Sinful Sunday: Celebrating the Bratty and Predatory Queerness of Sam Reid's Lestat in "Interview with the Vampire"
The Australian actor is, without a doubt, the Lestat that Anne Rice gave us in her beloved novels, in all of his complicated and messy queer glory.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
It’s probably a bit of an understatement to say that I am looking forward to the second season of Interview with the Vampire, the newest adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved novel. The first season captured so much of what I have long loved about Rice’s work: the queerness, the melancholy, the melodrama and, of course, the sexiness, and I have every reason to believe that the second season will just up the ante when it comes to the gay stuff. Indeed, if the 1994 film was marked by a certain circumspection when it came to its depiction of the obvious queer relationship between its two vampiric protagonists, the AMC version of the story has gone all in and then some.
Jacob Anderson’s Louis is obviously intended to be the emotional heart of the story. After all, it’s his narration in the present that frames the series’ narrative, as he pours out his heart to an aged Daniel Molloy, all in an attempt to make sure that it is his version of the story that gets recorded for posterity. Yet for all of that, it must be said that it’s Sam Reid’s Lestat who comes to dominate the story and to draw us in, despite all of Louis’ (extremely unreliable and self-serving narration). In fact, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Reid’s interpretation of the character is far closer to the way that Rice herself described him than anything Cruise was ever able to accomplish. Don’t get me wrong: I think Cruise did a fine job, as I wrote a few weeks ago. However, you can never quite lose sight of the fact that it’s Cruise in the role, which means that there’s always a distance between Rice’s Lestat and the star chosen to play him.
It certainly helps that Reid has a star text that is far less intrusive than Cruise’s, which makes it easier for him to slide into Lestat’s skin, to become one with the character in a way that his predecessor never quite accomplishes. As soon as he appears on the screen, you get the feeling that this is Lestat as he was portrayed in both Interview with the Vampire and its sequels, in all of his beauty and his contradiction. He’s a beautiful monster, but yet you can’t help but love him. Reid, more than any of the actors who have played Lestat, just seems to get the character.
Part of Reid’s appeal as Lestat comes from his voice. It’s rich and deep and sexy but, since this is Lestat we’re talking about, it’s also ever-so-slightly menacing. From the moment that he speaks, it’s clear that he’s quite smitten with Louis, but you get the sense too that he might just devour him and leave his corpse behind in a seedy New Orleans alley. However, this unearthly charisma extends beyond his voice. Reid has managed to capture the deadly feline grace that Lestat is always noted to possess and, just as importantly, he also has Lestat’s impeccable sense of fashion. He’s a dandy, yes, but a deadly one.
For make no mistake. This version of Lestat is an even more ruthless hunter than either his book or film counterpart. He stalks through the world of New Orleans like he owns it, and he is willing to slaughter anyone who he gets in his way including, most notably, a priest. Nothing stands in the way of his ravenous appetites, and his contempt for humanity and all of its weakness is manifest in everything he says, does, and thinks. This is a being, after all, who has nearly limitless power and who has strode across the absurdities of the stage for who knows how long, so it makes sense that he would view human life, and perhaps all of existence, as something of a joke. What, I ask you, could be more queer than that?
This version of Lestat is also ruthless when it comes to his relationship with Louis and, though the series is much more explicit about the queer nature of their relationship–bringing out the not-so-subtle subtext in Rice’s novel–it also makes it clear that, for Lestat at least, theirs is a relationship that is just as much (if not more) about power than it is about passion. Louis is his lover, yes, and to an extent he is also his partner, but we (and Louis), are left in no doubt that he is very much the junior in this relationship. He is the fledgling and Lestat is the master, and he will go to great lengths to demonstrate the extent to which Louis owes everything, including his very life, to Lestat, and no moment illustrates this more brutally than the incident in which Lestat nearly beats his fledgling to death, dropping him from a great height to what could very well be his doom.
Now, I know that this particular moment was quite divisive for some in the fandom, because many people saw it as a betrayal of who Lestat is as a character. From this point of view, Lestat would never have done something so dangerous and potentially fatal to Louis. Whatever else one might say about their relationship–no matter how messy it is, no matter how much Lestat loves lording his power over Louis and tormenting him with his conscience–he would never have gone so far as to drop him from such a height that the fall alone could kill him. This, though, is in my view a misunderstanding of Lestat as a character. Yes, he loves Louis, but for this ancient and powerful vampire all things are bound up with power and his own ego. Anything that threatens that, even if it’s his beloved (perhaps especially if it’s his beloved) must be crushed and brought under his dominion. So it is with Louis, particularly once Claudia is thrown into the mix and becomes a threat to both Lestat’s dominance and his primary place in Louis’ heart.
In Reid’s characterization, therefore, one can see two different narrative impulses doing battle. On the one hand there is the Lestat that we meet in Rice’s first book: alluring, yes, but also selfish and vain and cruel. On the other there is the Lestat that takes over the rest of The Vampire Chronicles, someone who always seems to be playing a game: with us as readers, with the world around him, and sometimes even with himself and with the Dark Gift that he never asked for but which is nevertheless key to his identity. This is the Lestat that all of us, like Louis, end up falling in love with, and it’s the one that I think Reid will slowly grow into to a greater extent if we are lucky enough to get a third season of the series and if they decide, as surely they will, to continue exploring the storylines that Rice introduced in The Vampire Lestat and its successors.
There’s a fierce power to Reid’s Lestat that I think makes him even more queerly appealing than he was in the original novels. Like so many beautiful bastards in literature, it might have seemed to many that Lestat would be impossible to capture on-screen, particularly since in Rice’s imagination vampires are simply so damn powerful and alluring that they seem to exist in a world all their own, one that would be difficult if not impossible to ever fully capture in so fundamentally human an invention as the moving image (while we’re at it, I suppose there’s something queer about the indefinability of the vampire, but that’s the subject of another newsletter). Somehow, though, Reid manages to do it, to make us believe that we are truly watching our beloved Brat Prince brought to life in a way that surely even Rice herself would have approved of. As I said to my partner the moment I saw Reid: this is Lestat as he always should have been.
However much Louis might like to figure Lestat as the villain of his story, to make him the monster in the fairytale life he sought to create with their daughter “Claudia,” the truth is that Lestat can never be fully contained within such a rigid moralistic and melodramatic narrative. His sexiness, as anyone could have told the overwrought and perpetually woe-is-me Louis, always exceeds the boundaries that anyone tries to put around it. It’s for this reason, I think, that Rice ended up making Lestat rather than Louis the focus of her subsequent novels (except for those which focus on particular vampires and their life stories, though even here Lestat tends to hog the limelight whenever they encounter him). He’s here, he’s queer, and he’s not about to let any of us forget his presence, not that we would ever be able to even were we so inclined.
As we all prepare for the sophomore season of Interview with the Vampire, let’s raise a chalice to the one and only Brat Prince and eternal queer villain, Lestat de Lioncourt.