wish to go apeshit?”

Not everybody holds ache as deep as Lestat’s ache, however many people on the planet have, like Lestat, been abused, deserted, handled cruelly, and watched family members die. It might be a mercy if these experiences gave us some nice perception into human nature. However the tragedy of Lestat is that regardless of all his powers, his potential to learn and manipulate individuals is just not a darkish reward given to him by the world’s ills. It’s merely self-protective, and it doesn’t even work very properly.

Reid’s efficiency as Lestat in AMC’s Interview captures each his harmful lack of inhibition and primary immaturity. So typically after I watch Interview I marvel on the expressiveness of Sam Reid’s face; his eyes plead for love at the same time as he kills individuals or insults his little chosen household. Every emotional wound as Louis and Lestat combat with one another exhibits on his face, not simply by his disappointment however by his anger. He’s nonetheless only a baby lashing out at individuals, anticipating them to depart him and deciding to present them a cause. After Louis catches Lestat dishonest, they comply with an open relationship. Louis has the audacity to truly hook up with somebody, which Lestat learns about by spying on him and watching them. Lestat confronts Louis about his dalliance. Though Lestat is totally within the incorrect, it’s arduous to not be a little bit moved when he cries out, close to tears, “I heard your hearts dancing!” Regardless of this wound being fully self-inflicted, the ache is actual.

On this most up-to-date Interview adaptation, what involves the floor most readily is how alike Louis and Lestat are, regardless of themselves. They’re each two individuals frozen in a second of grief, unable, attributable to their vampire nature, to alter or transfer on. Watching Lestat repeatedly spoil his personal life jogs my memory of the best way I behaved as a young person, stuffed with anger on the world and pointing that anger at everybody I met. If I used to be trapped in that second endlessly like an insect in a drop of amber I don’t know that I’d be completely different than Lestat, making an attempt desperately to maintain individuals from leaving me even when I needed to kill them to do it.