The Vampire Lestat Review: Glorious Vampire Rock Concert

The Vampire Lestat, Season 3 of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, takes to the stage for a thrilling, frenetic season of rock music and bloody gore.

The shift in tone and storytelling mode is purposefully jarring, representing the differences in temperament between Lestat and Louis. If the first two seasons were a storm cloud gray, this third is a hot neon pink. Watching the season feels much like attending a rock concert: it’s visually and aurally stimulating, frenetic, aggressive, romantic, and enrapturing.

The new season, called The Vampire Lestat after the second novel in Rice’s series, is framed around tapes that were recorded by Lestat during a tour on which he headlined a rock band and the subsequent recording of an album. With interjections sprinkled judiciously throughout the episodes, Lestat makes for an engaging and hilarious narrator, providing snarky asides, offering commentary on the effects of blood laced with LSD, and hinting at a future apocalyptic calamity during which he “awoke the queen and unleashed her wrath upon the world.” 

After the events of the second season, Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) has published his interview with Louis as a novel. Lestat responds to the publication and his portrayal inside the book, which he describes as a “mayonnaise villain with sociopathic tendencies,” by joining a rock band, renaming it after himself, and heading out on tour. What anyone would do, really. 

As the band travels North America, Lestat throws himself into the hedonistic excess of the rock star lifestyle as a means of tamping down the mental breakdown being brought on by memories that have been dredged up by the publication of Louis’s interview, and the re-emergence in Lestat’s life of his mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), whom he turned into a vampire in the late 1700s and with whom he shares a disquieting bond. Daniel is continuing to interview vampires, trailing after the band and capturing the sight with a Madonna: Truth or Dare-style documentary. At the same time, Louis is making attempts to weather the grief of the death of his and Lestat’s daughter Claudia (Delainey Hayles). 

The Vampire Lestat is a season of television that is dense with content, and thick with different modes of style. During the first two seasons we saw Louis trying to build a cohesive story out of his memories, giving a rueful, elegant, Old Hollywood feeling to the storytelling of Interview with the Vampire. In sharp contrast, Lestat would much prefer getting out of his own mind and life, and staying inside the amorphous, fantasy world of music. When memories of his more than three hundred years of life occur they are a violent intrusion, appearing in jagged, surrealistic, almost music video-like flashes. It’s energetic, vibrant filmmaking that never once allows the viewer to become bored. 

The jumble of styles, tones, and pure glam rock excess on display in The Vampire Lestat may have very well felt like incoherent spectacle if not for the emotional truth found by the actors. The Vampire Lestat boasts one of the strongest ensembles currently working on a television show. Sam Reid bursts out of the screen with a commanding and multifaceted performance; prancing around the stage like a show pony, dancing in a nightclub, performing pop bangers and tender ballads, violently fighting with other vampires, timidly learning about the world outside of the French countryside as a human young man, and breaking down under the weight of centuries of traumatic events.

Jacob Anderson gives a performance that is just as strong as the astounding work that he did during the first two seasons, playing genuinely heartbreaking scenes with the melancholic intensity of a Montgomery Clift. As the mercurial Gabriella, Ehle doesn’t feel like a new addition to the show, fitting in perfectly and biting off her venomous one-liners with a sly relish. One of the most mysterious aspects of the season comes courtesy of Assad Zaman as the Vampire Armand and a translucent performance that changes just as soon as you think you have it figured out. 

The artists working on the show have specified that they do not see The Vampire Lestat as a musical, yet the season uses Lestat’s music in order to reveal to the audience emotions and experiences that the vampire wouldn’t be able to articulate otherwise. In some cases, the songs literally move the story forward. The music was composed and produced by Daniel Hart, perhaps best known for his scores for The Green Knight (2021)  and Mother Mary (2026), and, befitting a more than three hundred year old being who has heard everything from Tchaikovsky to The Smiths to Drake, it jumps from style to style with mischievous abandon.

A stand-out track is “Your Biggest Fan,” a guitar-driven ballad that suggests what could have happened if Soundgarden covered Sarah MacLachlan. Reid’s strong baritone singing voice is muscular and emotive, and he carries off the concert sequences with a devil-may-care charisma that is nearly impossible to fake. 

The Vampire Lestat is not a show for everyone, and proudly so. Its manic, aggressive tone may be off-putting to even declared fans of the franchise, and it frequently deals with subjects that are perhaps heavier than a viewer would want when trying to find something for relaxing on a Sunday evening. This is a series so dense with information that the idea it could be properly viewed while scrolling through Instagram or understood through clips on Tiktok is laughable. The Vampire Lestat is a supremely confident work, and that refusal to compromise and appeal to every possible demographic is thrilling to witness. From moment to moment you won’t be able to guess what will happen next; from scene to scene you won’t be able to guess whether it will be funny or suspenseful or frightening or heartbreaking or uncomfortable or exciting. And isn’t that delightful? 

The Vampire Lestat will premiere on Sunday, June 7, 2026 at 9pm ET/PT on AMC and AMC+. New episodes will be released weekly, with the finale airing on July 19.