Early on in The Vampire Lestat‘s first season, the eponymous anti-hero mentions a formatively traumatic moment that we finally see in full in the finale, titled “The Failures.”
When Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) was just a boy, his mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), took him to see their neighbors burn alleged witches alive. In the final episode of this season, Lestat finally stops deflecting about what this moment meant. At the long table, before the Failure Finders, he confronts his resentment at his mother for how this execution impacted him for the next 200-plus years.
In a post-mortem interview, Sam Reid told Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko what that scene means for The Vampire Lestat and how it connects to the final moments of Nicolas de Lenfent (Joseph Potter).
What did the witches burning mean to Lestat?
In episode 7 of The Vampire Lestat, the version of Gabriella at the long table argues that she took the young child Lestat to witness the witches burn so that he would see his neighbors for the vicious and ignorant “cabbages” they are. She wanted him to be motivated to leave this terrible place for something better.
Asked about this sequence, Reid told Mashable, “That was one of the main conversations I had with [showrunner] Rolin [Jones] about the whole Lestat journey this season, was getting to the core of him, [which] was this existential crisis that he had when he was a child.”
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“You know, he [initially] puts it on Nicki, because he cannot deal with that,” Reid explained, “so he gives Nicki that existential crisis in episode three.”
Reid referred to the flashback in episode 3, where vampire Nicki goes mad, cuts off his own hand, and longs for death. At the time, Lestat told Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) that Armand (Assad Zaman) killed Nicki with fire. And as he died, Nicki let out a long, low moan, an “O.” In episode 7, recalling the witches at the long table, Lestat echoes this exact sound.
Lestat looks upset.
Credit: AMC
“Nicki saw that in death there was a nothingness,” Reid said, “That all of this means absolutely nothing, which is a very complex feeling as an immortal being. And his mouth formed a perfect circle, and all that came out was, ‘O.’ And then you see [Lestat] reprocess that memory as his own memory, watching these women die, and understanding for the first time: Yes, Gabriella has abused him, and has assaulted him throughout his whole life.”
He continued, “[By taking him to see the witches burned], she’s weirdly saying to him, ‘Get out. Go do [or] be something else, be something more [than these cabbages].’ But unfortunately, it came out of a place of trauma. So his whole sense of direction has been running — running so far from the idea that he might become nothing and he might be dead. So it’s very messy.”
“There’s a lot left unresolved with Gabriella,” Reid said, “But, we always knew that we were going to return to this ‘O,’ to this sound, the purity of existential crisis.”
Noting how the show’s take on Nicki and Lestat differs from Anne Rice’s novel The Vampire Lestat, Reid explained, “There is such a beautiful chapter in the book that he has with Nicki. The way that [Rolin and his team] do the the adaption is that they will look at it, and go, ‘Well, maybe Lestat here in the book is deflecting.’ So, [the writers] knew they were always going to return to that, and how fundamental the witches were going to be in Lestat’s life.”
The Vampire Lestat is now streaming on AMC and AMC+.
