The Vampire Lestat: You Have to Ask for It
In episode 3, “Toronto,” the show takes bold creative swings as Lestat tries (and fails) to rewrite his own sexual trauma.
“Were you a stutterer as a child?”
Daniel Molloy is hungry for his gotcha moment, but Lestat is a tough nut to crack. After weeks of combative back-and-forth on the tour bus, Daniel still hasn’t made much headway. So when he finally persuades Lestat to sit down for a formal studio interview, Daniel homes in on his stutter as a potential weak spot to exploit.
As interview subjects, Lestat and Louis couldn’t be more different. While Louis generally told his story in chronological order, delivering a carefully constructed narrative that Daniel had to interrogate and disrupt, Lestat finds it impossible to talk in a straight line. His train of thought is constantly being derailed, not just by whimsical tangents and stray arguments (and in one case a split-second .JPEG image of a vodka bottle), but by memories that seem to fly out of the past and attack him. We use the word “flashback” a lot when discussing this show, but after three episodes from Lestat’s perspective, that word feels far more psychologically apt for him than it did for Louis.
In the scenes from Lestat’s childhood last week, his father and brothers were reduced to loud, aggressive outlines, simplified by centuries of distance—and by the viewpoint of a traumatized child. This week, his recollections of the last years of his human life are equally messy, exploring one relationship that he’s evidently thought about a great deal (his first love, the violinist Nicolas de Lenfent) and one that he’d prefer not to confront at all (his abduction and murder at the hands of the vampire Magnus).
Likely hoping to delay this uncomfortable conversation, Lestat arrives late to the interview. He and Gabriella have been out on the town in Toronto, killing a couple of newlyweds whose bodies have to be disposed of by Christine’s clean-up crew. I kind of love that this season is doubling down on its Canadian origins behind the scenes, cracking jokes about the CN Tower and having Lestat absolutely butcher the word “Saskatchewan.” We’re also being treated to a fantastic piece of invisible stunt-casting, because the voice of The Failures (aka the guy who reads out “Album 22, side A” or whatever) is in fact the acclaimed Canadian surrealist filmmaker Guy Maddin.
Waiting at their rented studio with a bored film crew, Daniel and Christine are already losing patience with Gabriella’s disruptive influence on Lestat. Not that Lestat was particularly reliable before she showed up, of course. “You’d be a head mounted above a coven toilet if it weren’t for me!” shouts Daniel down the phone, referencing the fact that he saved Lestat from the Fang Gang back in Detroit.
Once he gets Lestat in front of the camera, Daniel tries to aggravate him into slipping up, targeting the stutter. Often a symptom of anxiety, this trait seems totally at odds with the Lestat we know now: a consummate performer who loves the sound of his own voice. Daniel is hoping for some sign of childhood trauma, and as it turns out, he’s right. Lestat’s stutter emerged after he witnessed a group of accused witches being burned at the stake, and it continued through to his adulthood, where he shook off his speech impediment (he claims) thanks to two years of vocal training while working at a Parisian theater. (Tellingly, his stutter made a brief return in episode 1, when Gabriella showed up in his hotel room.)
