How The Vampire Lestat Sneakily Introduces The New, Improved Louis
“It speaks to where Louis is at by this season that he’s able to relax into a conversational thing.”
When Interview with the Vampire became The Vampire Lestat, many a loyal fan worried that AMC’s focus shift would push its original protagonist to the margins. There’s certainly something to be said for the sudden influx of promotion for the show now that Sam Reid’s titular vampire is taking the spotlight — not to mention the platform’s attitude toward its previous two, critically acclaimed seasons.
On one hand, it makes sense: Seasons 1 and 2 adapted the first novel in Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe, and as Season 3 moves on to The Vampire Lestat, changing the title and the scope of the show isn’t totally unwarranted. But could the series tell Lestat’s story without totally abandoning its original star, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson)? It didn’t help that Louis scarcely appears in The Vampire Lestat’s first episode — or that the premiere seemed to tease a last-second reunion between himself and Lestat, only to introduce Lestat’s mom-slash-lover, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), instead. Fortunately, Episode 2 proves that Louis is still a crucial part of the series. His role is just going to look (and sound) a bit different in the new season.
Spoilers ahead for The Vampire Lestat Episode 2.
Louis is back and better than ever in The Vampire Lestat.
While the latest episode of The Vampire Lestat dedicates most of its runtime to Lestat’s origins in Aubergne, it also finally catches up with Louis. He reunites with Lestat — not exactly as himself, but “Thomas Pitt,” one of his many aliases — and later with Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) to air out their grievances. It’s been a while since Daniel published his interview with Louis in the form of a salacious novel, and though it did seemingly irreparable damage to his relationship with Lestat, enough time has passed for Louis to handle it all with grace. This version of the character is distinctly more casual than he was in the first two seasons of Interview. Where he was once prone to flowery language about “throes of increasing wonder,” now he talks to Daniel — and even Lestat — like he would to a friend over a beer.
Per Anderson, that has to do with the shedding of his vampire façade. One of the bigger challenges for the actor came with making Louis’ “elegant,” “flowery” dialogue easy for the audience to digest. But “a lot of that is a pretense,” Anderson tells Inverse. “A lot of that is what Louis is putting in front of what’s actually in his soul. The way he speaks to Molloy, it’s got to be f*cking exhausting to do that for that long.”
Sharing so much of his life story in Interview — and uncovering so much betrayal from his last partner, Armand (Assad Zaman) — has clearly broken down Louis’ walls. The character we see in The Vampire Lestat seems more comfortable in his skin and his solitude. “I think it speaks to where Louis is at by this season that he’s able to relax into a conversational thing,” Anderson says.
Though Louis’ “pretense” has melted away, another challenge could send him backsliding again.
While Louis turns a page, Lestat takes on a different kind of pretense. His audio journals, which guide this season through its campy tumult, adopt the “rhythmic, very specific language” that fans will expect from Interview.
But that doesn’t mean that Louis’ own journey is done. At the end of Episode 2, he meets Raglan James (Justin Kirk), an agent of the Talamasca who has a special mission for him. The top-secret, supernatural cabal has located Bruce (Damon Daunno), the vampire who assaulted Louis’ surrogate daughter-sister, Claudia (Delainey Hayles). Louis has been searching for him for a century, and now that he finally has the chance to confront him, we can trust that the skeletons in his closet will come tumbling out again.
