Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is a permanent 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. In reality, 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 modifications to Rice’s textual content. Moderately 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 an alternative 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 modifications as a result of the characters nonetheless really feel so true to what Rice wrote. Particularly, followers have taken to Sam Reid’s portrayal of Lestat, who performs the character with a recognizable, infuriating appeal and a barely suppressed capability for violence.
It isn’t that the fandom excuses or rationalizes this habits away. To like Lestat is to know that he’ll disappoint you. Just 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’re keen on a personality that lies like he’s respiration, doesn’t care if he hurts individuals, and ceaselessly intentionally causes hurt to the individuals he cares about? For many years, the reply to that query, not less than in regard to Lestat, has been sure.
Picture: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Within the novels, which after the primary ebook are instructed from Lestat’s perspective, he does issues so horrible that describing them out of context appears like a joke. When Lestat briefly features a human physique, he instantly sexually assaults a girl. As a younger vampire, he turns his mom and makes out along 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 dying. Louis tackles Lestat within the mud of a Louisiana swamp whereas his sufferer wins the duel, after which within the cut 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 type of character that folks turn out 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 pretend 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 may 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 an eye fixed and grew out his hair, turned an authorized heartthrob amongst some Home of the Dragon followers, however greater than his appears, 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 lively 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 enjoyed 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 disguise. What makes these characters fascinating is how, even after you’ve seen what they’re able to, you continue to need 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’ll be able to’t assist however chortle, as a result of after two hours of Louis it’s possible you’ll be anticipating a change of tempo. It appears like a trick — even after watching all the things that Lestat has put Louis by, you must 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 all the things, all over the 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 provides him a type of readability one might mistake for empathy. He doesn’t like or belief different individuals, however he understands them, or not less than understands easy methods to act in order that they provide him what he needs. Watching him is a lesson in actually understanding what it means to place your self forward of all the things else. He’s the reply to the query, “Aren’t you uninterested in being good? Don’t you simply need 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 could 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 present 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 whilst he kills individuals or insults his little chosen household. Every emotional wound as Louis and Lestat struggle with one another exhibits on his face, not simply by his unhappiness however by his anger. He’s nonetheless only a baby lashing out at individuals, anticipating them to go away him and deciding to provide them a purpose. 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 unsuitable, it’s laborious to not be somewhat 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 vary or transfer on. Watching Lestat repeatedly smash his personal life jogs my memory of the best way I behaved as a teen, filled with anger on the world and pointing that anger at everybody I met. If I used to be trapped in that second without end like an insect in a drop of amber I don’t know that I’d be totally different than Lestat, making an attempt desperately to maintain individuals from leaving me even when I needed to kill them to do it.
