Gone but not forgotten, Claudia comes back in the third episode of The Vampire Lestat, “Toronto.” The vicious daughter who took after her maker, Lestat, is remembered in echoes of the past and a doppelgänger in the present. So, what does Sam Reid, who plays Lestat, have to say about how “Toronto” adds a new layer to what father and daughter have in common?
In an interview for Mashable’s Say More series, Reid reflected, “They have a mutual understanding, Claudia and Lestat, where, yeah, they’re at loggerheads. They sort of hate each other, but they have a lot of mutual respect between the two of them.” He noted, “The writers never shy away from making these issues as complex and as truthful as possible.”
The complex new truth revealed in “Toronto” is that Claudia and Lestat have both endured brutal violation at the hands of a vampire. In this episode, while Lestat is forced to face his own violent vampire origins at the hands of his maker, Magnus, Louis seeks vengeance on Bruce, the motorcycling bloodsucker who’d preyed on Claudia in Season 1, while she was out on her own.
“They are similar,” Reid said in his interview with Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko. “They have a shared experience.”
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Jacob Anderson is Louis in “The Vampire Lestat.”
Credit: AMC+
To drive this parallel home, The Vampire Lestat shows Louis read the missing pages of Claudia’s diary aloud to her abuser, Bruce (before burning him alive undead). But rather than flashbacks of Bruce’s assaults on Claudia, “Toronto” cuts to flashbacks of Magnus’ assault on Lestat, which turned him into an immortal. Where Claudia expressed her feelings in her diary, Lestat offers his songs, including “Your Biggest Fan.” Reid explained to Mashable, this early in the season, Lestat is more interesting in presenting a version of himself he prefers than actually interrogating his life. But maybe Claudia took after him here too.
Of all the things Lestat says Louis and Daniel got wrong in their book, Interview with the Vampire, he’s most affronted by the claim that he’d gotten Claudia to come back to their Louisiana home by threatening to rape her on that train out of town. “Never fucking happened,” he wrote on the pages, a reaction which caused Daniel to chuckle in episode two.
Reid says of Claudia’s account of the train scene, “He’s blindsided by that. I think it’s a very painful thing.” He then teased we’ll see Lestat’s version of the train scene before the end of the season, saying, “You understand why it’s there in the book later on. But he’s blindsided about it, because he actually wouldn’t do that.”
For more from Mashable’s interview with Sam Reid, look for our new Say More episode on Friday, June 19.
The Vampire Lestat streams on AMC+, with new episodes weekly.
