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.
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.”
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