Spoilers follow for The Vampire Lestat Season 3, Episode 5 – “New York,” which is available on AMC and AMC+ now.
In “New York,” this week’s new episode of AMC’s series formerly known as Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) is in auteur mode recording his magnum opus “posthumous” album which triggers memories from the time he spent a decade gently awakening Akasha (Sheila Atim) from her slumber with his music.
For fans of Anne Rice’s books, or even Aaliyah’s performance as the “Great Mother” in the 2002 movie Queen of the Damned, this is a big moment for the AMC series: We’re finally getting deep enough into the canon to introduce this seminal character.
“We took a hard look at the Lestat, Enkil, Marius, Akasha text from the book and did our usual jack hammering,” showrunner Rolin Jones tells IGN about figuring out the best way to bridge multiple books and introduce the story of the first vampire. “Find the emotional essence of the scenes, look at your budget and see what you think you can pull off, look at the story you’ve told up to that point and then take your nastiest swing at it. Akasha bounced around ‘tween episodes four–six, and eventually we found a lot of wonderful things in merging the events of the book with Lestat’s origins as a musician. Thus, episode five.”
Jones says they structured “New York” as the telling of two momentous, music-centric periods in Lestat’s long existence. In the past, after Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) left him, Lestat is pulled from the grave by Marius de Romanus (Christopher Heyerdahl) and remanded to the “honored” job of being the Keeper of the deep-sleeping first vampire Akasha and her husband Enkil. In the present, Lestat terrorizes his band to rise up to his impossible standards of recording the “perfect” album, as he wrestles with many regrets that fester inside him.
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For Lestat’s ecstatic recording studio journey, making an album about his “three-century trainwreck life,” Jones imagined “how they would build some of those old Motown tracks, where it was just brutal, like 70 or 80 takes. That [sequence], by the end, it’s all of these spontaneous, joyful things. But the behind the scenes of that is just like grind, grind, grind it. I was interested in that. But what we were very excited about was tying that into the second awakening of him as a vampire.”
In the past, Lestat remembers his decade of solitary existence in the tomb with Akasha and Enkil. The music he plays to them on violin and piano wakes Akasha from her sleep, to the point where she sits up and feeds on him.
“Lestat told the story about how he became a vampire which is a very dark story. But taking this thing that happened to him with Akasha, and nearing the birth of him as an artist, he enters as an ape,” Jones says of Lestat’s journey with her. “Stretching that story out from, in the novel, a couple of days to 10 years gives him the time to actually see how he develops.
“This thing that actually became a harbor of safety, this music, it comes at this auspicious time when this thing happened to him and put something inside his body, just when he was starting to almost figure out how to live as a vampire,” Jones says of this time with Akasha. “This extra shit, this weird juice has come in, and it’s gonna fundamentally take him to this day. He shapes this as the origins of ‘me as a musician.’ So, it’s mirroring those [two times] together, and making sure that when we’re in the Akasha scenes that [the music] was just as important as the awakening of the Queen of the Damned.”
And for those surprised to see the return of the Parisian vampire Sam Buckley (Chris Geary) in the recording studio, Jones says he reappears for two reasons. “There were bits of connective tissue with the vampire Sam and the story we were telling,” Jones explains. “One was the Talamasca story crossover and the other was music. And then, like Jacob [Anderson] and Delainey [Hayles], sometimes you just like an actor and you keep them in mind for that convenient moment when it works for the story. We like Chris Geary. We think he is an excellent actor.”
The two main plots in “New York” end on stunning beats. In the past, Marius returns to check on Lestat and discovers him floating in the air while an agitated Akasha is awake, pacing, and chanting. She then looks at the camera, and says explosively, “I am the answer!”
Jones says that everything spoken by the Queen is an important connector to Rice’s text. “Go back and watch again and give a very, very close listen to what Akasha is saying prior to her saying ‘I am the answer…’ Then, go back and read Queen of the Damned. I think you will find a rather sophisticated point of view on the events of her origin.”
He adds that actress Sheila Atim exceeded their expectations in that chilling scene. “We thought we had good words. Sheila made them better.”
In the present, a despondent Larry (Noah Reid) quits the band after Lestat’s proclamation that they will need to record the album again from scratch. Armand (Assad Zaman) finds him exhausted and dazed in the subway, and gently suggests that he should rest. Larry then runs to jump in front of a speeding train. We’re left on Armand’s chilling stare.
“It’s most satisfying because we’re probably going to revisit that scene,” Jones teases. “There’s a lot going on in that look, and some of that is not privy to Lestat and his retelling in The Failures. And if you are asking why Assad did what he did at the end of Season 3, we are not unhappy about that.”
Be sure to check back at IGN every Sunday for post-morts of The Vampire Lestat with Rolin Jones!
