The Plot: Fast times on tour with an undead rock star as he recalls bits and pieces of his vampire origin through a fog of blood.
The Verdict: This just wasn’t my jam. If the intent was to convey, with haphazard editing, the effect of a drug-addled rock star’s fragmented memories and short attention span, then mission accomplished. The central performance by Sam Reid hits all the right notes, and I could get caught up in the violin-rock exhilaration of a song like “Black Licorice.” But the narrative around those components is so disjointed and almost stream-of-consciousness (in a rapid-fire way) that I had difficulty following it at times.
Gone is the elegance and dark drama of Interview with the Vampire, which did a better job of keeping the viewer invested with real plot developments. In The Vampire Lestat, everything is dialed up to 11, including the shouty, overlapping dialogue, delivered by motormouths with various accents. The result is a dizzying cacophony of scenes that don’t have enough room to breathe or connect and build on each other. It’s like watching a vamp mug while auto-scrolling TikTok videos or Instagram reels.
I haven’t read the Anne Rice novel this show adapts, but based on the summary, part of the problem may be that—beyond some ill-focused flashbacks—there isn’t much of a story under all that noise. Fleshing out your mythos isn’t the same thing as telling a compelling story. Maybe that’s why the Hollywood of 2002 only used some elements from The Vampire Lestat as it skipped straight to adapting the next Vampire Chronicle, Queen the Damned, for the big screen.
The idea of a vampire rock star is a good one, but it’s about as poorly executed here as it was in that movie. A couple of late-breaking cliffhangers and the reunion of Lestat and Louis (Jacob Anderson) in episode 6 aren’t enough to add framework to a show that’s all over the place.
The boys make nice while the writers’ room, led by showrunner Rolin Jones, blames Lestat’s history of domestic abuse on the blood of a Black vampire, Akasha (Sheila Atim). In 2024, Jones told The Los Angeles Times that his creative team was “going to try to beat Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and they have failed.
Armand (Assad Zaman) comes into his own at the end, but as an interviewer, Daniel Malloy (Eric Bogosian) only seems to have one annoying, antagonistic tone of voice now. The subplot with “Fraudia” (Delainey Hayles) registers as a mere contrivance, and it seems like a cop-out to conjure the real Claudia from hell, just to let the Louis off the hook, guilt-wise. As for Lestat, he’s a hot mess, and his series digests like a great big nothingburger, topped with steaming hot garbage.
If Motion Bitcher’s resident vampire expert, Jen Renfield, were still around to cover the show, maybe her verdict would be more positive. As it is, The Vampire Lestat is one of those instances where an unreasonably high Rotten Tomatoes score (on both the Tomatometer and Popcornmeter) leaves me questioning whether my own taste or the hivemind of reviewers is wrong.