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New The Vampire Lestat Trailer Has Fans Freaking Over Controversial Relationship (But It’s Book Canon)
This summer is going to be huge for Anne Rice fans. Almost two years after the Season 2 finale of Interview With the Vampire, Lestat (Sam Reid) will finally get to have his say with the arrival of the series’ third season — retitled The Vampire Lestat. The series debuts on June 7th and will continue the story, following Lestat who is now a rock star embarking on a multi-city tour even as he’s haunted by the “muses” of his past. AMC released a new trailer for the upcoming season on Wednesday and gave fans their best look yet at the Brat Prince’s next chapter — but it’s a trailer that has fans freaking out just a bit as well.
The new trailer, which you can check out below, features sees Rock Star Lestat arrive in all his gory glory while also giving us a glimpse at elements of his past, including his mother Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle.) While some of the elements of his past are mere ghosts and echoes, Gabriella actually has a place in the present — and the trailer suggests a highly intimate relationship between mother and son. With the series set to adapt the second book in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, also titled The Vampire Lestat, many fans were already expecting an emotionally charged relationship between the two, but now with it seemingly clear how the series is going to adapt things, fans are freaking out.
Lestat and Gabriella Have a Controversial Bond (But It Has Ties to the Book)
To call Lestat’s relationship with his mother complicated would be vastly underselling it. Previously released footage from the series showed Gabriella touching Lestat on his thigh in a way that can only be described as inappropriate, which already suggested a far more intimate relationship but the new trailer shows the two about to passionately kiss. While there is obviously further context missing from the moment (this is just a trailer after all) it certainly seems like the AMC series is going to take the relationship between mother and son to an incestuous level. It’s something that fans online have had some strong reactions to, though not necessarily negative ones.
“Oh my god, they are keeping Lestat x Gabrielle,” one Threads user noted in a spoiler-protected post with one commenter replying, “great now I gotta explain the de Lioncest to my wife.”
The key word in that reaction is “keeping”. As fans of Rice’s novel know, there was always heavy incestuous subtext in Lestat and Gabrielle’s (which is the name she uses in the book) relationship. In the novel, Gabrielle’s mortal life was a terrible one. Married as a young woman to a country lord in France, Gabrielle was brought from Italy largely for her dowry as the lord was broke. He was also a cruel man and Gabrielle hated him and where they lived and while she gave birth to several children, only three survived to adulthood. Her two eldest sons were much like their father, but the youngest, Lestat, was a gentler soul more like herself and she had particular affection for him. When Lestat was a young man and Gabrielle was dying from consumption, she gave him the last of her jewels to sell and told him to use the money to run away to pursue acting in Paris. When she visited him one final time in the City of Light, Lestat was already a vampire and Lestat ended up turning her. It was a change that complicated their relationship as she was now his mother and his child and he her child and her father.
That change also prompted a different sort of intimacy between them. Gabrielle almost immediately started dressing and behaving in a more masculine fashion and the book is clear that their relationship changes to something that could be termed incestuous. But in the books, vampires do not have sex. For vampires in Rice’s lore, blood is everything. It replaces drugs, food, and particularly sex as an expression of pleasure so while there’s uncomfortable intimacy between Gabrielle and Lestat in the books, it’s not actually sex or physical intimacy. The trailer, by showing the pair actually kissing, could be indicating that what is suggested in the book will become manifest in the series. AMC’s adaptation has already established that the vampires do have physical urges so if they show is “keeping” the relationship between Gabrielle and Lestat from the books, there’s a strong chance they will have a physical relationship as well.
How The Vampire Lestat Adapts Gabriella Will Be Critical
Outside of the implied incest between Gabriella and Lestat in the trailer, fans are also very curious to see how the series will adapt her gender expression. While Rice never explicitly made Gabrielle a transman in her novels, fans of Rice’s work have long seen the character as being extremely trans-coded. In The Vampire Lestat novel, she’s always miserable having to dress and behave as a woman and when she is turned into a vampire, she promptly begins dressing as and passing for a man. There is a particularly emotional scene in the book where Gabrielle cuts off her hair to be more masculine only to be horrified to find it having grown back long the next night. She’s so upset that Lestat promises to cut her hair for her nightly.
For fans, preserving this aspect of the character has been something they’ve hoped to see, but the new trailer also seems to present Gabriella in the modern day as dressing in a more feminine style. It’s not overly frilly or “femme”, but she does have medium length hair and appears to be dressed as a woman. It will be very interesting to see how the series handles Gabriella — but many are hoping the series will continue its groundbreaking exploration of the queer themes in Rice’s work with Gabriella as well.
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