What makes a great fictional character?
Hint: It doesn’t take a great work of literature or a wonderful human being.
Scarlett O’Hara — the Southern belle at the heart of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” — may be as self-centered as they come. But her refusal to accept defeat — no, nor none of her kinfolk, as she famously vows — in the face of the Civil War grabs you by the throat, holds you and won’t let you go.
In 1976, Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” — inspired by her grief over the loss of her daughter, nicknamed Claudia, to childhood leukemia — introduced us to another indomitable spirit. Over the course of the 13-volume “The Vampire Chronicles,” the French-born, 18th-century vampire Lestat de Lioncourt would earn a place in the pantheons of Gothic and gay literature as well as pop culture.
He would be embodied by Tom Cruise (the 1994 film “Interview With the Vampire”) in a marvelously arch performance that had the prejudging Rice eating crow; Stuart Townsend less successfully but no less stylishly in “Queen of the Damned” (2002); and Hugh Panaro in the short-lived Elton John Broadway musical “Lestat” (2006).
In 2022, Lestat reappeared in AMC’s “Interview With the Vampire” as the selfish soulmate of the tortured Louis, taking center stage literally and figuratively this spring in the series continuation, “The Vampire Lestat,” based on Rice’s second book in “The Vampire Chronicles.”
The shift in emphasis from Louis — eternally grieving over his dead brother, his own decision to be made a vampire by Lestat and the later loss of their daughter, another Claudia — to the equally tragic but always triumphant Lestat was too much of a tonal shift for some critics and fans, who clearly have never read the book or (let’s be frank) a book.
For Rice, however, casting her literary lot with Lestat over Louis as the main character had to make pragmatic as well as philosophical, to say nothing of probably personal, sense. In creating the sequel to “Interview,” she must’ve realized — and if she didn’t her publisher would’ve told her — that there was no way she or her readers could sustain a series of books with Louis as the protagonist. He’s a character to whom things — vampirism, parentage, loss — happens. He’s not a catalyst. It would be as if Mitchell had decided one of Scarlett’s sisters — the bitter, resentful Suellen or the virtuous Carreen — were to try to save Tara, the family plantation.
No, Lestat it was and that turned out to be a pivotal choice for it enabled Rice to plumb a subject that has long interested but eluded humanity — suffering, specifically not only why people suffer but how they suffer and, more controversially, how they should suffer. In “Interview,” Rice gives us two approaches to suffering and thus, to life. Louis is encased in it; Lestat is emboldened by it.
Forget vampirism, for the squeamish or puritanical, and substitute your own favorite trauma. Louis is the guy who says, “I have cancer, I have cancer” over and over again. Lestat is the one who says, “I have cancer, and I’m going out dancing tonight.” I’m not criticizing cancer patients, who may barely have the strength to get out of bed. Rather I’m using cancer the way Rice uses vampirism, as a metaphor for those who seize life to go beyond their challenges, as best they can, and those who are entombed by and in their troubles.
Reading interviews with the vampires’ maker, you get the sense that Rice’s own grief journey progressed from Louis to Lestat and that it was her husband, the poet and artist Stan Rice, her inspiration for Lestat, who showed her the way. In any event, it would be hard to ignore the star turn that is Sam Reid’s Lestat in the new series.
Haunted by the rape that made him a vampire; his complex relationships with his self-possessed mother, Gabrielle (Jennifer Ehle, making us forget her Elizabeth Bennet days), Louis (Jacob Anderson), and the doomed Claudia (Bailey Bass/Delainey Hayles); Reid’s Lestat is at once arrogant and yearning, cruel and compassionate, seemingly impenetrable and yet fragile to the point of breaking as he works through his issues by becoming a failed rock star. (Here Reid combines an excellent singing voice with a Mick Jagger-style swagger and armament.) It’s a tremendous, terrifying performance of astonishing range, depth and power.
Yet such armor can be breached. Existential threats lurk at every turn but especially in the quietly mesmerizing malevolence of the rival vampire Armand (Assad Zaman, making us forget his poignant “Hotel Portofino” days). Through it all, despite it all, Lestat refuses to be defeated when he can see beyond defeat.
He may be monstrous, but like Scarlett, he’s going to fight for his place, in his case, out of the sun and for those he loves. He won’t give out, give up or give in.
And in the end, there’s something terribly moving about that.