Medicine is my anthem

They’re like this for the entirety of our time together: a pair so in sync that I’m not sure they’re even aware of it, the twins from The Shining if they were men in their 30s who don’t resemble each other at all. Reid, who portrays the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, is slightly taller and a pillar of cool in his bomber jacket and sunglasses. His blond hair is tied back into a low knot that exposes tiny hoops hugging his earlobes, Lestat’s thick French accent gone in favor of Reid’s natural Australian speaking voice. Anderson, meanwhile, carries none of the ruthlessness but all of the swagger of his character, the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac. He’s in a fuzzy olive fleece and graphic tee, darting this way and that through the museum with his Canon 310XL in-hand, all Britishisms and warm brown eyes instead of icy green contacts and a New Orleans drawl.

Although Reid has some musical-theater experience, the performances in The Vampire Lestat are a different sort of beast. To prepare, he learned how to play violin and guitar to an extent that would look convincing onscreen. He laid down vocals for an entire album’s worth of original songs, crafted by the show’s composer, Daniel Hart, who looked to the glam and excess of ’70s singer-songwriters. (Anne Rice, for her part, named Jim Morrison as inspiration.) For the concert scenes, Reid also performed live at Toronto venues. “You’ll be hard-pressed to see any other actor on television have to do the number of things that he has to do,” Jones says of Reid. “And do them so artfully. I will never have anybody like him again.”

The online buzz for The Vampire Lestat has largely been about seeing Reid as this eyeliner-and-glitter-covered sensation, the wild vampire at his wildest self. But along with the excitement, there’s trepidation about how delicately—if delicately at all—the show will handle themes of grooming, incest, and sexual assault in relation to Lestat’s mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle). In the books, where she’s known as Gabrielle, she’s turned into a vampire by Lestat on her deathbed, then abandons him to travel the world, appearing again after decades apart.

“Incest is not something that anybody wants to explore, but you really understand the character Lestat through it,” says Reid. “And there is a very large payoff with that storyline. And I think it’s really important, because even though the show is fun, it is a comedy, and it is sort of silly in a way, it also deals with some pretty intense things.”

Anderson adds, “So much of this story as an overall thing is about abuse and the ramifications and echoes of abuse across—” “Centuries,” says Reid. “Generations,” Anderson agrees.

It’s a season that holds up a mirror to the uglier truths of our vampiric friends’ long, long lives. In seasons one and two, Louis struggled with recalling certain events for the gruesome realities that they were, and instead delivered cleaner, sugarcoated versions in his retelling; The Vampire Lestat slaps the viewer in the face with the brutal truth, again and again and again.

“They are actually really fucked-up characters that are greatly loved by people but also capable of eating babies, slaughtering their best friends,” says Reid. “You shouldn’t be rooting for them, and we can’t control how people feel about them. All we can do is just play the roles as they’re written in the script and serve them as best as we can.”

For Anderson, one of the joys of playing Louis comes from the fact that he’s allowed to be as nuanced and messy and antagonistic as any white character on the show, or any white Louis from past adaptations. “The myth of representation is that all representation should be good representation,” he says. “I think one of the exciting things about this show is that [non-white characters] Louis and Claudia and Armand are imperfect characters. They are incredibly rich characters and there is space to explore how problematic they are but also how beautiful and elegant and wonderful they are, but they don’t always have to make the right decisions. I think that’s something to celebrate. And it’s not something that’s that easy to come by now, particularly at the moment. I feel like some of that’s backtracked in the industry, generally.”