‘Vampire Lestat’ stars say role often amplifies human behavior

Thanks to Anne Rice’s novels (and the source for this series and “The Vampire Chronicles”), they have plenty to draw on.

Eric Bogosian, who plays the interviewer trying to learn the ropes from Lestat, says life is different when you’re immortal: “Consequences work differently in your life.”

Jacob Anderson, who plays Louis de Pointe du Lac, says his character “is most human” once he becomes a vampire: “It’s almost like these characters didn’t do the processing and now they have to live with themselves forever.”

Sam Reid, who plays Lestat, boils it down even further: “We never really change over time. We just become more of what we really are.”

In the series, the characters discover certain events have become amplified.

“The vampire gives us an artifice to explore humanity,” says Reid. “You can kind of do it in this very operatic scale, but actually it’s just a metaphor. We’re really exploring human things, but we do have a framework of monsters, which allows us to be more extreme with the actions. So, when they have a fight, they’ll rip each other apart physically but then get back together again.”

With the new title, “The Vampire Lestat” is able to focus on Lestat and probe his inspirations. Plenty of rock stars could be triggers, but “his onstage persona is built in that 18th-century French iteration of the commedia dell’arte,” Reid says. “Anything that goes beyond that is sort of an extension of that character.”

Reid looked at David Bowie’s concerts and albums “to remind myself that he’s not human, that he’s sort of like supernatural. We maintain that he is kind of another thing, which I thought David Bowie did extraordinarily. I wanted to make sure his stage presence felt theatrical in a way.”

To inspire the scripts, writers listened to music by Franz Liszt, “just to open up the day,” says Executive Producer Rolin Jones.

When actors were given the characters — and the extra characters they also play – costumes, makeup and wigs became essential. They toyed with accents, too.

And, in Reid’s case, they even reached back for the teeth he wore in the first season “and filed the fangs off. They were slightly too big, so the fit gave him a bit of a buck tooth. We also had double wigs going on, which was really a fun thing to do. A wig on a wig on a wig kind of felt like what we were doing with the show.”

Humor highlights the newest season, which lifts the dark veil that has surrounded the other season.

“I didn’t really know how to be happy in this show,” says Anderson.

Then he got to play with the new scenes.

The key to understanding the switch?

“It’s structured around how Lestat wants to tell his story,” says Jones. “He comes in very confident, thinking he can be glib and fun and keep it at bay, and then he gets deeper and deeper into recording and things are coming up. It begins to change how the story is being told. It’s part of an emotional landscape.”