Nicki and Magnus Scenes Explained by Joseph Potter and Damien Atkins (Exclusive)

Warning: The Vampire Lestat Episode 3 spoilers ahead. This article also contains discussion of sexual assault and incest.

The Vampire Lestat Episode 3 showed two of the most formative experiences of Lestat de Lioncourt’s (Sam Reid) life: his nonconsensual transformation into a vampire at the hands of his maker, Magnus (Damien Atkins), and the mental decline and eventual death of his first love, Nicki (Joseph Potter), whose mind was curdled by immortality.

Lestat has been avoiding emotional honesty all season long in his interviews with Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) for their documentary response to Daniel’s book, Interview With the Vampire. Episode 3 forced Lestat to lay his feelings bare, but he did it in Lestat fashion, by playing a mind trick that made it so Daniel was the only person hearing what he was saying, rendering what he thought was golden footage completely unusable.

Flashbacks to Lestat’s past with Nicki showed how they fell in love as humans, and then how their relationship was destroyed after Lestat was kidnapped by the obsessive Magnus and turned into a vampire. Lestat then gave the dark gift to his dying mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), instead of Nicki, which Potter says was one of the first acts of their incestuous relationship.

Lestat’s turning was first depicted in a campy music video for the song “Your Biggest Fan.” In it, Magnus is depicted as a modern-day stalker obsessed with Lestat and wanting him for himself. Once he kidnaps Lestat, the music video abruptly ends, and the flashback changes its tune.

More flashbacks reveal how Nicki lost his mind after Lestat turned him into a vampire. He didn’t know what “witchery” changed Lestat, but he wanted Lestat to love him enough to give it to him.

Here, Potter and Atkins break down their scenes from The Vampire Lestat Episode 3. (For another look inside the episode with Reid, Jacob Anderson, Assad Zaman, and more, check out our Vampire Lestat aftershow, Backstage Pass.)

We first see Nicki and Lestat together in Paris, which is a change from the book, of course. I wonder if you and Sam filled in backstory for your Nicki and Lestat, and if you think they had feelings for each other before they went to Paris.

Joseph Potter: Me and Sam didn’t necessarily talk about our own shared vision of what that was, but I felt like I had an idea and [was] trying to keep at that level of what we’ve got in the book, but also stay honest to what we’ve now got in the TV adaptation.

There’s this shared understanding that they’re both outsiders where they’re from and that shared difficulty and understanding of who they are before they arrive in Paris is what unites them when we meet them in Paris here. And that was really fun to play with these two boys who want to live this dream, but ultimately they’re lost. And when they find each other, that’s the beginning of their journey, and eventually one of them eclipses the other.

Yeah, very sadly. Damien, how did you find Magnus’ voice?

Damien Atkins: You have to start with the actual dialogue. The dialogue is so ornate and chewy and dangerous. And just speaking it aloud, you got to find a way to … His dialogue in particular is a mixture of poetry and knife, so savage and tender. The teeth actually make a huge difference, but that came later, adapting to that. He is French originally, but he’s been around for hundreds of years. He was old before he was turned or turned himself, and then he has been around, so I didn’t want him to sound like a cartoon French person. So, we did away with a lot of the gutturalness and softened the Rs a bit.

I came up with this kind of voice that was French. I do speak French, and I’ve done a lot of French accents on stage. I was just trying to make it silky. There is an actual person that I was thinking of that I directly referenced, but I cannot say who it is…It’s a very loving homage, but I think I will be embarrassed if people know [laughs]. It’s my particular inside joke, me and the dialect coach kind of going, “Yeah, let’s do that person.”

Sophie Giraud / AMC

That’ll be fun for fans to see if they can figure out who it is. Is it a very well-known person?

Atkins: Oh, yes.

Joseph, Lestat says that Nicki was his first love, not a great love. Is that true for Nicki about Lestat?

Potter: I think Lestat is the only person that Nicki’s ever truly loved, and Lestat is the only one who has given that love back.

Nicki doesn’t know what Lestat was turned into. He calls it witchery. He seems scared of it, and yet he wants it. Why is it so important to him to get whatever Lestat is now?

Potter: Because of Nicki’s history, my knowledge of his history, for what we glimpse through the book and what we get through the series, is that nothing good has ever happened to Nicki other than Lestat. And then once that relationship starts going awry, in the book, he talks about there’s no such thing as good art or bad art. There’s a belief that if this witchery is true, if this belief in that there’s this thing that encompasses everything bad, then that justifies all these wrong things that have happened to him and explains and justifies all of this turmoil that has existed in his life. His experience with religion has been a very, very tumultuous one. The God of the dark wood, which we get a glimpse of and what we hear about in the book as well, is that kind of belief that true evil does exist and that if nothing good can happen to me, then I will become … It’s that self-fulfilling prophecy of if I can’t be good, then I will become what you think of me, which is that, which is bad.

And then doubling that is that he’s jealous of Lestat. If Lestat’s got something, then he wants it. He feels owed to it because he hasn’t had anything else in his life. And anything that can keep him close to the person that he loves the most, he wants. And I feel like that betrayal is then just increased when he sees that he gives it to his mother. That’s the first act of that kind of incestuous relationship that they have, especially in the way in which the similarities between the turning and that sexual nature that it is; that’s another massive betrayal for him. I hope that kind of answered the question.

It does. And it contextualizes the mental state that would lead him to cut off his own hands instead of Armand doing it, as he does in the book.

Yeah, that’s how he hurts [Lestat].

Damien, the “Your Biggest Fan” music video is both scary and camp at the same time. I think depicting Magnus as a modern-day obsessed stalker is a clever blend of the book material and the show’s rock star theme. Why might adding humor into the context of this scene make it scarier, do you think?

Atkins: I’ve been thinking about this. First of all, it’s a language that Lestat speaks. He’s a very brittle, funny person. And so in the context of Lestat telling his own story, of course, even the kind of daddy villain has that language. But also thinking about why so many really good villains are funny, I feel like part of the stab wound of it is that when they’re funny, the feeling is that you get from a villain is, “Your feelings, your vulnerability is of no consequence to me. I’m unaffected by you.” You’re terrified, and I’m laughing and making jokes. It just makes you feel all the more imperiled and alone and insignificant.

I think that’s why it’s a rich, potent element in those kinds of awful characters, I say from outside Magnus. He’s funny because who cares? Only his point of view matters, but why not make jokes? Your crying doesn’t affect me.

And how was it to switch between that campier version and the really evil version that we see of him in the car?

Atkins: Honestly, my honest answer is that it all felt like a piece. It felt like this is the spectrum of his communication. For Magnus, there’s a whole lot of baggage there. There’s a kind of, “I gave you this gift, and what are you doing? What are you doing with it?” There’s a really sort of banal parental disapproval with enormous stakes. That’s a whole spectrum of feeling. It just felt like this is a part of the same engine of love and disapproval.

The Vampire Lestat, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+