Inspired by an unseasonably mild winter that stretched the cosy thrall of Halloween long past its usual end, I recently found myself reaching for a book that has sat collecting dust on my bookshelf for years. Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

I knew the story, of course. I’ve seen the movies, know the folklore, have even been to Bran Castle in Transylvania. But as I settled in front of the fire to read this classic tale of vampires that supposedly inspired it all, I was shocked by how different the story was from the one I assumed it to be.

The characters I was reading, the words on the page, were at odds with the story I knew. The story I had consumed through countless re-tellings, adaptations, movies and media throughout my teenage years. The original text is gothic and haunting, distant and dreamy in the way all classic works are. And while the pacing is not what I’m used to with modern fiction, it was the characters that stood out as vastly different to how I had come to know them.

Van Helsing was a bumbling old doctor, more prone to rambling rants about God than actual vampire hunting. And Dracula himself? The icon I was most excited to meet, was an old man, weak and rancid, with burning red eyes, who walked in the sunlight and needed boxes of soil to keep him safe.

Where was the vibrant, intoxicating Count that lured beautiful maidens from their beds? Where was the dashing villain with preternatural speed and haunting allure? And what happened between Stoker writing his tale and the world latching onto the dream of Dracula?

The answer lies in what endures when the words and details of a story are forgotten.

---

The plethora of Dracula-inspired media I ate up in my youth only told part of Stoker’s tale. The best part. Over the years, through each re-imagining, each retelling, each adaptation, the complicated and convoluted prose condensed to its core, turning his iconic characters into heightened versions of what they should have been in the first place.

This act of collective reinterpretation can bestow traits on characters that weren’t there to begin with or were only hinted at in the original text. As a story continues to be retold, again and again, iconic characters like Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and yes, Dracula, take on a life of their own off the page. A life that continues well after their original stories.

What’s left is the heart of the narrative, the heart of the characters, as seen through the eyes of not only the writer but generations of readers as well.

There is a lesson to be learnt here. A lesson in the art of writing great characters. In finding their essence. In distilling them to the core of what they were always meant to be.

And to learn it, we must first head to 1791 America, to the city of New Orleans, where another vampire awaits to hold our hand and explain how he, too, stepped off the page and became more than the sum of his parts.

Meet Lestat de Lioncourt – Anne Rice’s iconic Brat Prince. And our case study in character development and reinterpretation.

---

An audience with the Prince

Lestat de Lioncourt was initially introduced in Rice’s first Vampire Chronicles book, Interview With The Vampire, in 1976. This tale is told through the eyes of his lover, protege, and estranged companion Louis, but despite Louis’ initially damming portrayal of our protagonist, Lestat dominated the narrative of this gothic romance, capturing the hearts of readers and defining all other characters in ther series in how they either loved or despised him.

Lestat goes on to narrate many of the later books, cementing his voice as the iconic voice of the series, and even though he’s absent from vast portions of the narrative, his irrepressible and infuriating nature, hinted at in Interview and further expanded in the following novels, makes him the poster boy for Rice’s entire gothic universe.

But as I re-read Interview now, almost 20 years after I was first seduced by Rice’s iconic world, I am introduced to a Lestat who feels like a stranger. The way he talks, the way he acts, it feels out of character, out of place, in contrast to the Lestat that has existed in my mind for nearly two decades. Much like Dracula, the character on the page is at odds with the one I remember.

Of course, this book is told from the point of view of a character who initially despises Lestat. We’re seeing Louis’ interpretation of a man he never really understood, who was closed off and secretive with him, and subsequently the reader, about his true nature. Interview is ultimately Louis’ story, after all. Though Lestat is an irrepressible part of that story, often stealing the limelight from our melancholy narrator, he is but one part of Louis’ tale, meant to exist in stark contrast with Louis’ desperation and guilt, Armand’s poise and elegance, Claudia’s cold detachment and wanton bloodlust.

But still, even taking these things into consideration, even acknowledging how Rice’s own writing style changed over the 30 years she was writing these books, the character we meet between the pages of the 1976 novel is not the character as we know him today. And it’s not the character that made millions of readers fall in love.

So, let’s take a look at what changed. How our beloved Lestat morphed from his static beginnings to his dramatic, iconic self. Let’s take a walk through his reinterpretation, his Hollywood fame and his television debut, and discover how it’s possible for an adaptation of an author’s work to feel more realized, more true, more honest than the original. How the Lestat we meet in 2022, the Lestat Sam Reid so skillfully brings to life, can feel more like Lestat than Rice’s original words.

---

Reinvention and retelling

Since the book’s acclaimed release in 1976, the Vampire Chronicles has seen multiple adaptations: First, a Hollywood movie, Interview With The Vampire, in 1994; followed by Queen of the Damned, in 2002; and most recently, the 2022 AMC TV show, Interview With the Vampire. Rice’s iconic character is portrayed differently in each, as you’d expect from a variety of writers telling a story to different audiences through different mediums.

From Tom Cruise to Stuart Townsend, and now most recently Sam Reid, each Lestat has their own voice, their own feel, their own heart. But what’s interesting to note about each remake, beyond the modernization of setting and medium, is the core elements of Rice’s original story that change with each retelling. And how those seemingly insignificant changes affect our understanding of her characters as a whole.

In the original book, we first meet Lestat as an impetuous young vampire who seeks Louis out for financial gain and a place to house his ageing father. He’s flippant and reckless, a petulant child who’s arrogant and uncaring, dismissive of both human life and Louis’ guilt over taking it. He’s cold and closed off, from both Louis and the reader, and while we see him being callous and violent, we don’t ever get to understand why.

This image of Lestat as the Brat Prince, the wanton vampire with no remorse for his nature, continues through all the later interpretations, with one notable difference – his connection to humanity.

All subsequent adaptations remove the back story about Lestat’s father and his financial motive in turning Louis. Instead, they paint Lestat as the wandering immortal, bored and alone, seeking a connection with a humanity he despises. A companion for the undying hell he’s put himself in. By removing this seemingly insignificant plot line, this subtle difference turns Lestat from a petulant child into a desperate romantic, still spiteful and cruel, but spiteful and cruel because he wants something he can’t have – a human connection. It gives Lestat a heart, despite him being adamantly opposed to such a sentiment.

I can’t say if this was the conscious decision of the 1994 writers, or one born of the inevitable need to simplify a complex plot for the medium of film. But whatever the cause, it creates a far more focused character in Lestat, who we can see, even if only hinted at, has hidden depths behind his forced facade of violence and indifference.

The 1994 movie still leaves a lot to be desired. Tom Cruise brings a rather Hollywood aesthetic, and any romantic connection between our main protagonists is painted with a very heavy-handed heterosexual brush. But despite removing these integral themes and the Hollywoodization of the plot, the little changes in Lestat’s backstory present a more heightened, focused, self-realised character that further adaptations would build on.

---

The next time we meet Lestat is in the 2002 movie Queen of the Damned, when Stuart Townsend portrays our intoxicating, alluring vampire prince. While this movie plays fast and loose with the Chronicles plot, it does maintain one key element highlighted by the previous film – Lestat is lost and alone, seeking a human connection he doesn’t understand.

He says he doesn’t care about human life or following the rules, but the way he treats mortals with reverence betrays this brash facade. He hates humans, but falls in love with them. He despises his gift, but uses it with abandon.

Queen of the Damned finds the heart of Lestat’s contradiction, his love and hate for humanity, and makes it the essence of who he is. We hone in on his fear of loneliness, see him torn between his new powers and the knowledge that he’ll never be known. And for all its inaccuracies, it does what the previous film did not. It gives us a Lestat we begin to understand. A Lestat we begin to love.

---

A new interview. A new story

And then, we come to the most recent adaptation of Interview With the Vampire. The 2022 AMC show that inspired this essay. The best interpretation of this iconic story to date, that I believe, though it’s likely a controversial opinion, surpasses the original book.

The modern setting, a second interview 50 years after the first, the re-imagining of Louis’ back story, the hard-hitting and intensely personal statements on race and sexuality – the writers took what feels like Rice’s original intentions for the book and made them vivid and visceral, equal parts tragic, intoxicating and horrific. They turned up the dial on everything the Vampire Chronicles is about: love, gore, death, and darkness. Made it more real than it’s ever been. More tangible, heartbreaking, and explicit than ever before.

And yes, it feels like the story Rice wanted to tell back in 1976.

In the throes of increasing wonder

Right off the bat, this show pulls no punches showing us the love story that was always bubbling beneath the surface. That exists at the heart of this enthralling tale.

Gone are the subtle insinuations of Lestat and Louis being ‘companions’. These vampires are explicitly and all consumingly in love, with all the complications homosexual love in the 1900s brings. This adaptation doesn’t shy away from their sexuality but puts it front and centre, building the plot around the toxic and unhealthy relationship our two protagonists share. A violent portrayal of love and abuse that is tearing them both apart. That has us crying out for Louis to let go while we scream at Lestat to realise what he has before it’s lost.

This relationship is, of course, present in the books, hinted at with lavish descriptions of enticing eyes and delicate lips, but we never see it in the extremes we see here. Louis speaks of his inner conflict over Lestat; “I have to leave him, or I’ll die”. But this sentiment feels weak and passive, prompted by annoyance and boredom rather than any deeper emotional strife. Their relationship reads like friends turned to enemies after too long spent in each other’s company, instead of the suffocating, toxic passion we see in the show.

Lestat’s courting of Louis, which barely lasts a paragraph in the book and is an afterthought in the movie, becomes an entire episode in the show, culminating in the incredible confession scene where Jacob Anderson gives one of his most harrowing performances as Louis, racked with the guilt of his brother’s death and his fear of the man that’s so bewitched his heart. Notably, it’s actually Louis in the book who massacres a priest after his failed confession, and the decision of the writers to give this iconic murder to Lestat instead shows how well they truly understood their assignment.

Because a good adaptation isn’t always about being true to the original. It’s not about repeating the lines word for word and sticking to the text like a lifeline. It’s about taking the feelings, the heart, the characters we know, and turning them into the characters we see.

By lengthening the time we spend with Louis before he becomes immortal, we get to walk in his shoes, see him struggle, feel his fractured humanity, his suppressed rage at having to hide his true nature. It helps us understand where the internal struggle that permeates his character comes from. We understand the guilt that defines him more clearly and see him drawn to Lestat the same way Lestat is drawn to him.

We see the human story behind the supernatural that was there all along.

This is, after all, a story about love, and what it truly means to be alone.

The monster and the man

Sam Reid’s Lestat is again portrayed as the disconnected wanderer, drawn to Louis’ strength and inner conflict. And we see the contradiction in the heart of our Brat Prince from the onset: his violence and tenderness, his compassion and cruelty. The inner conflict hinted at in the book, which we only learn by reading between the lines for what is left unsaid, is pushed to the extreme.

In this new adaptation, Lestat is still a brat, still a pompous socialite who takes what he wants and disregards others’ feelings, but we see him more broken, more violent and more monstrous than we’ve ever seen him before.

He’s no longer the uncaring, facetious protagonist. We quickly and clearly see that underneath his facade of indifference, he’s scared and broken, trying desperately to hide his fears and failings from those around him. No one explains it more aptly than Louis himself when he says, “Lestat must be pushed considerably before he will open up and admit there is method to the way he lives”. And unlike previous adaptations, Reid shows us exactly what happens when Lestat is pushed too far. We see why he needs Louis because we see the awful thing he becomes when he’s alone.

He is more a monster here than he’s ever been – more vile and evil than in any previous interpretation. Even in the books, Rice speaks of Lestat’s violence and rage but seldom lets us see it. But here, it’s at the forefront. The manipulation, the abuse, the gaslighting, the trauma; We see the demon in the darkness, the uncaring killer the other adaptations gloss over. But we also see more love, more honesty, more heartbreaking emotion burried beneath the surface. A Lestat more hopelessly infatuated and ultimately lost.

Reid’s Lestat feels somehow more repulsive and more intoxicating than ever, a violent killer and a hopeless romantic. You’re drawn in by his charm, repulsed by his nature, yet you still love him. And just like Louis, you don’t know what to do with that feeling.

---

Louis. It was always about Louis.

No discussion of Lestat’s character would be complete without mentioning Louis. It is, after all, through Louis’ eyes that we first see Lestat; through Louis’ words that we come to know his nature.

And much like Sam Reid’s Lestat, Jacob Anderson’s Louis shows us a side to our morbid narrator we’ve never seen before. Channeling Brad Pitt’s calm, introspective, detached Louis from 1994 while still making him alive, heartbroken, and damned in the same breath. If Reid’s Lestat is more monstrous and broken, then Anderson’s Louis is more lost, more willing, more active in his own downfall, more complicit in his own damnation. He runs to Lestat like an addict to the needle, losing himself to the vampire while trying desperately to cling to the shattered remains of his life.

Anderson’s Louis hates and loves Lestat just as Lestat hates and loves humanity, and in none of the previous works do we feel that desperation and despair as completely as we do here.

But beyond Anderson’s compelling performance, and his and Reid’s undeniable chemistry, the Louis we meet in 2022 holds another secret. The answer to how our Brat Prince went from a petulant child to the broken romantic the world fell in love with.

Evil is a point of view

Despite Rice’s original story being told retrospectively, an interview between vampire and journalist set over 150 years after the fact, Louis’ retelling of these early years is at odds with his present-day character. The character we’re listening to alongside Daniel in that dark San Francisco motel room.

At the start of Rice’s book, we’re not seeing Lestat the way he was, but rather the way Louis saw him at the time.

The Lestat we meet in 1976 is seen through the confused, grief-stricken lens of a newly immortal Louis who hates both himself and his maker. All he saw in those early years was Lestat’s insolence and failings, which looked to Louis like incompetence and derision. By the end of the book, after centuries of love and death, Louis has lost that mortal connection. He has become the detached immortal he always feared, able to look back on the events of his life and his relationship with Lestat with a more balanced view. In the last chapter, we see how the vampire in the room is different to the one at the start of the story, how he has changed through the telling, and, in the end, how he finally sees Lestat for what he was all along. For the complicated, loving, broken creature we see him as now.

And the reader goes on this journey too.

It’s masterful writing from Rice, to let us feel this change alongside Louis. To let us come to our own conclusions about the errors and holes in Louis’ story. And while yes, it would have made more sense if Louis explained these things himself, and having this disconnect in Louis’ narration somewhat confuses the character Daniel meets in the present day, going on this journey with him, discovering that the story he told us wasn’t the truth, make the book’s ending so much more compelling.

And, it explains what is lost in the re-reading 20 years later. Once you’ve read the book, once you know this integral secret, the flaw in its narration, you can never go back and see the story with the same eyes. You know Louis’ bias; you know his mistakes. Once you’ve gone on this journey with Louis, from hatred and grief to understanding and love, you can never go back.

But what works in prose does not always translate to the screen.

The art of adaptation

This inconsistencies in Louis’ story work in the book becasue we are only given Louis’ eyes to see through. We hear only Louis’ side of the story. On-screen, we can draw our own conclusions as we see scenes play out in real time. We can see the things Louis missed, his clouded judgment, his biased opinions. We can see the fractured facade he and Lestat show each other and the deeper secrets they try to hide.

If Lestat acted on screen as he did in the book, Louis’ warped perspective would appear as truth. And the change we see in this perspective would appear as simply poor writing, as a confused character that doesn’t know who he is.

The AMC show navigates this disconnect perfectly. In the third episode, part way through the interview, Daniel confronts Louis with the discrepancies in his own account, the inconsistencies in his narrative, expertly highlighting the revelation you come to at the end of the book – that the cold and detached Louis we meet in San Francisco shouldn’t recall the character of Lestat with such obvious bias. That the Louis we meet at the end of the book, the vampire sitting opposite Daniel in 1976 and 2022, is at odds with the story he told at the start.

Daniel: “It’s not so much the minute details, Louis, as it is the total rewrite that’s giving me pause.” After which he plays Louis a recording of his own voice, comparing lines word for word from Rice’s original text with lines from the show:

“Louis, 1973: He was a sow’s ear, out of which nothing fine could be made. I was his complete superior, and I had been sadly cheated in having him for a teacher.

Louis, 2022: It was a cold winter that year, and Lestat was my coal fire. And I found myself, for the very first time, to anyone other than Paul, confiding my struggles to another man.

1973: He appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dried twigs with a thin, carping voice.

2022: I never allowed myself to feel emotionally close to anyone, much less a man. Lestat had surrounded me.“

To which Louis replies, “The version we speak of now is the more nuanced portrait. The tapes are an admitted performance. This is the premise of our interview.”

In one scene, the writers explain the revelation the entire book works towards. Explain how the Lestat we meet in future novels can be the same Lestat we saw in 1976. Why his actions feel so out of character in the original book. And how Reid’s Lestat can feel like a more accurate portrayal despite his character’s deviation from the original text.

The Lestat of 2022 is Lestat as Louis sees him at the end of the book. After Louis has lost his humanity, been numbed by death and grief, and is able to look back on his story with the detachment that loss brings. We’re still seeing the story through Louis’ eyes, but they are the eyes of the modern Louis, the current Louis, consistent in his detachment, retelling the facts of his life rather than living it, feeling it, judging it, as he is in the book. Describing not how he felt then but how he feels now. How he should always have felt in San Francisco when first telling his story.

This is the crucial difference between the show and the book. The critical element that elevates Lestat’s character beyond any interpretations we’ve seen before.

The differences we see don’t stem from the innate inconsistencies in Lestat’s character, but rather, in Louis’.

---

More like him than himself

The unexplored aspects of Lestat’s character that Reid so expertly brings to life are still part of the character Rice originally wrote. Rice herself was consulted by the show’s creators, and while the extent to which she was involved in the scriptwriting is unknown, having her input would undoubtedly have helped AMC create such a pivotal portrayal of her work. One that arguably surpasses her original books in both reach and intention.

Rice’s Lestat is just as complex and compelling as the vampire we meet in 2022, but in the books, these integral parts of his persona are hidden under layers of additional details that make the essence of his character harder to see. What makes him Lestat is harder to see. While Stoker’s Dracula changed in appearance, motivation and deed through the process of adaptation, as the little details of the story got lost in the retelling, Lestat became more vividly who he was the whole time. He was never the character we met at the start of Interview. Never the Hollywood villain of 1994, or the masochistic god of 2002. He was always a broken, violent thing, pining for his lost humanity, searching for meaning in a life filled with death.

Reid’s Lestat is Rice’s Lestat. We’re just no longer seeing him through Louis’ eyes, or Lestat’s voice, or even Rice’s own words. We’re seeing him as we, the readers, see him, and taking that knowledge back to the story that started it all.

---

The 2022 show is less about vampires, less about supernatural horror or devils in the night, and is, instead, a heartbreaking, bloodsplattered depiction of the all-consuming relationship between two beings bound together in love and death. The horror is more painful, the death more poignant, the passion and loss more expertly felt by both the characters and viewers alike.

This is the true heart of the Vampire Chronicles. The core of Rice’s writing. This visceral, explosive, toxic relationship is how so many of her characters feel towards the gift of immortality. It asks the question of what it means to be alive. What the point of it all is. What is humanity, if not the desperate search for somewhere to belong, someone to hold you, to see your flaws and tell you they love you anyway. What is love when you strip it of everything it’s not, and what would we all give for a chance at real happiness.

This is the story we see in Lestat. The heart we were drawn to all those years ago. The essence that made him stand out from the page of a book that wasn’t about him, that painted a picture in our minds at odds with the details we were told, and made him into the icon we all fell in love with.

---

The lesson in the love story

So, what can we learn from this love letter to the modern vampire? What can we take away from re-reading the stories we thought we knew and pinpointing exactly what’s changed and what’s stayed the same? What we’ve forgotten over time and what’s distilled in our collective memory.

And the lesson is this:

What a reader takes away from a story is so much more than what’s written.

Something interesting happens to a story after it’s been read. Or heard, or watched. Once the tale is over, it sits in your head, and slowly, over time, you forget. The side characters, the setting, the dialogue, the backstory, all the little details are lost, and a complex story gets condensed to its most basic parts.

What remains is how it made you feel.

Years later, you don’t remember all the things a character did or said, but you remember who they were to you, what they represented, what made them stand out, why you fell in love with them in the first place. The 100,000+ words the author spent trying to explain their vision are condensed into an idea of what that character meant to you, whether that’s actually how they were written or not.

Taika Waititi recently explained this idea far more eloquently than I can. When asked about his writing process, he replied that his advice for budding screenwriters was to write your story, and then put it away for as long as possible until you’ve forgotten what you wrote. Then, after re-reading your work, to write it out again from memory and see what pieces remain.

You won’t remember the minute details, the background characters or each scene exactly as you wrote it. What you will remember is the big picture, the way the story makes you feel, and the integral heart of each character. With the little details lost, you’re left with the broad strokes, the vibrant colours, the pieces of the story that make it memorable in the first place. The story that was hiding beneath your words all along.

---

There will always be a place in my heart for the Vampire Chronicles. Rice’s characters still speak to me, years later, as they do for so many, and her vivid worlds solidified in me a love for all things Gothic. A fairytale of romance and horror. Love and death and deviance hand in hand. Her books paved the way for countless modern vampire novels, and gave us a space where queer characters could thrive. And I am not trying to detract from her legacy or downplay the integral part her books played in my own journey as a writer.

But being reintroduced to Lestat after so many years, seeing Reid’s glittering devil grinning from the TV screen, looking more alive and real than I’ve ever seen him, made me realise that the way you tell a story, the original text, the original words, are far less important than the ideas. And once a story exists in the world, it can become so much more than the sum of its parts.

An author doesn’t always have a say in how their stories will be retold. How they’ll be changed and altered by the people telling them. But sometimes, if the story’s good enough, or it captures the hearts of a generation, that retelling can unlock the hidden heart of the tale that was there all along. The Vampire Prince, hiding between the words, waiting for us to notice him.