Movies & TV The Vampire Lestat The Vampire Lestat Breaks Out the Power Ballads in “Toronto” “Mmm, performative journalism.” By Molly Templeton | Published on June 22, 2026 Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC The thing I love—well, one thing I love—about the vampire Lestat is that he is usually trying to be a very good boy. Yes, I do feel this way in part because I just reread Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, in which our hero explicitly rejects a religious definition of goodness and sets out to be good on his own. But this is true of his television counterpart as well.  The problem is that everyone is constantly projecting their own shit onto him. Dan thinks he’s a monster? Lestat will be a monster. Louis wants him to be how he was in the first season? Now the entire world thinks that’s who he is. Gabriella, Nicki, Magnus—oof, Magnus—Armand: they all have their versions of Lestat. He is wrestling with himself and his demons as much as he is with his “muses” and his mother.  And then when he finally gets a moment of his own version of bliss, well. You see how they react. But we’ll get there.  “Toronto” is an incredible hour of television. It’s a little overwhelming. It had me struggling to explain it. On second viewing it messed me up a bit. It’s smart and biting and densely packed with perfect dialogue, and it has the funniest ’80s parody music video I absolutely never expected to see in this show. And it does a ton of emotional heavy lifting. It is a good thing we are not trying to rank vampire emotional trauma because that would be a lot. And on the flip side, we have foreshadowed beheadings and alarming bathroom quickies. This is not an episode without any humor. When Daniel (my notes say Dan, since Lestat likes to needle him thusly) claims that Lestat owes him, since he saved Lestat’s life, the good doctor Fareed muses a bit on how long, exactly, a vampire as powerful as Lestat could survive without his head. For some vamps, not so long.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC And amid the hints of beheading, more hints about Daniel’s impending doom. I hate these hints. I think this show needs Eric Bogosian’s prickly New Yorker vibes, his impatience, even his tired tough journalist schtick. But Lestat says “He led a brief, incidental life as a vampire,” and I get very worried about him. There’s a line about Daniel’s hatred for Lestat being “watered in the sunlight later.” Eep. And yet: Lestat has regrets! Lestat probably has regrets about a lot more things than he’s letting on, but he straight-up says this about Daniel. Perhaps he’s saying this for the benefit of his imagined listener in the future. Or perhaps not. Either way, he plays Daniel like an electric violin. I’m going to watch this episode another time just to watch Sam Reid move through the twisty, elusive, entirely fake, absolutely convincing emotions he pulls off over the course of the “interview.” (Using scare quotes because the interviewer is at no point in control of the situation.) The return of the stuttering question and his faked upset about it, followed by a genuinely revealing series of answers about the stutter, followed by some less believable answers about how he rid himself of it—amid which are hints and outright revelations about the psyche of the young Mr. de Lioncourt. He pretends outrage and exhaustion and then speaks of watching witches burn with alarming detail. He remembers their names. He implicates Gabriella while she sits there, and then she runs off to fuck his body double.  And then Lestat talks about Nicki. “Nicolas de Lenfent, my first love.”  We have met Nicki before, in Armand’s memories, as Daniel points out. But Nicki feels fragile and precarious in Lestat’s telling: obsessed with music yet practical about his skills, squatting instead of paying rent, aware that his father would never send Lestat with kind messages of support. Nicki is troubled even before he’s kidnapped by Armand’s coven and used for snacks.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Nicki is even more of a mess after he becomes a vampire. But his story is tangled with so many other threads of Lestat’s story: with Armand; with Gabriella; with Magnus, Lestat’s maker, finally seen here in all his disastrous glory. Lestat spins and weaves his history, and it is never entirely clear if the story he’s telling Daniel is exactly the same as the version that we’re seeing on screen. By the time he gets to Magnus lip-syncing “Your Biggest Fan,” we are in truly astonishing territory. Lestat is portraying his maker as a needy, grasping, lovelorn fool, even as he refers to Magnus as his liberator. He hides his feelings about Magnus behind the story of Nicki, offering Daniel something real in one hand while keeping the other behind his back. “I carried the box because I destroyed him, Dan,” Lestat says of his souvenir of poor doomed Nicki. “I carried the box to remind me what I was capable of.” What he was capable of was love, if we’re being honest about it. He turned his mother because she was dying, and Nicki because he loved him, and Nicki wanted it. He gave people what they wanted: Gabriella the power to be more like her son, and Nicki his trust. He stopped lying. And it killed Nicki, eventually, yes. But Lestat didn’t do that. Armand did. (Here’s what I pause and say: In Lestat’s version, Armand did. In Lestat’s version, which happened after Gabriella went to coffin, so she cannot say otherwise. In Lestat’s version, in which he tells Gabriella that Louis doesn’t know about her, but then says to Daniel that he’s surprised Louis didn’t mention how much he spoke of her. He is trying to keep his dangerous, complicated loves apart, which is probably for the best. Gabriella and Louis is a slightly terrifying idea.) Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Armand’s love language is doing truly terrible things. Armand is a gremlin, but also an abused child given eternity. I think there’s a way where, in Armand’s mind, killing Claudia was doing Louis a favor. Setting him free. I’m sure that in Armand’s mind, that’s what he did for Lestat: set him free from a mistake gone awry. You could argue this is most vampires’ love language, maybe, but I think Armand has a notably strong tendency toward it. At any rate, the tangle of Lestat’s psyche is really on display here, though only for Daniel and—notably—Gabriella. Who is this story really for? Which listener does he really want to understand what happened with Nicki, what role Armand played, how it affected Lestat? It’s not a story for everyone, as his little prank reveals. Lestat plays this off like he was just fucking with Daniel, but this story was never for public consumption.  And yet before he walks off, he plays one last card, telling Daniel that the band tried to play a bigger venue, that they couldn’t fill it. He knows this perfectly well: “Unlike your last vampire, there are no delusions here.” I am saving all my commentary about Lestat’s rock star career and Lestat’s specific knowledge about music for the end, but this little bit made me sit up straight. Because it’s never been about being a rock star at all. The trappings are fun. The rest of it is feelings.  Meanwhile, Louis has gone on a little road trip. If ever you needed a reminder that the version of Louis that he presented to Daniel Molloy is not the complete Louis du Pont du Lac, well, here you go: Louis snarkily asking “Hey, you seen Killer?” as he murders his way through an entire coven of vampires singlehandedly. There is just ever so much we haven’t actually seen about this man. And yet, in keeping with the version of himself we do know, he frees the humans and directs them to a waiting car. (Possibly an Uber driver’s most alarming night.) Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC The show’s decision to twine Louis’ revenge with Lestat’s making is heavy and dark and so very, very fraught, and I think it works. It works as a commentary about bodily autonomy, and consent, and fear, and helplessness. It works because though we never see Claudia, for this whole scene, she is present. For as heavy as all of this is, we don’t have to actually see her go through what she went though. To hear her story in her words is enough. Instead of showing us, while Louis reads those torn-out diary pages, what we have already inferred, we see Lestat’s memories. And we see what happened to him.  This is not the tidy, “oh he’s my liberator,” flippant-about-Magnus’ suicide version of events. There is no voiceover. There is no filter. There is fear and prayer and horror, and Magnus telling him to “ask for it.” No wonder Lestat’s always on Daniel’s case about his transformational trauma. The show is not shy about an unwilling transformation being an invasion, an assault, a loss of bodily autonomy. “I hope one day he feels this, small and cornered, and crushed like a can,” Claudia wrote about Bruce. But it’s Lestat we see small and cornered. And yet—this is important—this never takes any of the horror or the import from Claudia’s story, and her telling of it. It is a reminder that one person’s trauma does not lessen another’s. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how the show pulled this off, why this works for me, when in a lesser series or movies I might have felt very differently. There are entirely too many stories about men avenging the terrible things done to women. But Louis sits there, and he channels Claudia, who has been dead for centuries, and it still feels like the moment belongs to her. (You could argue that he’s doing this for himself. But I think his following move suggests otherwise.) Lestat, in the past, screams, almost dies, and is reborn. None of them are unharmed, and they are all connected. It feels like the right way to tell this story; it doesn’t let you look away from either horror, but doesn’t turn it into something tawdry or gratuitous, either. The performances are fierce, the intensity off the charts. Now we know, too, why it made Lestat so mad, what Louis said about him and Claudia and the train.  “And he did win, ’cause I want nothing, to be nothing…” Louis reads from Claudia’s diary. Everyone responds to trauma differently. Lestat, you might say, wants everything.  The entire scene with Lestat and Magnus in the car is bitter and rank and loaded, Magnus speaking of, or for, all the muses, all the ghosts haunting Lestat, and this bit: “We eat your soul at the long table. 68 courses so far. We keep waiting for the bill, but the plates keep coming. And we keep asking ourselves, when is he going to make an album?” This—this!—is what makes Lestat snap and shout and roll the car. “WHEN WE ARE READY” yells Lestat, who was clearly not ready for what Magnus did to him all those years ago.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC He’s ready for the show, though. Lestat’s voiceover doesn’t come back in until he refers to you, the listener, in your gilded bathtub. Then begins my favorite part: “I couldn’t pretend anymore that we were a Ticketmaster must-have, or that I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown or that psychosis wasn’t the exhilarating, horrifying byproduct of romping and stomping around the hippocampus. But here’s the thing. I loved the music. I loved it. It was compelling me forward, pulling me through the perennial walls of my psyche. And I thought, why not ride it to blindness? ‘Cause it seemed possible this was the muddy bottom, and on the other side, a marble floor polished to the horizon. Music, in its purest expression, would make me worse and then make me better. Bring on the muses.” Lestat, on stage, is blissed out. Lestat has dropped musical references, admitted that he can’t sell bigger arenas, spoke of the agreement between artist and audience, and insisted that Daniel is missing the point of the tour: “It is not about asses on seats or streams on Pandora. It is about pure expression!” Lestat does not care if you think rock music is passe or uncool or anything at all. It is a direct expression of his chaotic mind, and it couldn’t be anything else. It had to be this: melodramatic, over the top, performative, loud, ironic-but-also-not, anthemic, sincere, collaborative, and performed live through a haze of (bloody) sweat. If you have never been overwhelmed, blissfully overwhelmed, by the sound at a loud show where the audience has become one big shrieking organism, you might not get it. But I hope you have. There’s a term for this feeling, which can come from other things, like your basketball team winning a championship after 53 years: “collective effervescence.” In that last concert scene, while Lestat sings “You can’t fuck away the loneliness / it’ll wait ’til you’re done / ’til you come / like a vampire,” his muses watch. They might better be called his ghosts. They are not part of the collective that is effervescing. The ones who’ve been projecting onto him all this time, well, they walk away. Gabriella, seeing her son be exactly who he is, turns away in what looks like disgust. Maybe just boredom. Magnus slinks out the back door; he isn’t the star of this song. Lestat has moved well beyond his maker. And Nicki stands there in the crowd looking more joyful than he ever has. The band looks joyful. It’s everything. (A side note: It’s possible that I will come to regret this extremely credulous reading of Lestat. I tend to be a very credulous viewer and reader: I want to believe what I’m being shown, especially when it is as intimate and fascinating and shifty as the way Lestat presents his story. I want to find the truth in it all, even if it’s not there. That tendency toward credulous reading is part of why I love so very much the overtness of this show’s storytelling: that everyone’s version of events is different, every take is subjective, every story spun and respun and told and retold. I believed Louis, and now I believe Lestat. I don’t really believe Armand very often, but we have been shown good reason to be skeptical of Armand’s takes.)  Meanwhile, Louis has driven all the way back to New York City to visit the waitress Regina again, and of course it’s as Lestat sings “don’t worship that grave / dug on your own / don’t burn alone” that we see him looking at not-Claudia like that, after all this time. Lestat is exorcising his ghosts. Louis is very much haunted by his. “Toronto” could have ended on Lestat whispering, “Perfection.” But no! We’ve lost track of Alex. Who is at a meeting in a small town, talking about how the band he’s not presently on tour with is blowing up. You’re gonna hear about them soon. If you don’t get EATEN by the wide-eyed VAMPIRE GREMLIN in your midst, anyway. The long, long pan from that voice saying “I’ll share” to the camera actually landing on Armand—sorry, Arun? That was a vicious tease, and I loved it. I am rather worried about our second guitarist, here, and yes, it has something to do with one detail on that poster that I will leave for you to notice for yourself.  We have just been reminded, though, that Armand has a habit of doing terrible things out of love.  LITTLE SIPS Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Lestat’s pajama-pants vibe in the interview!!!! The extremely clear way in which Christine hates Gabriella, and the equally clear way in which Gabriella does not care. Bless you, Christine, you are extremely good at your job, even when it involves finding very discreet cleaning crews who are probably paid large amounts of cash. Somebody on this bus has to know what time zone they’re in. Interesting that there have been other, offscreen attempts on Lestat’s life.  The POSSUM. The reference to one of the vamps getting another possum and then it EATS HIS FACE. Good job, lil buddy. “That’s what moms did with kids before Lego and Peppa Pig.”  So our boy told Gabriella that he told Louis she was dead, but then he wonders, to Daniel, why Louis never said anything about her, after Lestat had spoken of her at length. I think he’s just trying to keep those two apart. I think he knows that Gabriella and Louis would be terrifying together.  The Great Conversion, according to Lestat, is “fucking stupid.” Noted! One certainly wonders if Armand saying “I love you, Lestat” is embellishment for the benefit of Armand’s fledgling.  I was lightly distracted in the coven basement because I just feel like someone playing 1000 seat venues would not have that many posters available. Why are these dirtbag coven vamps so into Armand, anyway? And what are all those pages? From the book, maybe? We have not seen the last of Baby Jenks. Louis was most definitely lying about his relationship with Lemuel if the single thing Lemuel asks, after calling his lover, is “Safe?” Phew, those two.  I am still thinking about the connection between the three artworks Lestat namechecks: Raphael’s Three Graces, Brancusi’s Bird in Space, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Any theories? [end-mark] The post <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> Breaks Out the Power Ballads in “Toronto” appeared first on Reactor.