The season finale of The Vampire Lestat arrived on Sunday night on AMC and for many fans, not a moment too soon. The previous episode, “Montreal”, had left things in a shocking place with both Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid) having quite literally lost their heads at the hands of Armand (Assad Zaman) and Daniel (Eric Bogosian). It was an unexpected situation and one that many fans wondered how the pair would get out of it alive (or at least as alive as a vampire can).
This week, we found out that answer in “The Failures”, the season finale for the series but while the episode revealed the answer to that and a great many other questions, it offered up a lot to unpack as well as a stunning ending that will certainly have fans begging for another season. In the wake of that stunning finale, we sat down with Reid to talk about everything Lestat went through in “The Failures”, as well as the meaning of one shocking character return, and that ending twist that took us in a direction we certainly weren’t prepared to go.
Warning: Spoilers for the season finale of The Vampire Lestat, “The Failures”, beyond this point.
ComicBook: Lestat lost his head literally. Now in this episode, he’s facing his maker, his fledglings, and really just his choices, his mistakes, his personal demons. And what I love about the scene, it’s not just a reading for filth, it’s part reckoning, part therapy session on some level. How does this moment for you as Sam, the person bringing Lestat to life, fit into Lestat’s overall journey that we’ve seen unfold this season?
Sam Reid: I think it’s important to look at why he’s making a recording called The Failures, firstly. And the structure of the narration is kind of like the key to the whole take on how we’ve kind of interpreted this specific season, which is that he persistently and adamantly rises from the ashes all the time, brushes off the trauma and keeps going, you know what I mean? And that’s why it sort of feels so erratic at the start of the season, because he’s like, this is what it felt like at the moment. I’m trying to explain to whoever’s listening to this recording, whoever’s bought that recording, I’m trying to explain to you, this is what it felt like for me. This is what it’s like when you completely and utterly ignore all of the failures and all of the issues that you have in your life. And he cannot escape it.
And he’s sort of like saying this step led to this step when I was horrible to Molloy. This is what led me to getting my head cut off. And I think once he’s now in this kind of like slow march of time towards death, which is a very specific amount of time that a vampire like Lestat can survive, he’s finally faced with all of his failures.
And these are the kind of specters or souls or, you know, elements of the people who he loved the most and how he believes that they actually see him. And I think it’s really kind of fundamental to who Lestat is as a character, particularly because he has so many facades. And he tries even in the last sequence towards when he is about to die, that he keeps fighting. Like, good luck. That was shit. Nice. You all tried but fuck you. This is how it’s going to be. I’m the vampire Lestat. I’m great. I’m great. Everything’s great.
And then as he’s dying, he realizes that he is actually failing and he is actually a failure and cannot win against the tide of these things hitting him. He can’t even structure a sentence correctly as he’s dying. He can’t even have a beautiful final kind of swan song final say. He can’t even get the grammar right as he’s dying. But I think it’s really interesting that that once that realization happens, you start to realize, he starts to realize that he is responsible for a lot of things. In fact, he might be even responsible for the destruction of the world.
Speaking of him in those final moments, it’s kind of like the going towards the light thing where your life flashes before your eyes vampire style. And I thought that was a really neat way of doing that, where like everyone’s at a concert and I thought it was just so cool. But the thing that stunned me the most is we get a really unexpected guest at that concert that I don’t think a lot of people are going to expect. Unpack for me why Paul is the last person Lestat sees.
So, Lestat, more than anything, wants Louis to love him. He loves Louis more than anything in the world. And Louis is a withholder. Louis is a very complex character. And a huge part of this kind of like bratty tirade is that he has felt very betrayed by Louis and unloved and unlovable. But what he understands in his moment of death from Paul is that the last person who Louis said he loved to was his brother and his brother committed suicide.
So, he no longer, Lestat, no longer necessarily needs to hear I love you from Louis because he knows he loves him. And he all of a sudden has this awakening, this moment where he’s like, I understand the love of my life. I understand him. I know why he can’t say these things. I don’t need to keep pushing him to say these things. I don’t need this anymore. I am loved. I love him. It’s a beautiful sense of closure for Lestat; do you know what I mean?
And hopefully Louis senses that. So, the fact that it’s Paul who says it to him is really, really very important, I think, because you understand Louis better. I think it’s very clear. I mean, look, you know, you’d have to think about that to get it. But hopefully people do think about these things. And, you know, it was sort of heartbreaking for me. It was such a mind-blowing thing to have Paul back and do that and give Lestat that sort of like closure to hear that he is loved and to give you that kind of insight.
And speaking of big, stunning surprises, let’s talk about that ending, because I know as a huge Anne Rice nerd and also just from following people online, watching people unpack the season, I brilliantly saw somebody figured out that the lyrics to Butterscotch Bitch actually forewarned us of things. And we didn’t figure that out until the very possible minute. We were expecting Akasha to come in and genocide the world. And it turns out we may have actually just seen the birth of the Brat Prince. For you as the actor, what was it like getting to find out that that’s where we’re going to stop the season?
Well, I mean, so we’re always we’re always like, particularly in this season, we’re really pulling from the next three books. So, like the point in when he is recording this failure recordings were obviously, you know, post the destruction of the world which he takes responsibility for. He actually says, you know, when we started, I was trying to explain to you how it felt then, what I felt like I was going through at the time as he’s going through this, you know, series of meltdowns. But towards the end, he kind of acknowledges like, actually, it was all mine, all my fault. All of all of it has been my fault. And I have fundamentally failed as a creature of the universe and of the world and as a vampire.
But there’s a reason why he’s in in that place and why he’s explaining those things. So, for me, it was like trying to understand where we were telling that story from. And I think I think it’s in terms of his anger towards or his battiness towards, you know, not understanding Louis’ reasons for writing the book and trying to unpack that and that leading him off to become a musician. It’s a better resolution for the season to kind of finally have Louis and Lestat back to each back to together and on a level. And give them enough closure to realize that they have both.
Louis says to Armand, the love of my life was him, even if he doesn’t say it doesn’t say it to Lestat. But Lestat does hear that from Paul and understands it deeply within himself that he is loved by Louis and he does love him. So, we have them together and Lestat has enough awareness that Gabriella has probably, you know, manipulated him throughout his entire life to go through a whole series of events. He has been dealing with an existential crisis since he watched the witches burn from when he was a child and has been running away from the concept of death being nothing. Been running away from the meaningless kind of elements of what life actually ends up being. Yeah. So, there’s a closure there.
Music was such a big part of the season. What was your favorite song to perform?
I mean, some of the songs that I love I haven’t performed. I just recorded it, but I love “Nothing to Lose.” And I also love “Cabbage”. Like I just think like equally they’re like such wild songs to sing and to perform because they do all of these jumps around. So, it really feels like it’s a very engaging and exciting thing to do.
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