The Toronto Skyline is Something to Behold: ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Finds Its Emotional Center in Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson’s Performances [Review]

Trigger Warning: This review discusses sexual assault as it is present in the plot of the episode.

Two weeks ago, AMC’s The Vampire Lestat premiered after an over two-year hiatus, throwing audiences headfirst into Lestat de Lioncourt‘s (Sam Reid) chaotic North American rockstar tour and the increasingly complicated — and ominous — legend surrounding it.

By the end of the premiere, three things had become abundantly clear: Lestat’s narration is being recorded from a point sometime after the catastrophic events associated with The Queen of the Damned; his music has unleashed a collection of “muses” — manifestations of figures from his past who continue to shape him as both monster and man; and his mother, Gabriella de Lioncourt (Jennifer Ehle), is not only alive and vampiric, but the two have an incestuous relationship that has shaped nearly all of Lestat’s 265 years of living.

“Toledo,” the second episode of the season, expanded heavily on Gabriella’s role in the story while simultaneously peeling back the layers of Lestat’s childhood. Through flashbacks, we met a stuttering child desperate to be told he mattered, a teenager punished for daring to dream beyond the confines of Auvergne, and the young man who survived the infamous wolf attack that would alter the trajectory of his life forever.

In the 2025 storyline, Gabriella’s arrival complicated Lestat’s present just as much as his past. His attempt to establish boundaries within their deeply uncomfortable relationship was quickly dismissed, while his increasingly strained relationships with those around him continued to deteriorate. Most notably, Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat finally reunited in what quickly became the episode’s most talked-about scene — a boardroom meeting loaded with jealousy, longing, old wounds, and enough pettiness to power an entire season of television. At the concert that followed, Gabriella also saw Louis with her own eyes for the first time, observing the love of her son’s life — though whether she is aware of the depth of that love remains to be fully seen yet — while Louis himself was forced to confront the reality that the publication of his interview remains a major fracture point between himself and Lestat.

Meanwhile, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) briefly returned the series to the energy of its first two seasons during a conversation with Louis, though even that meeting was ultimately overshadowed by the larger forces beginning to gather around them. By the end of the episode, nearly every major storyline felt poised for collision.

Episode 3, “Toronto,” wastes little time making good on that promise.

Home Again: Lestat and Daniel

There are two primary places we spend the 2025 storyline: Lestat being interviewed by Daniel in front of a camera and Louis hunting down the Detroit coven of vampires led by Killer — better known as Bruce, the vampire introduced in Season 1’s “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart” who attacked and raped Claudia (Bailey Bass in Season 1, Delainey Hayles in Season 2).

The interview sequences feel strangely like coming home. After all, Interview with the Vampire spent two seasons built around conversations between a vampire and a journalist. But while the format is familiar, the dynamic could not be more different.

Louis and Daniel were always engaged in a battle over memory. Lestat and Daniel, meanwhile, are engaged in a battle over control.

In Season 2’s “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape,” Armand (Assad Zaman) tells a very young Daniel (Luke Brandon Field) that he possesses a “splinter of coldness.” Across the first two seasons, we saw flashes of that coldness, but vampirism appears to have sharpened it into something far more dangerous. One of the major takeaways from this episode is that Daniel Molloy genuinely enjoys watching people break if it gets him closer to the truth. He thrives on uncomfortable questions. He pushes until something cracks.

Child of Armand he is, most indeed (derogatory).

But the interview also highlights exactly what a contradiction Lestat remains. Throughout the episode, we watch a character who appears simultaneously more in control than anyone around him realizes and completely incapable of controlling the emotions bubbling beneath the surface.

Most of the interview focuses on what happened after Lestat left Auvergne, particularly his relationship with Nicolas de Lenfent (Joseph Potter) and his turning at the hands of Magnus (Damien Atkins).

Magnus, of course, is not new information. We first heard about him in detail back in Season 1’s “Like Angels Put in Hell by God,” when Lestat described being kidnapped, held captive in a tower for a week, and repeatedly refusing what Magnus wanted from him. What’s fascinating here is that Lestat himself seems determined to downplay what happened.

Or perhaps more accurately: he’s determined not to look at it directly.

Instead, the emotional center of the interview becomes Nicolas.

As Lestat recounts Nicolas’ descent into madness following his turning, something inside him begins to fracture. There is genuine grief here. Genuine guilt. Genuine self-loathing. For a moment, it feels as though Daniel has finally succeeded in pushing Lestat into territory he doesn’t want to visit and Daniel is thrilled by it.

Then Lestat reminds everyone exactly who they’re dealing with.

The episode’s best twist comes when Lestat reveals he froze Daniel and himself during his emotional collapse, ensuring none of it was actually recorded. What initially appears to be a rare moment of vulnerability becomes something far more complicated: proof that even when Lestat is unraveling, he remains several steps ahead of everyone in the room.

It’s a brilliant reversal, and one that fundamentally changes Daniel’s understanding of him. Up until now, Daniel has largely treated Lestat as his next great story and access to a hedonistic lifestyle Daniel can now live in eternally. By the end of the interview, however, it becomes clear he is dealing with something much more dangerous than either Louis or Armand ever allowed themselves to be for him.

Louis Goes Hunting

Meanwhile, Louis’ destruction of the Detroit coven is one of the episode’s most satisfying sequences.

Armed with information provided by Raglan James (Justin Kirk) and Real Rashid (Bally Gill), Louis tracks the coven back to its house and proceeds to methodically dismantle it. One by one, he eliminates the vampires inside, frees the humans being kept in cages as a food supply, and patiently waits for the arrival of the person he actually came for: Bruce.

For all of Louis’ struggles throughout this series, we have rarely gotten to see him simply be good at being a vampire. Here, however, there is no hesitation, no uncertainty, and no visible emotional conflict. He moves through the house with a terrifying efficiency that reminds us just how dangerous he has become.

And it’s all underscored by an absolutely inspired music choice.

Set to T. Rex’s “Jewel,” the sequence culminates with Louis descending a staircase covered head-to-toe in blood while the lyrics “She walks the wind / And has a panther with silver fur” play overhead. Backlit and drenched in red, Jacob Anderson somehow manages to look both horrifying and impossibly beautiful.

It might genuinely be the sexiest scene currently airing on television.

But as spectacular as Louis’ rampage is, the episode’s real strength comes from the way it pairs his storyline with Lestat’s. Both men spend the hour confronting ghosts they have carried for decades, and it is in those parallel journeys that “Toronto” finds its emotional center.

Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson Put On a Masterclass

But both Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson deliver their best performances — and showcase exactly why they are two of the best actors currently working on television — starting around the thirty-eight-minute mark.

I’ve said before how this show is best when the two of them are together, and I firmly believe that to be true, and though they’re not “together” on the screen, this sequence in “Toronto” contains some of the strongest acting either of them has delivered across all three seasons and part of why it works so well is because it’s a split between the two of them.

There are two particular sequences I want to discuss, the first of which actually begins much earlier during Lestat’s interview with Daniel, long before he even talks about Nicolas.

For a brief moment, you think Lestat is finally breaking, the constant pushing Daniel’s been doing about his stutter getting to him.

And maybe it finally did get to him.

But ever the performer, ever incapable of allowing anyone full access to him, those tears suddenly devolve into a kind of manic laughter. The laughter turns into an unblinking stare. The stare turns into Lestat mockingly recreating Louis breaking under Daniel’s questioning in Dubai. Then the laughter starts again.

It’s cruel, to Louis, but it’s also incredibly unsettling. And it’s also one of the most impressive things Reid has done all season.

The emotional whiplash of the moment perfectly captures who Lestat is: someone who desperately wants to be understood while simultaneously sabotaging every opportunity he has to let people understand him.

After the interview’s discussion of Nicolas, however, the episode begins building toward something much larger.

Lestat leaves.

In Detroit, Louis waits for Bruce.

And both men find themselves trapped with ghosts.

Before diving into those scenes, I do want to briefly acknowledge one criticism I have, as it’s relevant to what is about to be discussed. I’m not entirely convinced Claudia’s diary pages needed to be read aloud to the audience. It’s not that the choice feels out of character for Louis. In many ways, it actually feels deeply in character. Louis has always been searching for redemption, and there is something tragically understandable about him returning to Claudia’s own words in an attempt to do right by her, even decades after her death, even if it’s selfish of him to do so.

But hearing the details spoken aloud feels uncomfortably close to reducing Claudia’s trauma into a narrative device for someone else’s story. But that’s, perhaps, a conversation for another time.

All of that said, Jacob Anderson’s delivery of those pages is devastating.

And once Bruce arrives, the episode becomes impossible to look away from.

Armed with Claudia’s diary, Louis makes it abundantly clear why he’s there. This isn’t about revenge for himself. It isn’t about justice in any meaningful sense. It’s about Claudia, or at least the closest thing to justice Louis can still offer her.

At the same time, Lestat finds himself confronted by arguably the most terrifying muse yet: Magnus.

Unlike Nicolas, who represents grief, Magnus represents something Lestat has spent centuries refusing to fully acknowledge.

Magnus immediately calls him out for being less than truthful with Daniel. More importantly, he forces Lestat to confront what happened in that tower. Because despite the language Lestat tried to use to describe his turning or his relationship with Magnus earlier in the episode, the parallels the episode draws are unmistakable. What Magnus took from him was not something freely given. 

And suddenly the episode begins cutting back and forth between these two confrontations.

Louis and Bruce. Lestat and Magnus. Past trauma and present trauma. Victim and perpetrator. Memory and reckoning.

It is here that both actors are allowed to play directly to their greatest strengths.

Anderson’s strength has always been his voice. He doesn’t need grand gestures. He doesn’t need explosive outbursts. He can break your heart with the slightest shift in tone.

As Louis reads Claudia’s words aloud, you can hear decades of grief sitting underneath every sentence. He isn’t enjoying this. He isn’t finding closure and he surely isn’t finding peace.

If anything, he seems more wounded with every word he reads.

What emerges isn’t a man taking revenge, but a father and, particularly, a father who failed his daughter; a father who has spent decades carrying that failure; a father desperately trying to convince himself that this act means something.

It’s absolutely heartbreaking.

Meanwhile, Reid does almost the exact opposite.

Where Anderson’s performance is rooted in voice, Reid’s is rooted in physicality.

For much of the sequence, Lestat barely moves. He sits behind the wheel of a car while Magnus talks and talks and talks. 

The road stretches endlessly ahead, and yet every emotion imaginable passes across Reid’s face.

His eyes remain fixed forward as he desperately attempts to avoid memories that refuse to stay buried. We see flashes of the tower. We hear the prayer he made to a God that wasn’t listening. We watch him plead not to be turned. We watch Magnus sink his fangs into him.

And throughout it all, Reid communicates terror, grief, rage, shame, denial, and heartbreak with almost frightening precision.

There is one particular shot where tears fill his eyes while a smile pulls across his face that genuinely haunted me.

It’s one of the most disturbing frames the show has ever produced.

The sequence also creates a kind of claustrophobia that mirrors what Lestat must have experienced in Magnus’ tower. The car becomes a prison. The memories become a prison. Magnus himself becomes impossible to escape, yet again.

And when all of it finally overwhelms him, resulting in the horrific crash that ends the sequence, it feels less like an accident and more like the inevitable conclusion of a man who has spent centuries outrunning himself.

The entire sequence is extraordinary.

The performances, the editing, the score from Daniel Hart, the cross-cutting between Louis and Lestat. Everything works.

It’s genuinely one of the strongest scenes this show has ever produced and a reminder that, three seasons in, Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson somehow continue finding new ways to outdo themselves.

The Loneliness

But if you think the episode is finished after that, you’re thankfully mistaken.

Louis ultimately gets his revenge.

Bruce dies exactly as he deserves to die, set ablaze by the very pages of Claudia’s diary that documented what he did to her. It’s a striking image, and one that immediately calls to mind Viserys Targaryen receiving his “golden crown” in Game of Thrones.

The problem, however, is that it doesn’t actually make Louis feel any better. If anything, it seems to accomplish the exact opposite.

By forcing himself to revisit Claudia’s words, Louis reopens wounds that never truly healed in the first place. When we next see him, he’s sitting in the diner he told Daniel about in the previous episode, the one with the waitress who reminded him so much of Claudia.

And there she is. Regina. Played by Delainey Hayles herself.

What that means has yet to be seen, but the emotional significance is immediate. For all the violence Louis inflicted throughout the episode, Claudia remains the thing he cannot escape.

Lestat, meanwhile, responds to his own emotional collapse in the most Lestat way imaginable.

He goes on stage.

Following the car crash, he performs “The Loneliness,” which is, in my opinion, the strongest song of the season thus far.

I’ll save most of my thoughts on the song itself for a separate article because it deserves one, but everything about the performance works. Sam Reid’s vocals are phenomenal, the lyrics are among the strongest we’ve heard from the season’s soundtrack, and the staging allows the emotional fallout of the episode to finally surface in a way words alone cannot.

Back in my season review, I wrote that the songs improve as they become more sincere. This is that turning point.

For much of the season, Lestat has been performing. He has been hiding behind showmanship, behind ego, behind provocation and excess. Here, however, the music finally feels honest.

The performance itself is haunted.

The phantasmic presences of Magnus and Nicolas are there. The physical presence of Gabriella is there.

The ghosts of Lestat’s past surround him as he sings, and it feels significant that when Magnus finally disappears, Gabriella leaves through the very same exit moments later.

For perhaps the first time this season, the music seems to give Lestat exactly what he has been searching for: catharsis. It’s not a solution, nor is it necessarily healing, but it is a release.

And in finding that release, the episode delivers what is easily its most powerful musical sequence yet.

It’s beautiful and it’s devastating, but most importantly, it is the moment the rockstar truly arrives. 

The Gremlin Arrives

But no worries, if you thought that was a really incredible ending to the episode, Armand is here to ruin it because of course he is.

We cut to Monroe, Ohio, where Armand is attending an AA meeting under an assumed calm that feels immediately suspicious in the way only Armand can manage. The target, as it quickly becomes clear, is Alex, one of Lestat’s guitarists who left the tour after discovering Lestat’s vampirism last episode and who is also actively struggling with addiction. The overlap is not subtle, nor is it accidental. Daniel Molloy’s own history with addiction looms in the background here as well, as does the series’ ongoing fascination with control, dependency, and the ways vulnerability gets weaponized in intimate spaces.

And if that weren’t enough connective tissue, the show quietly reminds us that, in the books, Armand and Daniel’s relationship is inseparable from Daniel’s addiction history. Which makes Armand showing up in a recovery space feel like a loaded gun placed carefully back on the table.

Elsewhere, Lestat does the unthinkable at his own concert: he uses the Cloud Gift in front of a live audience. Whatever boundaries remain between the myth of Lestat and the reality of him are beginning to dissolve entirely.

Interesting Smaller Details

Other key takeaways refuse to sit quietly in the background:

• Dr. Fareed (Gopal Divan) casually introducing the idea that vampires can survive decapitation — specifically pointing toward a vampire as powerful as Lestat — feels like the kind of line the show doesn’t include without intent. Terrified of what that could mean.
• And then there is Daniel, or rather, the version of Daniel Lestat insists is already gone.
• Lestat narrates that Daniel was turned by Armand on July 18, 2022, a date that immediately destabilizes everything we understand about the interview timeline because, as previously established, the Dubai interview began on June 14, 2022 and lasted eleven days. The math doesn’t comfortably align, and given that showrunner Rolin Jones has confirmed we won’t be seeing Daniel’s turning until next season, we probably have a few years before we find out the real answers to that.
• Worse still, Lestat keeps referring to Daniel in the past tense when speaking about his vampiric existence, as if he is already writing from a point where Daniel no longer exists in any stable form.
• Which raises the question the episode is increasingly daring us to ask: what happened to everyone after the events of Akasha as hinted at in this season’s premiere episode?
• Back on the topic of the episode at hand, even Daniel himself, for all his volatility, continues to behave like a journalist who knows where to press. His line of questioning around Lestat’s mother, Gabriella, and the inconsistencies that begin to surface around Lestat’s recollection of events suggest that once Daniel senses narrative instability, he does what he has always done: he digs until something breaks. And now he has fangs to match it.
• Meanwhile, Nicholas de Lenfent (Joseph Potter) remains one of the episode’s most quietly devastating presences. I’ve, personally, never loved Nicolas in the novels, and do have my criticisms of how the series has adapted him overall, but Potter’s performance does an enormous amount of emotional lifting here, bringing a fragility and collapse to Nicolas that is really incredible for the character. It’s genuinely strong work in a role that could have easily been reduced to backstory noise and I applaud the performance.
• There’s also a growing thematic preoccupation with witches and burning that the episode makes increasingly explicit. Lestat’s recounting of witnessing witches burn at the Witches’ Place deviates significantly from the novel, but what stands out more is the repetition of twin imagery and execution by fire — an unmistakable connective thread that gestures toward Maharet and Mekare as we move closer to The Queen of the Damned arc.
• And then there is fire itself. Fire as memory. Fire as punishment. Fire as love. Fire as erasure.
• Across the series, it has become almost a visual refrain: Louis burning his arm in front of Daniel in 1.01, Louis as a fledgling in 1.02, Claudia’s repeated self-inflicted burns in 1.04, Lestat forcing Claudia to watch Charlie burn, Louis and Claudia burning Antoinette in 1.07, Daciana’s self-immolation in 2.01, Louis begging Armand not to kill him by fire in 2.03, Louis’ attempted suicide in 2.05, Claudia and Madeleine burning in 2.07, Louis learning the fire gift in 2.08, and now Magnus and Nicolas being framed within that same lineage of destruction in 3.03.
• The 1980s-esque music video for “Your Biggest Fan” also deserves mention here, if only because it feels like it was beamed in from an entirely different, more unhinged television show. It takes a few viewings to calibrate to its particular frequency, but once it lands, it’s difficult to shake how deliberately chaotic and stylized it is.
• Damien Atkins as Magnus remains a grotesque triumph of casting and performance. A horrifying creature in every sense of the word, and one the series wisely burns through quickly.
• Louis de Pointe du Lac seemingly learning the Cloud Gift was also not on my 2026 bingo card, and yet here we are. It’s a fascinating development, particularly given how it reframes power within the series. That said, my only demand — yes, demand — is that this does not come at the cost of Louis and Lestat’s romantic flight at the end of The Queen of the Damned adaptation. Some things are sacred.
• The phrase “Armand told the truth” continues to recur in a way that feels increasingly loaded, especially given that we have not yet seen the full, unedited version of the Interview with the Vampire novel as it exists within the show’s Talamasca-edited framework. The implication that truth itself is being selectively constructed remains one of the series’ most quietly terrifying ideas.
• On a more interpersonal note, Louis’ relationship with Lemuel continues to blur lines in ways that feel increasingly difficult to categorize. What was previously framed as casual detachment now reads with a kind of emotional proximity that contradicts earlier framing, especially as Lemuel continues to check on Louis’ wellbeing with an intimacy that feels hard to dismiss.

The Problem

Largest criticism of this episode, and frankly of the season thus far, comes down to Gabriella. Talking about her at length in the premiere felt somewhat premature given how little of her presence we were actually working with beyond that final scene, but now, having spent two full episodes with her in the present-day storyline, I have to say that I’m disappointed in what the series is doing with her character.

I recognize very little of this Gabriella compared to the woman as she exists in the novel canon. But even setting adaptation fidelity aside, the larger issue is that I am struggling to locate a single redeemable or even legibly positive quality within her as she is currently being written for the screen. That absence of those kinds of traits matters. It matters not because characters need to be likable, but because even the most antagonistic or morally compromised figures in this series have historically been granted interiority — something to complicate them beyond their worst impulses, and that is what feels fundamentally missing here.

The series has consistently allowed its male characters to exist in states of contradiction: Lestat is both monstrous and romantic, Louis is both selfish and a victim, Armand is both manipulative and deeply wounded, Daniel is both invasive and curious to the point of cruelty. Even when they are behaving badly — especially when they are behaving badly — the writing makes room for the audience to understand why they are the way they are, or at least to sit in the tension of that ambiguity.

Gabriella, by contrast, is being rendered in increasingly flat strokes. She is positioned as cold, controlling, invasive, and emotionally unsympathetic without the counterweight of nuance that would allow those traits to feel like part of a larger psychological or narrative architecture. Instead, they accumulate without friction, and what we are left with is not complexity but repetition.

There is an interesting thread here, theoretically, in her fixation on the Great Conversion and what it suggests about ideology, immortality, and possession reframed as cosmic purpose. That idea, on its own, is compelling. But being interesting in concept is not the same thing as being dramatized with depth. At present, Gabriella feels like she is functioning as a vessel for that idea rather than a character actively embodying it in a way that generates emotional stakes or interpretive tension.

And so I find myself not engaging with her so much as resisting her. I find myself actively disconnected from her scenes in a way that is unusual for this series, which is typically so adept at making even its most unbearable figures feel fascinating to watch. Right now, I am not fascinated. I am waiting for the show to give me something more substantial to hold onto.

I’ve joked about it elsewhere, but there is a genuine sense of frustration that borders on disbelief when she is on screen with Lestat. It becomes difficult not to mentally shorthand the experience into something like: “GET A JOB. STAY AWAY FROM HIM.” Which is obviously hyperbolic, but it speaks to the larger issue at play — that the dynamic is currently so one-note in its dysfunction that it stops feeling dramatically productive and starts feeling narratively repetitive.

Even in the novel, where Gabriella’s parenting is complicated, distant, and often emotionally difficult, there is still texture to her. There is history in the silence, contradiction in the affection, and a kind of wounded intelligence that makes her difficult to fully reduce. That version of her may not be warm, but she is legible. She is readable as a person.

This version, at least so far, is not.

And then there is the Jarda sequence.

The scene with Jarda (Sam Reid as Lestat’s body double) and Gabriella is, on a purely conceptual level, understandable in what it is attempting to do, but understanding intent does not automatically translate into successful execution, and in this case the scene lands with a kind of tonal dissonance that is difficult to ignore.

It is not only that the scene feels excessive; it is that it feels oddly miscalibrated within a series that has, up to this point, been relatively precise in how it handles intimacy, eroticism, and emotional violence. The explicitness itself is not the issue. The issue is that it does not feel narratively earned in proportion to the depth it seems to be reaching for.

And perhaps most strikingly, it is difficult to ignore the fact that this becomes, across two seasons of television, the most explicitly sexual sequence in a show built around queer desire, queer intimacy, and queer monstrosity. That imbalance does not invalidate what the scene is attempting to explore, but it does complicate how it lands within the broader tonal and representational landscape of the series.

It is, in short, a lot.

But that, perhaps, is a conversation best left to the end of the season, once we can better see what Gabriella ultimately becomes in the architecture of the story, if anything more than what she currently is.

In Summary

Still, none of that undermines what the episode ultimately accomplishes.

“Toronto” is, so far, the strongest hour of the season. It expands its emotional and mythological scope without losing narrative propulsion, and it begins to do what the series has always done best: let its characters hurt each other in ways that feel both operatic and deeply personal. The result is an episode that doesn’t just escalate plot but actively destabilizes every relationship at its center.

The first three episodes of The Vampire Lestat are now streaming on AMC+. Keep following us here at iHorror for continued seasonal coverage — including breakdowns, editorials, and ongoing coverage of all things Lestat.

The Vampire Lestat airs every Sunday at 9 p.m. EST on AMC.