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The Vampire Lestat Showrunner Admits Changing Anne Rice’s Source Material in This Week’s Episode Will Probably Be a ‘Little Disappointing’ to Fans
Spoilers follow for The Vampire Lestat Season 3, Episode 3 - “Toronto,” which is available on AMC and AMC+ now.
In “Toronto,” the latest episode of AMC’s series formerly known as Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, audiences get to witness a sampling of every version of Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) roiling inside of him. The memories of his life in Paris up to when he was turned are juxtaposed against his current, combative on-camera interviews with vampire documentarian Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), making us voyeurs to his tempest of memories and emotions.
Reid commands the screen from beginning to end in a performance that showrunner Rolin Jones admits to IGN is his personal favorite of the actor’s this season. “He's extraordinary in [Episode 3],” Jones tells IGN with awe. “He's so fucking good in 3.”
Jones explains that they staged the documentary interviews with Reid looking straight into the camera in such a way that put Bogosian, his scene partner, about 30 feet away in a dark void. “When these scenes line up on the call sheet and you're doing this from page 40, that can be really disorienting,” Jones says about what Reid faced. “And you're block shooting, which means you're doing [Episodes] 3 and 4, so you don't know where you are [in the story]. For an actor to be able to hold a screen like that, in tight close-up, as if you're an Errol Morris subject, I think there are very few people who can pull it off. The number of mini beats that are in there – outrageous and insane!”
In fact, Jones says Reid questioned his ability to pull it off successfully. “He's sitting there alone, staring into this box,” Jones says. “After those two days, he comes to me and goes, ‘I don't know… I don't know what I'm doing.’ So I was like, ‘I'll go look.’ I looked at the dailies that day, and I'm like, ‘You're gonna be lost some of this time of the year, [just] continue to do [it]. Just take the big risks. Take it all, go for it.’ And then I just secretly whispered in his ear, ‘You're very, very good.’
“So, I think he was okay,” Jones chuckles.
Lestat’s First Love Redux
In the flashback portions of “Toronto,” Jones unspools a nonlinear dissemination of what happens to Lestat after he moves to Paris, falls in love and then gets violently turned against his will. In the book, Lestat relocates to Paris with his childhood friend Nicolas de Lenfent. In the series, Lestat accidentally reunites with Nicolas (or as he calls him, Nikki) in Paris when he spies him busking as a violinist. They fall into a passionate two-year relationship where Nikki (Joseph Potter) plays in the theater pit orchestra and Lestat cleans the theater and acts. But it all goes to hell after Lestat is turned by a stalker fan, the insanely obsessive vampire, Magnus (Damien Atkins). Afterward, Lestat goes back to Auvergne to turn his ailing mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), only to return to find an increasingly depressed, distrustful and erratic Nikki. Tragedy ensues and leaves Lestat permanently anguished, as evidenced in his confessional retelling of his lover’s death.
Jones acknowledges that changing Anne Rice’s course of events is something he knows will “probably be a little disappointing” to book readers. However, the showrunner explains that it was necessary. Going back to when they opened the writers room for Season 3, he says the team knew episodes would have to be "tighter and faster” to be in keeping with their rock-and-roll, roadshow energy.
“The decision we made about Lestat's family in Auvergne made it very difficult to come back the next episode and still be in Auvergne,” he says of the revised pacing of Lestat’s history. “So I said, ‘He's going to Paris, go to Paris.’ We re-engineered some of those given circumstances, and squeezed in as many golden moments as you can. But in the version of the story we're telling, it was still incredibly important that Nikki had standing, and was something that would, to this day, haunt [Lestat].”
In fact, Jones says the audience should go back to Season 1 and revisit Lestat meeting Louis in light of what happens in this episode. “[Maybe], think about it less in terms of Louis' version of whatever the predator was taking, and more about trepidation?” he says of Lestat seducing Louis. “Why it took six months, because the last time he was deeply in love with somebody, it did not turn out well. So, hopefully these things keep talking to each other.”
Jones is also quick to praise how well Nikki actor Joseph Potter was able to sell with Reid their tragic love affair in so few scenes. “I knew what he could do, and so I knew I could probably tell this in fewer and fewer scenes because I had such a volcanic actor,” Jones explains. “He's incredible.”
Their scenes together, and how Reid portrays Lestat reliving those memories, is a window into the most broken parts of the vampire according to the showrunner. “This idea about [Lestat] being the person that didn't love the other as much as they loved him, I think that's what haunts him the most about Nikki,” Jones says. “Nikki loved him more and he understands that, and it hurts him a lot. I think it dimensionalizes Lestat.”
Setting the Stage for Louis and Claudia
The other big revelation in “Toronto” is how Jones begins to thread Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia (Delainey Hayles) back into the story. Per the information laid out by Talamasca agent Raglan James (Justin Kirk) in “Toledo,” Louis goes after Bruce (Damon Daunno), the vampire who assaulted Claudia after she went out on her own in 1923.
Jones says they knew from Season 1, when they showed the ripped-out journal pages from Claudia’s diary, that they would revisit this story thread down the line. “It goes back to when we made the decision to do that assault on Claudia – that it can't be a plot point,” Jones says of the subplot’s importance to the overarching story.
In portraying Louis’ vengeance in detail, Jones says it reiterates the vampire’s unresolved business with his dead daughter. “We knew how this scene would go, and we knew very instinctively that it needed to be a dissatisfying thing,” he says of the hollowness to Louis’ revenge. “It was not going to be the fulfillment that he thought it would be.”
But it leads to some major revelations next week…
Be sure to check back at IGN every Sunday for post-morts of The Vampire Lestat with Rolin Jones!
via The Vampire Lestat Showrunner Admits Changing Anne Rice’s Source Material in This Week’s Episode Will Probably Be a ‘Little Disappointing’ to Fans
by Scott Collura
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