On Lestat in the AMV series

Watched/read some cast interviews. Found it touching that Sam Reid believes evidently in Lestat's redemptive potential while being frankly disappointed in his boi's lack of emotional growth this season lol. Which also made me realize the show was not merely papering over the discrepancies between IWTV Lestat and thereafter series Lestat with sheer force of performance plus theory of ~*~*~unreliable narration~*~*~ but had actually rejigged Lestat's character arc entirely? Intentionally?

This was already too long / just me thinking aloud but I feel like I didn’t get to what I thought was interesting about it? What I thought was interesting is that Lestat is all of 30 when he meets Louis in the book, and really 21 at best in emotional age lol. He gets into a 60-something year long starter marriage in which Louis angsts about his lost humanity every night, as opposed to spending a century with Gabrielle or Marius or by himself coming to the conclusion that humans aren’t worth it except in the most superficial sense. In the book it’s Lestat’s idea to make Claudia, because he can. In the show he knows it’s a bad idea and only does it because Louis asks; while he might care for Claudia to some extent, it’s hard to believe he loves her the way he did in the book, despite or even because this Claudia is significantly more humanized. There’s a lot of he-said-he-said in the books regarding how much book Lestat is a gremlin vis a vis all that monstrous longtermist capital, but the series presents both Lestat and Louis as practiced and canny with money. And so on. Book Lestat is much more of a hot mess; series Lestat has become a worse and meaner person who truly deserves to die a couple of times over so he can learn and change. He’s got more of a way to go, but it’s been pruned into a clearer arc.