Do we like Lestat?
A character from Interview with the Vampire (1976)
Our score: 5 out of 10. Dazzling, funny and fiercely loyal to the people he loves. He is also a vain, controlling killer who wrecks lives. We'd go to his concert, but we wouldn't leave him alone with our friends.
Lestat de Lioncourt first appears in Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. There, a fellow vampire, Louis, tells the story of his long, tangled life with him. Lestat is a showman and a hedonist with a sharp tongue, born into the French aristocracy and made immortal. He pulls Louis into his world with charm, cruelty and a very good sense of timing.
His appeal is that he is never boring. He treats immortality as a stage and himself as the lead. He is vain, impulsive and self-dramatizing, but also witty, passionate and strangely honest about what he is. His affection is real, but it comes with possessiveness. He dislikes being told no, and the people closest to him pay for that.
That mix is why he lands in the middle of the scale. He is a villain in someone else's telling and an antihero in his own. He is the kind of company you would love for one night. The cost of staying longer is high. We rate him a 5: thrilling, loyal in his way, and a menace to everyone near him.
Later books and adaptations let Lestat tell his own story. He sets the record straight about the portrait Louis painted, and he reinvents himself as an immortal rock star. His fame draws ancient forces and a whole new vampire world into his orbit. That makes him a more sympathetic lead, but it doesn't clean up his record.