Sam Reid rocks Beacon as Lestat’s TV debuts

On June 2 at New York’s Beacon Theatre, AMC’s “The Vampire Lestat” premiered and the event flipped into an in-character concert led by Sam Reid and composer Daniel Hart—complete with a full set, tour-bus scale thinking, and a season built to keep Lestat watchi

Smoke swallowed the Beacon Theatre on June 2. turning the iconic New York venue into something almost storybook—if the storybook had scars on its chest and “Long Face” ready to ignite a crowd. Outside. fans had packed in earlier in the night in corsets. black lipstick. and shirts for “The Lost Boys. ” clutching signs of devotion big enough to be their own pre-show.

Inside, the premiere of AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles,” now titled “The Vampire Lestat,” followed by an in-character performance from star Sam Reid, turned the evening into a single, unruly promise: the show wasn’t just coming—it was already performing.

The musicians entered led by composer Daniel Hart, and the opening chords landed like a dare. For a moment, 3,000 fans chanted “Lestat!. Lestat!. Lestat!” in unison—then the chaotic vampire. or maybe he was something else. strutting in like he owned the room. pulled faces at the crowd and kept the cheering climbing.

Reid’s onstage Lestat—curling fingers around the microphone. with scars from killing a pack of wolves visible on his mostly bare chest—sang “Ooh-ooh. wah-ahh” through the hit “Long Face. ” a track positioned halfway between seduction and something softer. like a baby’s coo. And when the crowd exploded again, it didn’t feel like a typical concert moment. It felt like the show had found a way to step past the fourth wall and lock the audience inside it.

AMC’s “The Vampire Lestat” premieres Sunday. June 7 on AMC and AMC+—but what happened at the Beacon that night came with its own logic. Daniel Hart and the band ran through a set that included “Long Face. ” “Big Bad Wolf” (thus-far unreleased at the time). “Your Biggest Fan. ” “The Loneliness. ” another unidentified unreleased song. and finally “Butterscotch Bitch.” Between songs. Lestat himself derided the publication of “Interview with the Vampire. ” a major plot point that kicks off the action of this new season.

Sam Reid had previewed the approach to IndieWire ahead of the performance. The meta idea, Reid explained, is that Lestat has both a TV show and a band. If it’s all presented as one thing, he said, it risks becoming confusing. The night at the Beacon tried to solve that by letting the fictional world and the promotional world collide on purpose.

Even before the cast arrived, the crowd made sure the show felt like it belonged to them. Step-and-repeat photos cleared, cast members entered, and both the packed orchestra and two balconies screeched every time. Eric Bogosian. who plays the interviewer-turned-vampire Daniel Molloy. drew the same immediate reaction as new star Sheila Atim. who plays Akasha. the Queen of the Damned—and AMC executives got treated like the rest of the cast once they were in the room.

A big part of the night’s energy came from the way it mirrored the series itself: “The Vampire Lestat” leans into the conflicting narratives that defined “Interview with the Vampire” in its first two seasons. Showrunner Rolin Jones described the storytelling as “the usual seven layer burrito that we build for ourselves.”.

Jones also framed what this season is trying to do visually and structurally—turning the form into something that matches a new kind of story pressure. While the Immortal Universe adaptations of Anne Rice’s books include “The Mayfair Witches” and “Talamasca: The Secret Order. ” this season—now titled “The Vampire Lestat. ” but really Season 3 of the series—reworks the angle on what the audience already thinks it knows.

In the show’s past. Jacob Anderson’s Louis de Pointe du Lac recounted his story to the interviewer Daniel Molloy. and the narrative kept turning inward. guided by distortions and suppressed truths as Louis corrected earlier interviews. This time, Jones said, Lestat gets to tell his own side. The result is presented like a rock musical built around a North American rock and roll tour.

And if this sounds like a recipe for chaos, Jones said that’s the point. The season isn’t just about Lestat’s victory tour. It’s also about what happens when the audience watches him while, behind the scenes, he keeps getting more unhinged—having “really, really, even for him, bad, bad months.”

The complicated part, Jones added, is that they designed the season so Lestat stays enraptured as the episodes unfold. The goal wasn’t simply to entertain—it was to keep him from walking out of the story and insisting, “You guys didn’t understand me at all,” or “You guys are boring.”

That’s where the Beacon event sharpened the theme. Jones said the show looked to classic NYC club CBGB for inspiration—tattered photos. graffiti. and that “grotty beauty” that slinks in a way he described as “like he does.” Even camera language. he said. had to move like something sharp and unpredictable rather than a calm conversation between two men.

There were also deep practical reasons the music mattered so much. Hart and Jones built the season in a way that didn’t just attach songs at the end; Jones said he gave Hart free power to walk out when the muse hit and return with something two days later—then. sometimes. episodes were structured around it. Jones explained they had more road mapping than usual. with “giant holes” in drafts that music would later fill. allowing contradictions and mess to stay on purpose.

Reid’s performance at the Beacon didn’t just demonstrate the sound—it made clear the hard part: filming and shooting musical scenes around live music spaces, with real audiences, hours at a time, and cameras sweeping and swooshing through stunts, flying sequences, and multiple points of view.

The night even carried an extra layer for the show’s emotional architecture. Reid’s Lestat went on stage while Daniel Molloy’s own documentary-film crew captured the moment. and the idea of unreliability hovered everywhere—because in the series. Louis may attend one of Lestat’s concerts in earlier episodes without outwardly reacting.

Outside of the stage lights. the cast’s interviews made it plain that this season isn’t only about the spectacle. Reid said he’s been anchoring his role as Lestat for five years. tracing the show’s start back to COVID lockdowns in Australia when auditions and script reads were done over Zoom and production staff wore masks—so he “barely” saw faces. Since then. he credited constant conversations with Jones and writer Hannah Moscovitch for keeping the unit close. and he described a shift in his own mindset from “trying to understand what their vision was” to a clear belief: “whatever you want to do. I believe in you.”.

There were major differences, too, in how the characters are viewed. Reid said Louis needs some accuracy in his portrayal of Lestat early on for the love story to work—when Louis is angry. misinformed. and violent in the way he mega-love-bombs Lestat. Anderson. though. sees things differently: Louis is “a part of me now. ” and when Season 2 ended. Anderson tried to purge Louis from his system by spending a day as himself in New Orleans. grabbing stones from the Bywater and scattering them in a “ceremonial thing.”.

As Season 3 progresses, Anderson said Louis, seen through Lestat, becomes different—leading him to “say goodbye to Louis’ version of Louis.”

The emotional pressure of the series also expands into how memory itself is handled. Anderson said Louis describing events earlier comes with a deeply subjective angle. Reid added that when Lestat tells his own story. he points out his own flaws and shows the uglier parts—framing Lestat with more self-awareness and an awareness of his destructive nature.

The show’s most disturbing thread—Lestat’s mother Gabriella. played by Jennifer Ehle—arrived as something the cast treated as both complicated and deliberate. Reid said the books include an explicit. confusing scene early on when Gabriella and Lestat are human. with subtext of incest. and that the show expanded it and made it more appropriate for filming while keeping it present “because it’s there in the books.” Jones laughed when he recalled reading it. saying it didn’t feel like subtext—it felt like text—and insisted it was the responsible move to address it directly rather than as a shock-value reveal.

Through that lens, the season’s “unreliable narrators” matter even more, Reid said. They’re built so you can narrate one thing but feel another, and understanding Lestat’s relationship with his mother helps explain why he can’t fully understand it and why it sets him up for failure.

At the Beacon. with Lestat singing and commentating in character. audiences weren’t just watching a premiere—they were watching the show try to control how the story is experienced. Jones said the script and music bridges emotional gaps while keeping the season “contradictory” and “messy. ” and Reid said the music infuses every moment.

Even the idea of adding levity was treated as part of the mechanics of surviving Lestat’s world. Jones said it’s important this year because Lestat deals with life through laughter—both producing laughs and having that uncontrollable laughter Anne Rice wrote into the character. During the live show itself. Lestat paused to laugh between songs. and it pulled some of the biggest screams of the night.

There was, inevitably, the question of how the story’s central love continues. Reid said Louis and Lestat operate “in tandem. ” and that the heart of the show remains a love story—one that has to deal with the repercussions of events from the earlier seasons. He and Anderson. Reid said. have an easy rapport. and switching from supporting Louis’s story to anchoring his own let him discover new things about Lestat interacting with new characters.

That relationship between audience and story doesn’t exist only inside the episode. Reid compared the show’s intense fanbase to what Lestat calls his fans: “The Beautiful Unwell. ” a phrase fans have taken on in real life. Jones said their approach involves having conversations with fans right from the beginning because many of them have memorized the books “to the comma. ” and the job is to keep the show fresh without letting viewers get ahead of what comes next.

Reid added that writers don’t do fan service, but they’re aware of the psychology of the online generation—something that matters even more now because “we’re in the modern times,” and Lestat becomes “quite a nihilistic figure” as the characters react to a nihilistic era.

For anyone worried the season might blow into something too huge. the cast insisted it keeps coming back to something human. Reid said that even with hints early on that the scope and scale could go beyond what audiences might expect from Lestat’s rock show. Jones and Hannah Moskovitch bring it back down through a relatable. human experience. Anderson put it in classic Anne Rice terms: the epic is the intimate. and the intimate is the epic—this season is “very much in Lestat’s mind.”.

By the time the final song landed and the crowd’s attention finally started to settle, the Beacon felt like more than a premiere location. It felt like a proof-of-concept—Lestat’s world, built in layers of performance and narrative uncertainty, arriving with music first and answers later.

“The Vampire Lestat” premieres Sunday, June 7 on AMC and AMC+.

The Vampire Lestat Sam Reid Daniel Hart AMC Anne Rice Interview with the Vampire Beacon Theatre Rolin Jones Daniel Molloy Sheila Atim Akasha Eric Bogosian Jennifer Ehle Gabriella