Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 4 of The Vampire Lestat.
Better call B2K, because the vampire Armand just got served. The Vampire Lestat‘s fourth episode, “The Devil’s Road,” features the titular vampire rock god (played by Sam Reid) essentially pantsing his former flame (Assad Zaman) in public through the power of song. As Armand looks on, a braided Lestat and his band perform the mocking punk-pop tune “Big Boss,” which features such lyrical smackdowns as, “Are you mad or do you always look that way?” and “I know life is cruel/But you should get your face did/You gotta lot of rules for a theater kid.”
Onscreen, Armand stoically endures his musical humiliation before exiting the concert, his vampire tail between his legs. And when Gold Derby asks Zaman how his alter ego might choose to serve Lestat if he’d been given the floor, the actor says that the prospects of an 8 Mile or Hamilton-style rap battle would have been nil.
“Armand’s response would have been really bad,” Zaman says, laughing. “He would probably have done a weird spoken word performance about how all of this is wrong and forbidden, and Lestat needs to stop. It would have had no music behind it, or maybe just a simple drum beat just sort of tapping away. Something like that — just very stripped down and monotone.
“Imagine if Lestat had a dance solo like in You Got Served,” the actor adds, subjecting Armand to further humiliation. “He’d do a backflip on his way to me, or do a little waltz around me. That would have been fantastic.”
You could maybe accuse Zaman of selling Armand’s musical gifts short, but then again, nobody can match Lestat when it comes to rocking out with his… um, muscles out. As those lucky fans who saw Reid perform live at the show’s Beacon Theatre premiere know, the star never gives anything less than full throttle Lestat when performing composer Daniel Hart’s songs. The sheer energy radiating off the stage in Episode 4 really did stop Zaman in his tracks.
“That was one of my first days on set, and they’d already been filming for about a month,” he remembers. “Seeing Sam and the band perform that whole song was brilliant; he was so completely free in himself and I think even Armand couldn’t help but enjoy Lestat’s performance a little bit — even though he knows that he needs to stop him.”
What Armand is specifically looking to prevent is the Great Conversion — the tipping point when Earth’s bloodsucker population explodes beyond the human population. It’s a looming threat that was previously teased in the since-canceled Immortal Universe spin-off Talamasca: The Secret Order, but is rushing ever closer thanks to Lestat putting vampire secrets on front street through his music.
Armand’s mission makes for some unlikely bedfellows, like his sire Daniel (Eric Bogosian), who has a bone to pick with his old man. In fact, he’s on the receiving end of another serving when he finds Daniel at a bowling alley and offers a contrite statement of apology that sounds a lot like a textbook example of Alcoholics Anonymous amends-making. Zaman reveals that he wrote an early version of that apology letter, but showrunner Rolin Jones ended up giving it a final polish.
“In the script, Armand’s letter had big chunks missing to make room for Daniel’s interjections, so I wrote things to go in the missing bits,” the actor recalls. “My version was way more sincere and self-deprecating, and way more confessional. I fully laid my heart out to Daniel, and it got so soppy!
“I e-mailed that to Rolin, and he wrote back saying, ‘This is great, but this is what he’s really saying,'” Zaman continues. “He didn’t Armand to fully bare his soul to Daniel in that moment, because that was going to happen at the end of the episode and he wanted to hold off until then, which made complete sense.”
Considering the show’s revamped title, Zaman was very aware that he’d be coming into the third year playing Lestat’s version of Armand as opposed to the one that his other ex-lover Louis (Jacob Anderson) described in the previous two Interview With a Vampire seasons. And “soppy” is one of the adjectives that Lestat would certainly use to describe his frenemy. “Lestat sees Armand as a bit pathetic, a bit try-hard, and a bit needy,” the actor notes, referencing the tone of the “Big Boss” tune. “Those were my foundations, and I definitely feel Lestat’s influence on Armand in the scenes set in the past.
“But the Armand we meet in the present day is a bit more objective and authentic,” he adds. “Lestat will embellish and heighten peoples’ personalities, but he also has an ability to see people for who they really are, which is different than how Louie recounted his journey with these characters. But I also don’t think we’re going to see massive changes in his personality as the show moves forward. He’s always going to be that gremlin.”
Just like one of those other gremlins, Armand doesn’t appear to like getting wet. Before getting served by Lestat in concert, he pays a visit to the band’s tour bus and is forced to watch the singer take a very long, very bloody shower. “That was a full-on blood shower,” Zaman says, calling the effect a “bit of a technical nightmare.”
“They had this contraption that would start the blood, and then another that would change it to clear water,” he explains. “We also had to time it with the dialogue, so Sam didn’t have to dry himself off from the blood and water. It was a jigsaw puzzle, and while we were doing it, neither of us were sure whether it was really working. We kept saying, ‘Is this going to cut together?’ But when we saw the episode, it worked so well. And it’s such a catty sequence.”
