what the hell, people

I talked about this a bit during the hiatus, but to me it really harks back to the fact that in the time period Lestat's from, the line between acting/performing and sex work was virtually non-existent, to the point that the Paris Opéra-Comique was colloquially known in the 1700s as a 'prostitute training ground'. Many (many) performers were doing sex work to survive, either as cherry picked courtesans by wealthy, noble patrons, or in myriad other forms, and that's the context with which a teenaged Lestat first encounters performing.

The Marquis actually even says as much during one of the flashback scenes with Lestat at the dinner table, it's just mostly beneath Lestat's modern narration about Gabrielle, so I didn't even pick up on it the first time around. I've taken the latter out so you can actually see what the Marquis' saying about Lestat's brief foray with an acting troupe:

To Lestat's father, to France, actors aren't respected, and even here, they're sexualised - 'whores and whoremasters', people Lestat can fuck, but not anything he can be - and how that soaks into his sense of self as someone who feels a deep connection to the stage does, I think, impact how he understands and feels about his body as both an instrument of his art and a commodity to sell in order to be able to make art and call himself an artist at all.

And honestly? He's not wrong, even by today's standards - maybe especially by today's standards - sex and art are intrinsically tied, and while Lestat might operate at a level of vampiric and financial power (although I do think the show's decreased Lestat's wealth) where he's able to protect himself on some level, that's not necessarily how these things work. Money, profile and even physical power rarely equates to power in every context, and while yes, Lestat could kill or pay off or mindfuck his way ahead, what's that going to achieve for the career he's desperately trying to build for himself? Not much for a Lestat who is searching for legitimacy as an artist, in my opinion.

He's also a character who's been socialised to understand sex and sex work to be a part of the job of performing, so I do think that will play a role in how Lestat navigates all of these sorts of situations, and I think that being one of the threads in the tapestry of Lestat's hypersexuality is something the show's actively tugging on this season. Gosh, I even think we see that see saw between this scene:

And this one:

I could have hung it up there, too, I guess. But we sounded really good in Detroit, and there were another thousand beautifully unwell to serve in Ohio. And she had come a great distance to comfort me.