Music makes The Vampire Lestat a god—and more human

The Vampire Lestat follows a lineage of rockstar films like Hedwig And The Angry Inch and Velvet Goldmine. Not traditional musicals, but stories about music, where the songs reflect the personality of their fictional protagonist. “Much of my time in the writers’ room was spent thinking about Lestat’s past,” explains Hart. “How that might affect him musically, and what kind of music he might have enjoyed the most.” That ranged from classical composers Lestat might have encountered in his youth (“a lot of Mozart and Bach”), to 20th-century names like Igor Stravinsky and Florence Price, to more direct reference points like Bowie.

“I’ve never been as involved in anything as I’ve been involved in this,” says Hart, who co-wrote an episode this season. “I was in the writers’ room essentially from day one, and spent the entire length of the writers’ room either working on scripts or working on songs, or both at the same time, and the two informed each other quite a bit. I would sit at the writers’ room table with all the other writers, and we would talk about an episode and how it related to a specific part of the book. Every once in a while inspiration would strike, and I would just get up and leave and go back to my little corner where all the music instruments were, and work on music for a little while.”

Taking cues from the novel, Lestat’s guitar rock sound is partly a matter of circumstance. We see him working on music in the season-two finale, but his rock career only takes off a couple of years later, after he hijacks a nearby garage band and recruits them for his Vampire Lestat tour. “They’re good, but they’re not as good as Lestat is,” Hart explains. “He raises them up to another level with his musicianship and his personality.”  

It’s a conflicted dynamic. Lestat’s band are important characters this season, played by multi-hyphenate actor-musicians including Schitt’s Creek star Noah Reid and Man Man songwriter Ryan Kattner, who collaborated with Hart on some of Lestat’s music. Performing in Lestat’s shadow, these characters have mixed feelings about their newfound success. Their new frontman has given them the fame they craved, but it’s a devil’s bargain, leaving them beholden to the whims of a megalomaniac overlord.

“We knew that at least one of the songs needed to have come from the band,” notes Hart. “Like it would have been their song first that Lestat then hijacked, which also feeds into some of the tensions between him and the band members.” Playing into the group’s garage band roots, Hart found it “a lot of fun to make a shittier version of a song that I’d already written.”

One of the most compelling elements of Interview With The Vampire is the way it invites us to analyze the biases of its narrators. All of the main characters are performers, attempting to retell their own stories through theater, music, or journalism. So when Lestat takes the stage, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of Sam Reid’s vampiric charisma, encouraging fans to dig deeper.

“My favorite lyrics are ones that are open to interpretation,” says Hart. “I would love for people to listen to Lestat songs and find things that relate to their own life in those lyrics. Some fans of the show have reached out to me on social media to say, like, does this lyric mean this? Is this lyric talking about this? And most of the time it hits on one of the multiple intentions that I had in writing those lyrics.”

Likewise, Hart could imagine Lestat smirking while writing some of those more ambiguous lines. “Lestat would really enjoy being allegorical and engaging in double entendre, or even triple entendre.” In Lestat’s debut single “Long Face,” he refers to a relationship as a “Boléro”—an old-fashioned term that harks back to his classical roots—but otherwise sticks to a horny glam rock vibe, including a phallic brag about his “long fangs,” and a cascading finale of orgasmic “oh yeahs.” Mirroring the comedic side of Sam Reid’s performance, Hart never loses track of the fact that Lestat is a pretty ridiculous person. His music may be a window into his traumatic past (for instance, with the intensity of “Your Biggest Fan”), but in some cases it’s also wildly over-the-top.

Under normal circumstances, Hart finds lyrics to be “the most challenging part” of his songwriting process. “Conversely, writing for a vampire who thinks of himself as a clown sometimes, and is pretty silly sometimes, and melodramatic, and extremely clever, and witty, and petty, and angry, was extremely easy.” Getting into Lestat’s head was a freeing experience, allowing him to get “more heart on the sleeve than I might ever do from my own music.”

There’s a self-aware humor to Hart’s approach, overlapping with the complicated question of whether Lestat’s music career is actually a success. Viewers may begin this season expecting to be wowed by Lestat’s genius, but within the show’s narrative, he’s more of a trashy B-list celebrity, filling mid-sized venues and receiving more attention from conspiracy theorists than critics. In an early episode, Daniel Molloy openly makes fun of his songwriting, suggesting that lyrics like “Oh yeah we’re coming, oh yeah we’re coming” are not exactly a convincing showcase for Lestat’s inner turmoil. Sometimes, Hart’s goal was to write songs that provoke this kind of criticism; an exercise he enjoyed a great deal. 

Later, this self-mocking tone extended into the show’s promotional materials, where Hart and Rolin Jones co-wrote quotes in Lestat’s voice. Hart says it was “extremely satisfying” to make fun of himself as Lestat—for instance when Lestat derides “Butterscotch Bitch” in an AMC press release as “the song that feels the most like Daniel Hart, as it’s the song he wrote on a toilet in between vegan burritos.”

Like many of Lestat’s songs, “Butterscotch Bitch” is full of in-your-face sexuality. Lyrics like “Gimme your hips and I’ll open you wide” play alongside self-critical lines where he characterizes himself as “a showgirl in the shower, a puking princess on your bathroom floor.” After two seasons where we only see Lestat through other people’s eyes, he’s finally getting to introduce himself on his own terms—and it’s interesting to see how much of his identity is wrapped up in sex appeal.

After season two, Sam Reid described Lestat as “a hypersexualized person, not necessarily by his own design.” Abusive relationships and sexual trauma are central themes throughout the show, and it feels telling that Lestat processes his side of the story in such a radically different way from Louis. We see a few quiet moments of private Kurt Cobain-like angst, but for the most part he’s an attention-seeking stereotype of rockstar sexuality, moaning and thrusting his way through songs about toxic relationships and self-destruction.

Despite Lestat’s repeated claims that he’s an inhuman monster, Hart highlights his music as “one of the things that connects into humanity” this season. “It is a very human thing to want to create in this way, and that music was a way for him to discover himself, for him to think about his past.” Unlike the controlled environment of Louis’ interview with Daniel Molloy, Lestat’s therapeutic process requires an audience—preferably an adoring one who will buy his records and scream his name at the stage, providing evidence that his trauma has tangible worth to other people.