Since the first Interview episodes, Jones and Hannah Moscovitch, both playwrights, have imbued the series with a kind of meta-argument for the power of art in times of tremendous turmoil. These are dense, literary shows packed with references to all manner of highbrow art and pop culture—compositions inspired by the poetry of Baudelaire, visual nods to films like Trainspotting, dialogue that gestures toward figures as disparate as pioneering Black American jazz pianists, medal-winning British ice dancers, and Post Malone. But in keeping with its protagonist’s difficulty staring at his feelings head-on, The Vampire Lestat—and the marketing that preceded its premiere—doesn’t start with ballads or sensual odes to far-reaching love. The new show leads with up-tempo earworms that magnify Lestat’s ego, his spiral into all the expected vices, or his petty musings about Louis. Before we hear the cracks in Lestat’s voice, we see him peacocking onstage; before Lélio, we see Harlequin. “Rolin was always like, ‘Serve more cunt, serve more cunt,’ and I was a bit like, I don’t think you know what is in your mouth,” Reid said with a laugh. “Let me do the serving of the cunt, and you can just deliver the writing.”
The music starts to shift beginning with the third episode, when Lestat becomes overwhelmed by the apparition of his abusive maker and other ghosts, including Claudia, whose killing he’d been forced to witness firsthand. “I think episode three is probably the greatest primer for, Did you wanna know what Sam Reid could do?” Jones said, pointing out that the five to eight years before Interview saw Sam getting “very close to a lot of big things a long time ago and someone went for the star, whatever—I would just love all those casting directors or all those directors or the suits from studios, I’d love to just send them episode three and go, You dummies, you dummies. My good fortune.”
And again, during a crushing confrontation in the most recent episode, which finds Louis and Lestat once again reuniting on shaky emotional terrain, we see the latter address the gulf between them with one of the season’s most poignant songs: Standing onstage before Louis and the character whose noxious influence caused that evening’s fight, Lestat pivots from a high-energy rendition of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” to belting the heartfelt lyrics of “Brutal Love,” a jagged, vulnerable ode: “Show me that bitter star / I want it / Gimme that brutal love / I want it all.” When Reid performed the song in New York last month, no one in the crowd looked more ecstatic than Anderson, who swayed and sang along joyfully to the Loustat ballad as his counterpart inhabited the tortured rockstar onstage. In the weeks ahead of the performance, Anderson, who also makes music under the alias Raleigh Ritchie, was confident in his costar’s ability to hold the entire theater in the throes of Lestat’s musical catharsis: “He’s born for this.”
