thunderstorm enjoyer

Mm, I wouldn’t say that he hated it - in fact, I’d say a part of him loved it because it got him out of the de Lioncourt house and away from his father and his brothers - but it wasn’t his choice, no. What Lestat tells Paul in 1.01 at the dinner table is true to book canon - as a little boy, he originally wanted to be a priest, in no small part, because the local priest is the only person who tried to teach him to read and write (the priest teaches him how to spell his name as a little boy, and there’s a prayer he can write too, but he’s otherwise illiterate until he’s turned).

He actually almost gets taken in by the church as a child too, which he tells Paul, but his father goes and gets him and beats him so badly he can’t go back. That’s about control, of course, his father is immensely controlling, but also about the family name - Lestat should be guaranteed a certain rank within the church as an aristocratic child, but that has to be bought and the family’s broke. His father sees it as a humiliation to him that Lestat would never get the appropriate rank, and so denies him a Catholic education as a result.

This is really an aside to your ask, but Lestat’s relationship to religion is actually really important in TVL. He’s kind of the embodiment of that line that goes around “God loves you, but not enough to save you”, and there are three really important moments which basically destroy his relationship with God - the first as a little boy where he becomes absolutely inconsolably hysterical at the site of some of the witch trials, the second when God doesn’t intervene with his father (which the show’s already written in to 1.01) and finally when he begs God to save him as Magnus rapes him, which is ultimately the death knell in his relationship to God.

But after the clergy, Lestat meets a travelling group of actors when he’s about 13 (I think? He’s a young teen in the book) and it’s that moment that theatre basically becomes his new church and it’s all he wants to do. He tries to runaway with them too, but his father and brothers both go and get him, beat him, and bring him back. Again, acting in this period of history was considered barely a step up from sex work, so it was reputational again for the Marquis, but also an act of abuse and control.

The theatre obviously remains a type of church for Lestat though, and I don’t think there’s ever anything he’s wanted to do more than perform, which is part of the tragedy of Magnus finding him because of the theatre, and both Nicki and Claudia dying in one too. It’s a place of immense trauma for him, but he can’t break free of it in the way he could the church, I think in no small part because the theatre did free him for a while, even if it killed him too.