#lelio

A noise.

I made some strangled, choked sound as I gasped. Struggling to catch my breath as my eyes shot open.

Nothing but blackness.

Nothingness.

I blindly gaped, blinking, desperate to clear my vision as though that would help and still there was nothing but the darkness.

And a sound.

Nicki?! No… this isn’t Nicki next to me. A man, a form, someone warm and sleeping but it wasn’t him and was I even me?

The pounding of my heart throbbed in my temples as my chest rose and fell more and more rapidly. Twisting my head in every direction, I was still seeking the source of that noise. Of thudding footsteps that grew closer. Something moved in the corner of the darkness, how could I even perceive it?

My rifle!

A shaking hand ran along the side of the bed, that was far too soft and modern for what my brain was telling me it should feel like. No, that’s right, I don’t have that rifle anymore. Why did I feel so heavy? If I could sit up. If I could grab my shoes.

Magnus!

What was supposed to be a scream only fell from my lips as rasped whisper.

All at once a flood of light burst from the side table.

My phone shown with the illumination of some sort of notification. Panting a snatched it from where it’d been resting.

[TX:] Lestat.

Lestat de Lioncourt. The Vampire Lestat. Rockstar Lestat. The Brat Prince. Lelio (not Harlequin). Wolfkiller.

Shall we asses which lines get me the most?

When Rolin [Jones, the showrunner] said Lestat was going to be Arlecchino, I was a bit like, ‘whoa.’” Reid pushes his hands out in front of himself, as if attempting to hold the concept at bay. “I was not happy about it, purely because in order for Lestat to develop as a character, he needs to be Lélio. He needs to be the lover … He needs to be this kind of aspirational, heroic, loving figure when he is mortal.” “If Lestat is onstage, and he isn’t playing Lélio, that doesn't make sense to me. What Rolin and I settled on, for Season 2, was that once Lestat was a vampire (when Armand is seeing him) he had grown resistant to playing Lélio. He’s survived things that have changed his relationship to the stage. Now, he wants to play Arlecchino, to take control of the show in that way. Figuring out what Lestat was actually doing as a vampire playing Harlequin was very different, and actually very fun … I created a version of Arlecchino for Lestat that is much more seductive, and much more dangerous. Like all the great commedia actors, he developed his own version of the archetype, and I made a version of Arlecchino that suited who he thought he was supposed to be, after his transformation.” After continued discussion between Reid and Jones, the “error” of Lestat as Arlecchino became an intentional red flag on Armand’s recollection of events. “The framework of our show is that you are looking at these characters from different points of view all the time. And once I got my head around the idea that Armand was framing him as Harlequin, that kind of made more sense to me.”

During his transformation, Lestat desperately monologues Psalm 118, clinging to the path of religious performance that had been instilled in him as a young man. “That was one of the hardest things for me to do this whole season,” Reid reflects contemplatively. “The language of that Psalm, if you’re a real nerd about it, is not exactly period accurate.” Lestat, illiterate as a mortal, is not reciting a prayer he was taught rote from a physical Bible, but instead, he’s reciting how he had seen it performed from a pulpit, paraphrasing and all.