‘The Vampire Lestat’ Costume Designer on Rockstar Wardrobe and Easter Eggs

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “New York,” the fifth episode of “The Vampire Lestat,” now streaming on AMC+.

When costume designer Lex Wood started planning the wardrobe for “The Vampire Lestat” — or Season 3 of “Interview with the Vampire” — she had one word in mind: color. And a lot of them, reflecting the mania of Season 3’s narrator and the newly formed rock star version of Lestat de Lioncourt, played by Sam Reid.

Wood, who joined the costume department of the Anne Rice adaptation at the end of Season 2, straying from the red and black typically associated with vampires, saw the shift in narrator as an opportunity to expand the aesthetic of the AMC+ show.

“Lestat is a musician,” says Wood Variety. “Everything is done through the lens of the music, so I spent a lot of time researching and listening to music from artists who felt like they fit into our vibe, some of which Daniel Hart directly referenced when he was composing.”

Although Wood and Reid were clear that they did not want to model Lestat after any particular rock star, giving him the space to “be as individual as possible”, Iggy Pop, David Bowie for his “interchangeable and chameleon efforts” and Freddie Mercury were all inspirations when Wood began designing pieces for Lestat and his idiosyncratic bandmates.

“A lot of the actual design we were doing as we went along,” Wood explains. “We had some pieces that I had designed before we started, but a lot of them we do on the hoof because we’re responding to the script.”

Wood, who says about 75% of the show’s costumes were handmade, was also deliberate in his choice of fabric. Take for example Lestat and his mother Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle); “They were both made in the 18th century, and I wanted to incorporate as much silk into them as possible to continue to give those little puffs of physical thread that connected them back to their past. There are also a few Easter eggs when it comes to using those fabrics,” Wood hints, hoping the show’s fans will understand as the season progresses.

Much of the rest of the clothing drawn was archival pieces, selected to look a little unique. When it came to dressing vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), Lestat’s other half and the show’s previous narrator, things became somewhat difficult to source.

“Jacob and I had talked a lot about Louis’ transitional post Armand (Assad Zaman) as we were wrapping up Season 2, and we wanted his costume to match that,” Wood explains, adding that “he is no longer held back by Armand, and a physical manifestation of that is his use of color and pattern.”

“He’s a very difficult character to get to because, in theory, he’s incredibly wealthy,” she adds. “He’s a billionaire and unfortunately we do everything within a television budget, so we couldn’t always find the most expensive version of everything, but that was kind of the goal: to have the look and feel of a billionaire.”

With season 3 set in the aftermath of Louis discovering that his lover Armand — and not Lestat as he initially thought — was responsible for the death of his adopted daughter Claudia (Delainey Hayles), Louis is “deluding himself, thinking he’s fixed,” according to Wood.

“We wanted to layer him so we can show that little bit of concealment,” says Wood, whose team sourced and tailored fabric for his outfits, including his pants and vests. “How does he try to show that he is integrated into society? He no longer hides in an apartment in Dubai; he walks around and is successful. How does he try to fit into this world?”

Louis’s clothing choices are also partly due to his “attempt to make himself look normal in front of Regina.”

Regina – a dead ringer for Claudia, and also played by Hayles – takes over the role of the deceased vampire for a fee, but meets Louis for the first time while she is a waitress in a New York restaurant.

Regina’s waitress uniform is a nod to the yellow dress Claudia died in, the similar hue being a conscious emotional choice that also helps her stand out when she is first introduced through the window of the restaurant.

“Regina is a bit of an enigma, so we wanted her to feel like any girl you know; you wouldn’t look twice at her walking down the street, and that’s exactly the idea,” says Wood. As Regina begins to properly impersonate Claudia, her wardrobe reflects that decision.

“Regina pretends to be someone she read about in a book, but she didn’t see Claudia’s vision the way we saw it, so we wanted to have some very clear nods to some of the parts that would have been described by Louis or in the book,” says Wood. “When they go out to dinner, she wears yellow on purpose, but she doesn’t get the style of the dress just right. She wouldn’t have read that in the description.”

Not much is known about who Regina really is, and Wood decided to play it safe and steady with her jewelry. Louis’ jewelry also remains consistent, with some additions for the new season.

“We wanted Louis to have a little bit of silver, a little bit of bling, because we thought that was a choice he would make. He wears a special bracelet with notches on it, as if he’s counting the murders he committed for the Talamasca while he was in their employ,” says Wood.

Lestat, on the other hand, uses his jewelry to “play with people”: “Maybe that ring means something, and he’s trying to turn Louis on by wearing it. ‘I’m wearing someone else’s wedding ring, not yours,’ kind of vibe.”

“We have different colored stones that have different meanings depending on what’s going on with Lestat,” Wood adds. “It’s the exploration of trying to figure out who he is at that particular moment, and so we wanted that element of changeability in everything, while everyone else is a little more constant around him.”

Different silhouettes throughout the season reflected Lestat’s many moods, some emulating his 18th-century heritage, some incorporating corsets to add an element of playfulness.

“We wanted to accentuate features at different points, such as a softer shoulder when we lean in with the emotion of him feeling something, or giving him a stronger shoulder to let him see more other points,” says Wood.

Part of Lestat’s character this season is the incestuous journey he takes with his mother. Gabriella makes her first on-screen appearance in the show and is described as appearing more androgynous in Anne Rice’s novels.

“Our writers will exclude or include some things in our script, so we wanted to use androgyny in her style and use quite a few 18th-century tailoring techniques to tailor her jackets,” says Wood, who adds that the audience “sees Gabriella through Lestat’s eyes.” “Exploring the masculine and feminine made important choices about the type of fabrics we used, or how soft some of her pieces were.”

“Everyone deceives someone in some way,” says Wood, but when it comes to lies and secrets on the show, Armand is usually the clear trailblazer.

“He’s a real gremlin when we first see him, and so his style develops a little bit over the course of the series,” says Wood, who promised Zaman they would work up to Armand’s famous black coat by the end of the season. Armand shifts to “softer layers, earth tones, more defined shapes, and more tailoring,” as he leaves behind decades of lying to Louis and draws closer to his very first rookie journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), responsible for writing and publishing the novel that turned Louis and Lestat’s lives upside down.

Molloy, despite recently being turned into a vampire, seems to be the most emotionally balanced on the show.

“We didn’t want to move too far away from where we left him at the end of Season 2,” says Wood. “He’s a bit bolder and a bit more laissez-faire. He also hasn’t really made money in the same way as everyone else. It wasn’t that long ago his book came out that he decided to pick up a bag and go with Lestat on his tour bus. We wanted to give him the impression of a limited wardrobe, because he doesn’t really care, but he didn’t have as much room to pack stuff anyway.”

Don’t think the on-the-road nature of the season limits all the characters: “We imagine that behind the tour bus is an extra bus that takes Lestat’s entire wardrobe with it.”