Sam Reid says The Vampire Lestat finale brings Nicki’s pain home
The actor told Mashable the season finale ties Lestat’s childhood witch-burning trauma to Nicolas de Lenfent’s final moments.
By Poppy Nakagawa · Culture Writer
3 min read
The Vampire Lestat saved one of Lestat de Lioncourt’s oldest wounds for the season finale, and Sam Reid says the payoff reaches all the way back to Nicolas de Lenfent’s brutal end.
In the finale, titled “The Failures,” the AMC series returns to a childhood memory Lestat had mentioned earlier in the season: his mother, Gabriella, taking him to watch neighbors burn alleged witches alive. The sequence lands at the long table in front of the Failure Finders, where Lestat stops skirting around what the execution did to him.
Reid, who plays Lestat, discussed the scene in a post-finale interview with Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko. He said the moment was central to conversations with showrunner Rolin Jones about tracing Lestat’s season-long crisis back to childhood.
A childhood horror returns
In episode 7, the long-table version of Gabriella, played by Jennifer Ehle, argues that she brought young Lestat to the burning so he would see the cruelty and ignorance of the people around him. In her telling, the lesson was meant to push him away from that place and toward something larger.
Reid told Mashable that Lestat initially cannot face what the event did to him, so he shifts that terror onto Nicki in episode 3. That earlier flashback showed vampire Nicki, played by Joseph Potter, losing his grip, cutting off his own hand and wanting death.
At that point in the season, Lestat told Daniel Molloy, played by Eric Bogosian, that Armand, played by Assad Zaman, killed Nicki with fire. Nicki’s death was marked by a long, low “O” sound. In the finale, Lestat repeats that same sound while remembering the women being burned.
The Nicki connection
Reid told Mashable that Nicki had seen “that in death there was a nothingness,” a revelation he described as especially complex for an immortal. He said Lestat then processes the same terror through his own childhood memory of watching the women die.
The actor also framed the scene as a turning point in Lestat’s understanding of Gabriella. Reid said Lestat recognizes that Gabriella “has abused him” and “has assaulted him throughout his whole life,” while also seeing that her push for him to leave came from trauma.
According to Reid, Gabriella’s message was, in effect, to get out and become more than the people around him. The damage, he said, is that Lestat’s life has been shaped by running from the fear that he might become nothing and that he might be dead.
Reid said there is still much unresolved between Lestat and Gabriella, but the creative team knew the show would come back to the “O” sound as an expression of existential crisis.
He also pointed to a shift from Anne Rice’s novel The Vampire Lestat. Reid said the book contains a notable chapter between Lestat and Nicki, while Jones and the writers looked at whether Lestat, in the novel, might be deflecting. That approach helped make the witch-burning memory a defining force in the show’s version of Lestat.
The Vampire Lestat is streaming on AMC and AMC+.
This story draws on original reporting from Mashable.