News The Vampire Lestat How David Bowie Inspired Sam Reid’s Performance in The Vampire Lestat In a press conference hosted by the Television Critics Association, Sam Reid dished on his inspirations for Lestat’s onstage persona By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 5, 2026 Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC We’ve already gotten a solid dose of actor Sam Reid performing the rock star version of Lestat. There are the teasers we get in the trailers, of course, and you can listen to original songs “Long Face” and “All Fall Down” to get an extra dose of the vampire’s angst. It’s enough to make clear that Reid embodies Lestat’s musician persona well, and in a press conference hosted by the Television Critics Association that I attended, he shared how he channeled that sexy rockstar energy. In Reid’s mind, the core of Lestat’s penchant for performance goes back centuries. “His onstage persona is built in the 18th century… it is the French iteration of the Commedia dell’arte, and that’s where I place him as a performer,” he said. “Anything that goes beyond that is an extension of that character, because I feel like that’s where he built his stage presence.” Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC One of those extensions involved Reid watching David Bowie perform “Cracked Actor” at live concerts. He did so, however, to “remind myself that [Lestat’s] not human… I just got to make sure that I don’t forget that sometimes, because there is a lot more vulnerability in this season than we’ve had before, so I just wanted to make sure we maintain that he is a kind of other thing, which I thought David Bowie just does extraordinarily.” Lestat’s stage presence also changes as the season goes on. “I wanted to make sure it felt still theatrical in a way, because he’s still performing the idea of a rock star, at least at the beginning. And as the show progresses, the performance starts to disappear, and then I just really focus on the books and [showrunner Rolin Jones’] work, and the songs that Daniel Hart wrote, and trying to hone in on that, and pull the guy out of those things.” You can see Reid’s performance of Lestat’s performance (and then his performance of Lestat’s vulnerability) when The Vampire Lestat premieres on AMC and AMC+ on June 7, 2026. [end-mark]   The post How David Bowie Inspired Sam Reid’s Performance in <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: The Vampire Lestat Always Plays The Hits Plus: Is Mads Mikkelsen a genre? By Molly Templeton | Published on June 5, 2026 Image: AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Image: AMC It’s June? It’s June. Does anyone remember what it was like when every turn of the calendar didn’t come as a peculiar shock? I guess that was maybe how we lived, once. But here we are in June—the month, the internet advertisers will have you believe, of dads and grads—and there are such things to look forward to. Sam Reid as The Vampire Lestat. Colin Farrell in Sugar. The season finale of Widow’s Bay, which seems to be the thing bringing together the oddest corners of my personal internet. Book discourse! The wary excitement of Knicks fans! A lot of things are very, very bad, but there’s a little hint of hopefulness in the air. Or maybe that’s just pollen. Remember your Claritin, hug your friends, worship your vampire rock gods, call your reps—you know the drill. Love Bites: The Vampire Lestat There’s one loud thought in my head this week, and it’s just LESTAT. Jealously, I have been reading every account I can find of the one-night-only The Vampire Lestat screening and concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Ravenously, I have been reading interviews with the cast from previous seasons. My Instagram feed is on to me; the usual cat videos are interrupted with the cast in increasingly lush outfits. I spent two days rereading the novel on which this season is based. I rediscovered my love for this ridiculous dramatic child of a vampire. I am ready. To France! To the past! To a whole-ass tour, which is way more rocking than Lestat gets to do in the novel with his name on it! I cannot wait to see where this goes. The Vampire Lestat takes the stage Sunday night on AMC+. RIP Marjane Satrapi I keep trying to come up with something succinct to say about Marjane Satrapi, who died this week at the far-too-young age of 56, and failing. But you don’t need me to talk about her; what you need is her art. Did you read Persepolis? No? Pick it up now. And watch the movie, too.  In 2023, the graphic novel turned 20 and got a fancy new edition; writing about it for NPR, Tahneer Oksman said: As a memoir told in comics that are both comical and also deeply serious, sometimes at the same time, what might potentially bewilder certain audiences is the unorthodox packaging of this complex and deeply moving story. Told through the eyes of a heroine whose moral compass is better defined than many of the adults around her, even as her naiveté is a source of endearment as well as amusement, Persepolis reminds its readers that children and teens are more often tuned in to the ways of the world than the adults around them are willing to admit. It’s exceptional — and perhaps for that reason a bit unsettling — when a piece of art, or literature, can so thoroughly capture that basic, but easily forgotten, reality. Ted Chiang: “No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious” I keep reading this new Ted Chiang piece on AI in little pieces, both because I need to stop and scream occasionally, and because there are just so many brilliant, biting, necessary bits that I need to take a little pause after each of them. He is clear and sharp and simply not messing around: He asks, “Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?” And answers: No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot. And then goes on to outline the careful reasoning and thought process behind this statement. Sometimes he’s funny even while making important points: Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded.  I’m not going to tell you everything good in this piece. I think you should just go read it. Is Mads Mikkelsen a Genre Unto Himself? No one is going to argue that the Danish film Another Round is genre. However, it stars Mads Mikkelsen, who feels, at this point, like the embodiment of some kind of mashed-up, unquestionably brilliant genre of his own: stone-faced, emotive, dramatic, swooping in as sad space dads and hit men and, you know, Hannibal. And also Le Chiffre! And I could go on. But the point is, the Danish film Another Round is now on Netflix, and I’ve been meaning to watch it for ages. It has a wild premise: a group of schoolteachers (all men, I feel compelled to note) decide to see what happens if they try to maintain a consistent blood alcohol level of 0.05%, which may perhaps make them more creative. This gives me a headache as a concept. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. And yet: I must know how it all plays out. It won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film! I mean, if you need a reason other than Mads to watch it.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> Always Plays The Hits appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV anime Indie Anime Jinsei Is More Conceptually Impressive Than Enjoyable to Watch It’s exciting to see anime getting wider distribution globally all the same. By Reuben Baron | Published on June 5, 2026 Credit: Greenwich Entertainment Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Greenwich Entertainment It surprises me how many times I’ve seen the trailer for Jinsei—not just in arthouses but at regular theaters. I thought this could be just my New York cinephile privilege (it has a limited opening at IFC Center on June 5), but the movie’s reported to be playing in over a hundred theaters nationwide starting June 12. That might not be a wide release, but it’s wider than the typical North American anime release from back in my day. No Satoshi Kon film exceeded 37 screens in his lifetime. The Oscar-nominated Studio Ghibli masterpiece The Tale of the Princess Kaguya never played in more than 29 theaters in its initial 2014 release. Summer Wars, as accessible a family-friendly crowdpleaser as any anime, maxed out at 11 theaters in 2010! It’s cool that anime as a medium is now popular enough to sustain bigger releases (all aforementioned films have since gotten wider rereleases). But even in this era, Jinsei feels like something that would normally play in a dozen arthouses at most. This might be the least mainstream-friendly anime feature to ever get this big a release. It’s certainly the most outside the system. By “outside the system,” I mean that Jinsei is almost entirely the product of just one guy. First-time filmmaker Ryuya Suzuki wrote, directed, animated, and edited the film entirely by himself, as well as composing the music in collaboration with Yuki Hara. The only other names in the credits are the voice actors, the sound team (led by Shuji Suzuki), marketing people, a long list of Kickstarter backers, effects artist Taishu Tomita, and producer Kenji Iwaisawa. That last name you might recognize as the director of On-Gaku: Our Sound, another crowdfunded indie anime made with only a slightly larger team, and the bigger budget sports anime 100 Meters. Iwaisawa spent seven years animating On-Gaku. Suzuki completed Jinsei in just 18 months. I realize I’ve spent a long time talking about the circumstances of Jinsei’s release and production without saying anything about the film’s story or quality. That’s because, disappointingly, those circumstances are more interesting to me than the film itself. I was intrigued by the premise of a single character (voiced by rapper ACE COOL) taking on different identities over the course of a century, reminiscent of Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress. I also appreciate how it bends genre, starting realistic before gradually evolving into psychedelic science fiction—the bold swerve recalls another one-man wonder of animation, Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Millennium Actress and It’s Such a Beautiful Day are five-star favorites of mine, so why did Jinsei leave me so cold? For one thing, I don’t love how the film looks. It turns out the way one person can animate 95 minutes in 18 months is to barely animate anything at all. Limited animation, in my view, works best at extremes: either using graphic simplicity to heighten the appeal of stylized motion (as with something like The Powerpuff Girls or Hertzfeldt’s stick figures), or going the opposite route of providing such lavish detail that the art wows even when the animation doesn’t (the more common route for anime, taken to its furthest extreme with the 1973 erotic horror watercolor slideshow Belladonna of Sadness). Jinsei is neither fish nor fowl, its character designs caught in a bland middle ground between these two approaches, unable to overcome the jerkiness of their movements. At least Suzuki knows how to compose a frame well. The use of symmetry, color design, and different aspect ratios representing different eras call to mind the works of Wes Anderson. Is it coincidence or direct inspiration that the most striking scenes in both Jinsei and in Anderson’s Isle of Dogs juxtapose violence with sushi preparation? Jinsei divides its narrative into chapters, each using a different name for the protagonist. The first segment, “Se-chan,” makes some of the most effective use of its minimalist visuals, telling the story of the main character’s parents through a montage of car scenes leading up to a deadly accident. In the next chapter, “God of Death,” our protagonist is deep in mourning and subject to bullying but finds a friend in Kin (Taketo Tanaka), a classmate with a love for boy bands. The friends decide to try and become idols themselves (Se-chan/”God of Death” is the son of a famous idol), and so Se-chan becomes “Kuro” as he goes through five years of training under an abusive manager, Shiratori (Kanji Tsuda). Breaking away from his idol experience with a burst of violence, the protagonist’s next phase of life is as “Reito,” a host club worker who nearly gets killed but survives in an abandoned warehouse. He’s discovered as “Man A,” then gets a second chance at celebrity as “Zen,” somehow ends up getting together with Sakura (Miho Ohashi), a woman he refused to defend from a sexual assault… and then the movie gets really weird, hurtling our protagonist into bunker life during a far-future war and eventually engaging in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque alien encounter. For all the dramatic changes throughout his long lifetime, Jinsei’s protagonist remains a blank slate throughout. Perhaps some might connect to him as a depiction of a certain type of depression, but I never found myself that invested in his journey – the gaps of how he gets from one segment of his life were left too vague for a satisfying character study. The supporting cast also goes underdeveloped. Kin is the most immediately sympathetic and compelling; I found myself wishing we got more time with him. The relationship with Sakura was just baffling. The extreme weirdness and more creative visuals in the gonzo third act make it slightly more entertaining, but the pacing of the film overall feels like a slog. Despite all my heavy criticisms of Jinsei, it is objectively neat that this film exists. It’s cool that an outsider artist and true indie animator can make a movie like this and get such wide exposure! That doesn’t change how little I cared for the movie itself. Maybe next time, Suzuki can find a co-writer to help develop his big ideas and a few more artistically skilled animators to work with.[end-mark] The post Indie Anime <i>Jinsei</i> Is More Conceptually Impressive Than Enjoyable to Watch appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Terror: Devil in Silver Devil in Silver: Aasif Mandvi Talks About Shooting Dr. Anand’s Major Scene Reactor interviewed Mandvi about his character’s journey over the course of the show. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 5, 2026 Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/AMC Warning: This episode contains spoilers for the fifth episode of The Terror: Devil in Silver, “Vermillion.” The fifth and penultimate episode of The Devil in Silver has more than one shocking moment, and one of them involves New Hyde’s managing psychiatrist, Dr. Anand. Dr. Anand, who is played by Evil alum Aasif Mandvi, has a run-in with Dorry, New Hyde’s long-term patient played with disturbing perfection by Judith Light. That run-in involves Dorry crushing Dr. Anand’s face into a pulp and tearing him open with her bare hands. It’s not subtle, and it’s a scene that Light, in character as Dorry, would constantly remind Mandvi of on set. “She would always just come up to me and secretly whisper [in a singsong voice], ‘I’m gonna kill youuuu… I’m gonna kill you…’ It was kind of a creepy thing that she would do to me,” Mandvi told me in an interview. Mandvi talked more about Dr. Anand’s final scene, how the social commentary of the show attracted him to the role, and what he thinks his character on Evil, Ben, would think of New Hyde. Read on for our full discussion. Image: Emily V. Aragones/AMC This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. What attracted you to the role of Dr. Anand from the get-go? It’s a great role, and multi-layered, and there’s a lot of complexity to the role. As an actor, it felt like it was fun to dig in and sink your teeth into something like that, and then I just liked the social commentary that the series has. I’d done this show Evil, and that was a real mix of horror and social commentary as well, and this lived in a similar space. I also liked the idea of Dr. Anand caught between being a person who genuinely, I think, wants to do good, and then also being beholden and being imprisoned himself inside this institution. He’s a middle management guy who’s stuck in this place where he knows he has to compromise his ethics and sense of right and wrong in order to keep the institution going, and that’s an interesting conundrum that I think that we see a lot in our world right now. He’s interesting because as episodes go on, it’s not quite clear how much he acknowledges or knows about the supernatural component as well. Did you have a thought in your mind of how much he knew what was really going on in New Hyde? I think he’s in denial about a lot of it. It was always a question for me: How much does he know? And then the question became: How much is he willing to look in that direction? I always got the feeling that he was a man who didn’t want to see the things he didn’t want to see. He wanted the institution to run smoothly, and with a certain level of consistency. For him, keeping the institution going was more important than losing the institution altogether, and so whatever he had to compromise in order to do that he would do. And then this other stuff with the devil and the supernatural, I don’t think he knows quite what to make of it, and I thought that was interesting, because I don’t think he buys into it 100%, but I think he knows that something is going on, and so I imagine it gives him an ulcer. Image: AMC+ It’s ironic too, because he gets punished for trying to do good at the end. And that’s the thing, right? As long as he just goes along with it and doesn’t take any action, he manages to survive. But the minute he takes action, the metaphor of the devil, through Judith’s character, kills him. I feel like that was a really powerful scene and moment in the show, but also a message about what the show was saying. At the end of the day, it’s all about just get in line, follow the rules, don’t speak up, just take your meds, non-compliance is not an option, all that kind of stuff. And when Dr. Anand decides to step out of line, the institution stamps down on him and kills him. And again, I would say we see more of that in the world today than we want to. It was an interesting and powerful metaphor. When did you know what would happen to your character? I think I got all the scripts prior to shooting, so yes, I probably knew before then. And it was kind of fun, because Judith was always in character when we were shooting. I rarely saw her out of character and she would always just come up to me and secretly whisper [in a singsong voice], “I’m gonna kill youuuu… I’m gonna kill you…” It was kind of a creepy thing that she would do to me.” That is creepy, especially from her. Yeah she was always Dorry, with the whole wig and the teeth thing. She was very much in that character the whole time. Image: Emily V. Aragones/AMC Can you talk about actually filming that scene, just what that was like? It was bizarre. There’s a lot of things that we do in this business where you look back on it, and you go, “Oh, right, that’s a weird thing that I had to spend the day doing.” That day I spent like five hours just [making grunting sounds, as one does when their face gets smashed in]. They had to shoot it at all different angles, and then they had a prosthetic, and they had a stunt guy. But I just remember Judith sitting on top of me just screaming for God knows how many hours. Did she stay in character for that too, in between takes? In character the whole time, yeah. It was a day. On one hand, I got to lay on the floor all day. On the other hand, I was basically told, “We just want the sounds of her hitting and smashing your face.” And I was like; I know a lot of things that I can call upon but that is not necessarily one of them…  what does that feel like to have your face smashed in? Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/AMC Have you seen end product of it? The final version on screen? I haven’t seen that one yet. It must be a weird thing, to see yourself in something like that. Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about it. My wife was like, “I’m not watching it.” It’s a weird thing… I’m trying to think if I’ve died in many things. I don’t know if I have or not, but in this particular gruesome fashion, this was a first, although I did get to take a selfie with the guy who had my smashed-in face. Well that’s good for memories! And for my last question, I have to ask: you mentioned Evil, and I’m a big fan of that show as well. Do you have a take on what Ben [Mandvi’s character on that show] would think of New Hyde if he ended up in there in some capacity? I think Ben would have quite a field day trying to figure out what was what, and what was real, and what was not real. This show starts to become less ambiguous as it goes along, whereas Evil always remained ambiguous about what was real and what was not. And I think in this case, if Ben went behind that door and ended up in that other world back there, I wonder if it would be more like the episode we did on Evil where he gets stuck in the elevator down in the basement and is suddenly faced with his worst nightmare and fears. So, I don’t know, but I definitely think that Ben would be checking the entire place… he’d be checking into the air conditioning. The season finale of The Terror: The Devil in Silver premieres on AMC+ and Shudder next Thursday, June 11, 2026.[end-mark] The post <i>Devil in Silver</i>: Aasif Mandvi Talks About Shooting Dr. Anand’s Major Scene appeared first on Reactor.

Books post-apocalyptic fiction Finally, a Unit of Measurement for a Certain Kind of Moral Depravity… We’ve all encountered this trope in post-apocalyptic fiction before. Let’s give it a name… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on June 5, 2026 Credit: American International Pictures / Amazon MGM Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: American International Pictures / Amazon MGM Studios Remember this old essay? The morning after I finished writing the article below, Reactor published an article by Ruthanna Emrys titled “Ixnay on the Post-Apocalyptic Cannibals: Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell.” Emrys’ column could have sent my mind down the path that led to the essay below… if I’d read it before writing the essay and not after. What a coincidence—I guess it’s “People Don’t Really Act Like Post-Apocalyptic Novel Protagonists” time! So, I recently became aware of the absence of a potentially useful unit of measurement, one I could use in review after review. It’s lack came to me as I was reading John Christopher’s 1956 The Death of Grass, which is rather counterintuitively about the death of grass and the consequences that follow. I don’t know how we’re supposed to get that from the title. The property being measured is temporal: how long does it take protagonists in an existential crisis to embrace war of all against all, to start murdering their way towards refuge—or, having refuge at hand, to aggressively prevent others from joining them? Obviously, crisis calls for resolute action. Imagine, for example, that you were on an escalator and that escalator halted. Provided you waited an acceptable time for the escalator to start up again or for rescue to appear—five or ten minutes—I don’t think anyone could reasonably criticize you for whipping out a machete to carve your way to freedom. Likewise, light cannibalism or establishing a Cosmic Circle commune working along proper Degleresque1 lines is just common sense under those circumstances. To quote A Mighty Wind’s Terry Bohner, “You would make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store.” Even granting the above, fictional characters seem to make the jump from conventional middle-class grudging coexistence to homicide and warlordism astonishingly quickly. For example, The Death of Grass’s heroes… well, no. Protagonists… conclude that impending famine means it’s every man for himself so quickly one might suspect they’ve been dying to hoist the Jolly Roger all along, and only waited for a pretext. This is almost certainly true for gunsmith Pirrie, who allies with the central characters early on. Pirrie brings his wife Millicent along not because he loves her, but because he is afraid she might thrive without him. As soon as opportunity presents itself, he murders Millicent and replaces her with Jane, whose parents he has just helped murder. I would be in no way surprised to discover Pirrie was a serial killer (or worse) pre-famine. While Grass’s characters might seem a bit hasty, an objective survey of works such as Varley’s Slow Apocalypse, Ward Moore’s “Lot,” Ing’s Pulling Through, Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer, Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence, and others—too many to list here—suggests that in fact these characters are not really all that exceptional. Survival-oriented pragmatists abound! DO NOT BOARD ESCALATORS WITH THESE PEOPLE. The lack of a formal measuring system makes it more difficult to compare works along that specific axis. Happily, I am here for you. More accurately, Ray Milland and Ward Moore were here for you, but I am going to steal their credit. In Ray Milland’s film Panic in the Year Zero! (Based on Moore’s “Lot” and “Lot’s Daughter”), Los Angelinos Harry Baldwin and family set out on a camping trip. The Baldwins become aware something is wrong about 2 minutes, 45 seconds into the film. By about the 3-minute, 30-second mark, they see ominous flashes. At about the 6-minute mark, they witness a mushroom cloud rising over Los Angeles. At the 7-minute mark, emergency broadcast radio confirms atomic attack. At the 9-minute mark, Harry sees another man2 assault a gas station attendant. 10 minutes in, Harry abandons any thought of returning to rescue his mother-in-law. Over the next minute, Harry convinces himself civilization may have collapsed. At minute 13, Harry asserts survival will have to be on an individual basis. Finally, at just under the 23-minute mark, Harry commits his first survival-related crime. Now, Panic was not filmed in real time. The 10 minutes between the Baldwins suspecting something is up and Harry concluding it is every man for himself is probably somewhat longer. An hour seems like a reasonable guess. Therefore, I suggest one hour as the basic unit of measurement for the interval between characters discovering there is a crisis and them deciding to chuck every civilized value overboard in the name of survival. I further propose this unit be henceforth be known as “the Baldwin,” in honour of Harry, who with his family contributed absolutely nothing to the (entirely successful) US war effect in the course of the Baldwins’ post-apocalyptic crime spree.I don’t know if the Baldwin will be useful to you all, as a concept, but I suspect I will get considerable use out of it.[end-mark] Researching “Cosmic Circle” and “Claude Degler” can only surprise and delight you. ︎Who also witnessed the attack and its effects. ︎ The post Finally, a Unit of Measurement for a Certain Kind of Moral Depravity… appeared first on Reactor.