Sam Reid and Jennifer Ehle Explain Lestat and Gabriella’s Relationship

Warning: The Vampire Lestat spoilers ahead. This article also contains discussion of incest.

The final scene of The Vampire Lestat Episode 1 revealed, briefly and bluntly, how the show was adapting the thorny dynamic between the central vamps of Anne Rice‘s sequel novel, Lestat de Lioncourt and his human mother turned vampire fledgling, Gabrielle (renamed Gabriella in the AMC series). In both the book and the show, Lestat (Sam Reid) explains his incestuous dynamic with his mother (Jennifer Ehle) by saying, essentially, that it’s different for vampires, that familial lines disappear when you’re no longer human. This adaptation takes a clear stance against that explanation. Here, Reid and Ehle dive into this dynamic as it is depicted in The Vampire Lestat Episode 2, “Toledo.”

Episode 2 flashes back to Lestat’s human childhood hundreds of years ago in Auvergne, France. It’s here that we meet the vulgar man — as Lestat described him in Season 1 Episode 1 to the de Pointe du Lacs — that was his father, the Marquis de Lioncourt (Peter Outerbridge). Lestat’s older brothers are equally as vulgar. It’s the father and two sons vs. Gabriella and Lestat in their countryside family home that’s anything but happy. The Italian Gabriella is miserable with her life in France and the loveless arranged marriage with the Marquis. She openly hates her elder sons, and they dislike her just as much.

Gabriella and Lestat’s only companions in the home are each other, as Lestat is the only one of Gabriella’s children who takes after her. Lestat struggles with a stutter as a child and teen, and while his mother defends child Lestat’s pursuit of knowledge at a monastery and teen Lestat’s interest in acting, she doesn’t care at all when the Marquis orders the brothers to beat him. Lestat had to fight back alone.

His mother’s indifference to his suffering evolved into wanting to prove his worth to her through violence as an adult. When a pack of wolves threatened their village, Lestat killed all eight of them himself after Gabriella challenged him to be a man and do it. “She meant to kill me with the challenge,” Lestat’s narrations say. To the aging, ailing Gabriella, dying in a display of bravery and manliness was more respectable than living as a “cabbage,” the insult nickname the mother and son gave their family to call them brainless and worthless.

Sophie Giraud / AMC

Lestat survived the wolf attack but was badly wounded. These wounds created Lestat’s scars that we see in the present day. As Gabriella treated his wounds, she described one of her sexual fantasies that, to her, expressed her desire for complete liberation from her circumstances. Saying this to her son, however, while touching him intimately, makes for a more horrific scene.

The monologue is pulled from Rice’s Vampire Lestat novel. In it, Gabriella describes her dream to swim naked in a mountain stream, go to a nearby inn, and have sex with any man who enters the room without any fear of consequences. In Episode 2, Lestat says, “Except for me,” after she says she dreams of belonging to no one. Her response made it clear that Lestat was no exception. She tells him she’s dying, and more flashbacks later in the episode show vampire Lestat giving Gabriella the dark gift to save her life. The series hasn’t depicted Lestat’s vampiric transformation yet.

In the present day, Lestat’s narrations thank viewers for being patient about the vampire incest topic. Lestat’s “The Failures” album was recorded sometime in the future in an unknown place, when he can look back and reflect on his origins. He’s telling the story of these months on the road with his band as he experienced them at the time. Back then, the memories of traumatic experiences from his past were coming to him in quick flashes, like intrusive memories that he was swatting away.

When Gabriella joins Lestat on tour, they make a pact to stop having sex, but they have a hard time committing to that. Ehle’s Gabriella is designed as a vampire not just completely devoid of morality, but taking pleasure in that immorality.

Vampire Lestat, as Reid plays him, is visibly uncomfortable about his sexual relationship with Gabriella in certain scenes in Episode 2, but she’s turned on by the twisted nature of how wrong their dynamic is, showing that even as vampires, she knows that Lestat is her son and that this relationship is wrong. She calls him her son in the same scene where they make their pact, so there’s no beating around the bush here about Lestat and Gabriella’s knowledge that their mother-son dynamic didn’t go away.

Narrator Lestat is exasperated by the “it’s different for vampires” line at the end of the episode, but you can hear in Lestat’s voice that he’s having a hard time putting words to his feelings about this relationship and would rather not reflect on these uncomfortable memories.

Sophie Giraud / AMC

Reid tells TV Insider whether his Lestat really believes the “it’s different for vampires” line.

“I think the joy of the book and those explanations he gives is that you are looking at a first-person narrator who has lots of flaws and complexities, so he is likely to be unreliable as well if we’ve set that up,” Reid says. “It’s also a very complicated thing to explain. It’s sometimes a bit like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to talk about it now.’ And actually, progressively as the season goes on, it keeps coming back to him and he’s forced to readdress it and he’s forced to readdress it. So, yeah, I don’t think he really believes that. It’s kind of weird. It’s impossible.”

The Vampire Lestat showrunner Rolin Jones says that in the voiceover at the end of Episode 2, Lestat “can’t articulate” his feelings about this. It’s a sore topic for the vampire, one he clearly tries to avoid unpacking at times.

Reid says that Lestat is thinking, “don’t make me dig too deeply” about this. “But no one’s making him dig into that.”

“That’s the thing, he’s not being pushed,” Reid says. “He’s doing his own self-narration. He’s narrating himself alone, or wherever he’s narrating it… but he’s not digging. The way that the memories are hitting back on him means that he can start to unpack things later on.”

Ehle tells TV Insider that vampire Gabriella has no morals, no soul, but that her immorality predated becoming a vampire, as we saw in the flashbacks. How self-aware of her immorality is she, in both her human and vampiric lives?

“When she’s human, I think she is so stunted by her environment and her life in that miserable house and having been there since she was 15 and left Italy and came to France and lived with this horrible man,” Ehle explains. “She’s so stunted and twisted, it’s almost like she takes a kind of joy in it. It’s like there’s a kind of pleasure in it. It’s like touching a sore place, to be cruel, to be cold, to cross some of the lines she crosses when she’s human. I think there’s a kind of sick pleasure in it for her.”

Ehle says that Gabriella does believe it’s different for vampires. “Definitely, when they’re vampires,” she says, “but it does start before they’re vampires.”

“For vampires, they’re monsters. There’s no morality,” Ehle says. “But when they’re human, yes, she definitely crosses a line in order to manipulate, but also because I think she just has so much loneliness and need and she’s really screwed up.”

Sophie Giraud / AMC

Gabriella sees Lestat’s great love, Louis (Jacob Anderson), for the first time in Episode 2. We learn that she came to New Orleans after Louis and Claudia (Bailey Bass and Delainey Hayles) tried to kill Lestat and left for Europe at the end of Season 1. Gabriella feels immediately “threatened” by Louis when she sees him at Lestat’s concert in Episode 2, Ehle says.

“He definitely is a threat,” she says. “She worries. She knows he has hurt Lestat and that he’s really the only other person besides her that has the capacity to hurt him emotionally, so she has that as somebody who cares about him, but he also threatens her power over Lestat enormously.”

“I don’t think that she thinks of herself as a mother when she’s a vampire,” Ehle says. “She’s a terrible mother when she’s not a vampire as well, but I do feel like there is something about… she loves him. Maybe it’s not as a mother, but she definitely has tenderness for him, even if it’s not maternal.”

Lestat and Gabriella’s disquieting relationship will continue to evolve throughout the season, as will Lestat’s ability to ignore the true meaning of it and how it has impacted his life.

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

If you or someone you know is the victim of sexual assault, contact the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network‘s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). If you or a loved one is in immediate danger, call 911.