The Vampire Lestat - “New York” Review
There is a moment in “New York” when Lestat de Lioncourt enters a diner in a black hoodie and sunglasses – his disguise, in an episode full of performances within performances – and watches a young woman who looks exactly like his dead daughter go about her work.
Louis asked him whether it was really her. He walked in to find out. And watching the grief and calculation move simultaneously across Sam Reid’s face in that moment – the instant assessment of how easy it would be to fall into this fantasy, the swallowing of his own tears, the decision to protect Louis from something that is hurting him even as it is clearly, acutely hurting Lestat himself – is the finest piece of acting this season has produced.
He tells Louis that this young woman is nothing like their dead daughter. He tells him not to see this person again. He is lying, at least partially, and the lie is an act of love.
“New York” is the episode where the pain that birthed this entire franchise finally takes center stage. Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire fifty years ago in the aftermath of losing her daughter Michele, and the grief of a parent for a lost child has always been the emotional bedrock underneath this vampiric mythology – the thing that gives all the grandeur and darkness its human weight. The Vampire Lestat has been circling this material all season. In “New York” it finally arrives.
Louis’s storyline has become the season’s most uncomfortable and most honest simultaneously. He has paid a young woman named Regina to wear a dress, do a Louisiana accent, and pretend to be Claudia – and has folded a fake Madeleine into the arrangement as well – constructing a domestic scene as though grief could be managed through staging. Jacob Anderson plays the desperation of this arrangement with a restraint that makes every moment of it more painful: this is a man who knows exactly what he is doing and cannot stop doing it, because the alternative is sitting alone with the truth that Claudia is dead and he could not protect her.
When the fantasy cracks – when any stray detail lets too much real pain in – you see the seams of it, and the seams are the whole point. Grief that cannot be faced directly does not go away. It finds stranger and stranger containers.
The season’s flashback sequences reach their most fully realized expression in this episode with the introduction of Akasha, played by Sheila Atim in a villain debut that manages to be simultaneously awe-inspiring and genuinely terrifying. The sequence of Lestat’s time as Keeper – isolated with the ancient progenitor of all vampires, tasked with bringing her “presents of the present” from the human world, playing music for a being who went twenty-three years without speaking to his predecessor – is the most Gothic material the show has produced all season. When Akasha finally moves, flicking an ice cream scoop to the floor in a gesture of displeasure so small it barely registers as motion, the scene earns its unease completely.
Until finally, she drinks from him. And in doing so, puts her madness into his veins. The revelation – that the wickedness Lestat has, in his worst moments, visited on those closest to him across centuries has been in part the madness of Akasha’s blood running hot through him, beyond his control – does not exculpate him. The show is too honest for that. But it deepens him, and deepens our understanding of why a being who so obviously loves the world and the people in it has spent an eternity leaving wreckage behind him.
But it’s the recording studio sequences that contain the episode’s single greatest moment. “Stained Glass Eyes,” the song Lestat writes after being forced to face his grief over Claudia, is the emotional culmination of everything the series has been building toward. Where the album’s other tracks have mostly been anthems and provocations, this one is simply a wound laid open – a vampire who has lived for centuries confessing that he failed his child, that he loves her still, and that the grief has nowhere to go. Sam Reid’s performance in the recording of that song is extraordinary – a man singing to a daughter who cannot hear him, two centuries too late.
Fifty years ago, Anne Rice sat down with her grief and wrote something true. She wrote about a vampire who loved his child, lost her, and could not stop grieving her across centuries. “Stained Glass Eyes” is this series’ clearest expression of that truth – the moment when the love, the loss, and the specific anguish of a parent losing their child that originally built this franchise converge into something genuinely moving. In “New York,” the show has finally, fully remembered what it has always been about.