The Vampire Lestat’s Sam Reid Unpacks the Revelations in That Bold Season Finale

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the season finale of The Vampire Lestat, “The Failures.”]

Throughout this season of The Vampire Lestat, the title character’s narration is delivered via “The Failures,” a series of autobiographical audio recordings. We’re introduced to these tapes in the season premiere, where they’re being sold at an auction sometime in the future, in the aftermath of an unspecified catastrophe. The finale then comes full circle, concluding with a glimpse of Lestat (Sam Reid) recording the last volume of “The Failures.”

As Lestat’s narration comes to an end, he walks to his apartment balcony, revealing a scene of apocalyptic destruction outside. But while this season hinted at the return of the vampire queen Akasha (Sheila Atim) — and repeatedly mentioned the vampire population boom known as the Great Conversion — we still don’t know exactly what went down.

Viewers likely expected the finale to culminate in Lestat’s farewell concert, but in the end, we don’t see this happen on screen. Speaking to TV Guide before the episode’s debut, Sam Reid cast doubt on the assumption that Lestat takes to the stage at all.

“Is he going to do it? I don’t know,” said Reid. “He’s saying he’s not going to do it.”

The previous episode ended with Lestat and Louis (Jacob Anderson) getting decapitated, leaving them as disembodied heads for most of the finale. Teetering on the brink of death, Lestat finds himself in a dream sequence that the show refers to as the Long Table — a surreal trial featuring manifestations of important characters like Lestat’s mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), and maker, Magnus (Damien Atkins), who debate whether Lestat’s life qualifies as a failure. Back in the real world, Gabriella and the Talamasca conspire to reattach Lestat’s head and body, pushing him to perform a show for a massive gathering of vampires. But when he awakens, he no longer wants to participate.

“I think he wakes up, and obviously wants to know where Louis is first and foremost,” said Reid. “It sort of dawns on him through that process, through the events of the Long Table, that he has been co-opted throughout his whole life. His modus operandi of taking control and being the phoenix rising from the ashes, and being this figure of taking a lighter-hearted approach to dealing with his traumas, was not all coming from a place of self-ignition, but actually being driven by other characters. And so, at the very end, I think he actually refuses to go on stage. He says he’s not going to do it, and he calls Gabriella a f—ing monster.”

However, it’s worth noting that Lestat’s retrospective narration does refer to a conversation taking place “after the concert, after the mayhem,” implying that some kind of performance may happen, even if we don’t see it here.

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AMC hasn’t confirmed whether the show will return for another season, but this episode leaves us with plenty of questions, particularly regarding that postapocalyptic epilogue. “Obviously something has happened,” acknowledged Reid. “Because by the time you get to the very end, you do realize that he has caused, or he is taking responsibility for, a mass destruction of the world.”

“There is a time frame that we haven’t seen in this season that alludes to what we might potentially see later on,” said Reid, highlighting the auction scene from Episode 1. “There’s also a mental state that Lestat is in while he’s narrating ‘The Failures,’ and what he considers to be the great failures of his life.” 

“He’s very erratic in the way that he narrates, and he’s also purposely saying, ‘This is how it felt then,'” Reid said. So that final scene invites us to reexamine the context of Lestat’s narration, recorded in a future where Lestat now blames himself for some form of apocalypse. According to Reid, Lestat is telling his audience, “This is how I was experiencing the world, and this was my experience leading up to this unknown event.”

“Whoever he is recording that for, he is purposely trying to give them an insight into a state of mind that is leading him to a series of decisions that we are yet to reveal. Those recordings are made for a very specific purpose, and they have a huge weight to them.”

“He’s not necessarily trying to attack Louis or attack Gabriella,” added Reid. “Even though he does come across as very antagonistic towards them, particularly in those early episodes. He’s also trying to explain, ‘This is how it felt for me at the time, and this is what led me to make these decisions,’ which overall are a series of failures.”

“He feels like throughout his entire life, he’s consistently gone through one traumatic event, gotten up, brushed the dust off and kept going,” Reid said. But when the time comes to revisit those failures at the Long Table, Lestat “can’t fight it anymore. There’s something very deep down in his subconscious that he’s no longer able to fight.” As Lestat’s physical body begins to die, his inner world shifts into a surreal concert scene, preparing to perform for an audience of people he met (and killed) throughout his long life as a vampire. Yet as Reid points out, “right down to the very end, he’s not even able to form a coherent sentence.”

“When he’s dying, he’s thinking, ‘I’m gonna have this beautiful swan song, then I’m gonna die,’ and then he can’t even form a structural sentence. He gets caught in the grammar, which I think is a lovely, beautiful piece of writing there,” Reid said.

“Then he does have this moment where he sees death, and that is a whole new experience for a vampire. This creature’s lived forever and has lived with the idea of living forever, and he sees death, which does give him a sense of clarity to try and then take ownership over his life.”

One thing that comes to the foreground at the Long Table is Lestat’s incestuous relationship with Gabriella. In the season’s penultimate episode, their leaked sex tape forced him to confront the abusive reality of their dynamic, and this episode allows him to process that realization further.

“There’s so much left to still unpack between Gabriella and Lestat,” said Reid. “There’s a lot left unresolved, intentionally so. But I think now he’s probably able to separate the fact that their relationship was not, is not healthy at all. And it’s all in the open now. He’s shared that with his most trusted and loved confidant, which is Louis.”

Reid added, “You know, when he finds out about the sex tape, and Louis has become aware of that, that’s probably the first time he’s ever spoken to anybody about it. So it’s very new information, and now that he is able to process that out loud, I think the relationship between Lestat and Gabriella will evolve and will change, going forward.”

The structure of the finale may come as a surprise to viewers, but Reid told TV Guide that the season was “always leading towards this sort of Long Table scenario, and a sense of closure between Louis and Armand.” Above all, he remains impressed by the work of showrunner Rolin Jones and writer and executive producer Hannah Moscovitch: “Rolin and Hannah do this amazing job of distilling what they’re trying to say specifically in each season. And I think this one is very complicated because it’s a very large plot.”

Although this season mostly draws from Anne Rice’s novel The Vampire Lestat, it also incorporates elements from The Queen of the Damned and Merrick, along with recurring characters from elsewhere in the Vampire Chronicles, like Fareed Bhansali (Gopal Divan) and Raglan James (Justin Kirk). “We adapt from multiple books at any time,” said Reid, “and so I think they’ll be revisiting certain parts of [Rice’s The Vampire Lestat] which are not shown in this season — if we do go on.”

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The Long Table scenes clarify the framing device of the “Failures” tapes, revealing Lestat to be, in Reid’s words, “this character who continually feels like he is trying to regain control over his life and consistently failing.” This theme is reflected in the public reception to Lestat’s autobiographical music, which earns negative reviews from critics within the show.

“Just before he gets his head cut off, he thinks, ‘I think I’m making my way through this now, and I think I’m understanding that I am myself pursuing, manically, failure,'” Reid said. Lestat has finally reached a point of self-knowledge in Episode 6, coupled with his long-awaited reunion with Louis — and then in that exact moment, he gets decapitated.

“He sees it in the Long Table. He’s like, ‘I still ended up failing because just in the moment we get together, we lose our heads,'” Reid said. “We’re separated. Then obviously they come back together again. But I think it’s quite a beautiful and tragic sort of framing device, of this very powerful being who has so much joy of life, or attempts to see the positive in everything, continually reaching a place of failure, and reaching some sort of peace with that… I think it’s a very elegant way of portraying an immortal being.”

The Vampire Lestat is now streaming on AMC+.