The Vampire Lestat Showrunner Rolin Jones Explains the Season 3 Premiere

The season premiere, “Detroit,” teases the audience with a somber continuation of the events of last season, but then quickly makes a hard right turn and sheds its former structure and tone, matching the audaciousness of its new lead character. Series creator and showrunner Rolin Jones tells IGN that the nebulously future-set, ultra-private auction of what seems to be Lestat de Lioncourt’s posthumous possessions is the last remnant of the prior seasons.

“You could say the first scene, up until the point that [Lestat’s] voiceover comes in, it feels like our show. And then his voice drops in and suddenly you go, ‘What the fuck is starting to happen?’” Jones laughs.

In Anne Rice’s book The Vampire Lestat, the aggrieved eponymous vampire decides to publish his own autobiography, which becomes an in-universe novel by the journalist Daniel Molloy (played by Eric Bogosian in the show). However, that didn’t settle right with Jones and his co-showrunner Hannah Moscovitch for their show. “It didn’t feel like the guy that we had established would have gone that route,” Jones says of their thinking in the writers room.

Instead, they came up with the auction’s reveal of a single vinyl pressing of “The Failures,” 111 recordings that contain the complete history of Lestat de Lioncourt in his own words, including the events of this season set in 2025. “Creating this sort of art installation seemed really Lestat-ian to us,” Jones says of their insertion of individual album segments peppered throughout every episode this season.

“There’s a journey there, we just simplified it; reel-to-reel, a microphone, some cigarettes,” Jones says of the disembodied voice of this future Lestat. “He is totally friendless [because] of some shit that had gone [down], and people were like, ‘I’d like to know what you were thinking about, and how this happened?’ We start there, in a place of bratty, snotty arrogance.”

Lestat’s first-person “The Failures” voiceover observations about the hypocrisies of this modern world, and personal navel-gazing about his own mediocrity as a rock star, is the connective tissue of Season 3. In “Detroit,” it facilitates Lestat getting to saltily address the “discrepancies” in Louis’ tell-all book. But Jones explains that the deeper the season gets into them, the more that voiceover becomes the means by which Lestat confronts characters and events that he’s still “struggling to articulate.”

Jones says this new way into Lestat’s story is a lot more exciting because it cracks away at Louis’ narrative in the prior two seasons, forces Lestat to ask questions, and allows for intriguing stops and starts in his own story.

And astute audiences will note that “The Failures” don’t unfurl as expected. “Instead of Molloy lobbing the questions that would send you to the scene, now you have these gaps in the albums,” Jones explains. “And one of the things that came up in the writers room was like, ‘Well, what happened to this album?’ I was like, ‘[Lestat] just woke up one morning, took out a Danielle Steele novel and just started reading it, and goes, “That’s your album,” because this is a Lestat art piece.’ He didn’t feel like talking about the revelation that just came out, so he took a break. And [the albums] gave us some space to do that too.”

Jones tells book-loving viewers to also pay attention to the meticulous editing accomplished by Yuka Shirasuna in “Detroit” that will bookend with the season finale in capturing the “noise and music” firing in Lestat’s head at all times: “These little pops of stuff in the [future] with stuff from previous years, I will say we are almost 95% of the time never using the same take we used in the previous episodes; alternate takes are reframed. It was a lot of meticulous work to prepare you. I don’t expect anybody to comprehend everything that is in Episode 1 on a first viewing, but it was built for… go see Episode 7 and come back. It is a lot. It’s an assault, and you’re supposed to feel like, what the hell just happened? And I think that’s okay.”

Jones hopes audiences enjoy the ride, and the fans of Anne Rice will delight in how they’ve changed but honored the continued unfolding of her Vampire Chronicles in this medium. “We feel comfortable and we feel it’s part of our aesthetic to try to be ahead. Even in that first scene, we’re almost a season and a half ahead, you know what I mean?” Jones says, alluding to the show teasing events in future Rice books The Queen of the Damned and The Tale of the Body Thief.

“It takes a lot of trust from the audience,” he says, “but ‘Detroit’ felt like what I think spending an afternoon with Lestat would feel like. You will feel unmoored and untethered and provoked and bored and abandoned, and all of that shit.”

Be sure to check back at IGN every Sunday for post-morts of The Vampire Lestat with Rolin Jones!