Goddamnit do you know what I need now? Feanor/Lestat. I feel like they’d get along like a house on fire (and probably set many real houses on fire)
Imagine Lestat being like “so….you’re immortal and still get to walk around in sunlight and eat things and have sex and damn YOU JUST GET TO FUCKING HAVE EVERYTHING DON’T YOU’
But the two of them being all glam rock and going out to bars and fetish clubs until 5am and just Living Life
Lestat trying elf blood and being all like SHIIIT
The two of them talking about what they were doing at various periods through history. “How did you survive the French Revolution you fucking aristocrat??” “Meh, hid in a theatre.” “Sweet.”
“I burnt my son.” “Yeah I tried to burn my daughter and husband, you’re fine.”
Feanor holding Lestat up to an electron microscope because he would
Overall just GIVE ME THESE TWO I DIDN’T KNOW I NEEDED THIS BUT I DO. Brat Prince and Spirit of Fire. It’s a recipe for disaster and epicness and everything in between. I NEEDS IT
im always a slut for silm and vc, 28/8
!!!!!!
YOU HAVE BLESSED ME WITH ART OF THIS I LOVE YOU FOREVER
Hmmm… I haven’t seen him act in anything so idk how he is as an actor, I watched the trailer for one of his upcoming movies, Lean on Pete, he plays a 15 yr old in that movie.
^These pics are from 2017, so they’re pretty recent. I think Charlie has an unconventional look, very unique features, with the wide nose, full lips, a prominent forehead and a soft jawline. Re: the mouth, specifically, Lestat describes his mouth as “well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look very mean, or extremely generous, my mouth.” Maybe Charlie’s would match that description?
The nose doesn’t match as Lestat has “a fairly short narrow nose”. Now, Tom Cruise wasn’t the right height and he did an amazing job, so sometimes talent outweighs physical deficiencies. But in Tom’s case, they could give him heels, an easier thing to adjust. Tom ALSO had a prominent nose, definitely not short or narrow. And it didn’t stop him from doing an acting job that earned him the glowing praise from Anne Rice herself, who had been very against his casting.
I don’t know if you find Charlie attractive physically, Anon, but there is a recent trend in casting unconventionally attractive actors. While I think the title is a little unnecessarily click-baity, in the article “MILLENNIAL’S GUIDE TO FILM: THE AGE OF THE UGLY ACTOR” Marina B. writes:
Sometimes there aren’t really words to explain why we find someone intriguing, they just have that je ne sais quoi that pretty boy actors can’t achieve. I feel like Adam Driver has that something special, and I’m not alone. Scorsese can back me up on this one. Scorsese can be quoted giving some serious admiration for Driver that he discovered when casting for Silence:
“I love the way he moves, his sense of himself on camera… he also has that remarkable baritone voice. He’s talented, of course, and very, very brave.” -Martin Scorsese
We also have growing antagonists. Caleb Landry Jones is for sure the go-to gross, delinquent star in film lately. He played the crazy brother in both Get Out and American Made. He goes absolutely ape shit with the roles he’s given; there is no amount of crazy that he isn’t willing to take on for a character.
^All that aside, I think Charlie Plummer looks a little too young to play Lestat yet, in both his face and his body. Lestat was a hunter in life, and had to have some muscle for that. We could get a trainer for our eventual actor for Lestat, tho!
Anon, while I always had Lestat in mind as being a conventionally attractive “pretty boy,” you might be onto something. A screen test would be the real determining factor 😉
I think there are many ways to make a character’s death really sad, and bc we can all have different feelings about a given character, any individual reader will be very sad about the death, when another reader might be totally indifferent (or even glad!). I’ve only written fanfic myself, and I know what makes me sad when I read/write character death, that’s about as informed as I am on the topic, DISCLAIMER: I’m not a professional writer and this is not professional advice.
💀 Some things that come to mind re: making a character’s death really sad: 💀
How they die,
How preventable their death was,
How other characters feel their loss and/or the loss of their potential,
And how much that character meant to the reader/audience, did they like the character?
I don’t know what specifically you’re doing in the Memnoch timeline… I won’t use any examples of deaths from that book in case of spoilers (Idk sometimes I’m more respectful about spoiling ppl than other times *shrugs*)
In IWTV, it was a very sad death when Claudia died. It’s portrayed differently in the book(s) and the movie, but I’m just going to address it re: the points above generally and drawing from both.
1. She died by sunlight exposure and it seemed extremely painful.
Louis would not have seen it, so he can’t describe the moment of her death in the book, but it’s shown in the movie. Leading up to the death, the tension builds and builds, all these moments where Louis, Claudia and Madeleine are hoping for Armand (or some other deux ex machina) to swoop in and save them all. It doesn’t happen. Probably one of the last shreds of hope they had was when the troupe pull Louis and Claudia apart, from that point on, he can no longer protect her ;A;
As it was so painfully underscored in Claudia’s Story, the last name Claudia hears Louis call for is “Armand,” bc calling her name won’t do them any good. But to her, it feels like a final betrayal, that he’s calling for Armand bc he cares more about him ;A;
Claudia and Madeleine get locked in the well, and when Claudia sees the sunlight approaching, she’s already starting to cry, trying to wake Madeleine to try to figure out a way out… there is none and then they can only brace themselves bc there IS NO ESCAPE ;A;!! The acceptance of their own deaths is part of the tragedy.
It’s a pretty universally nightmarish situation, even though sunlight is not fatal for ppl (most, anyway), but we can all relate to the experience. It’s like being pushed onto subway tracks and not being able to escape in time ;A;
2. Her death was a failure in diplomacy, basically. The Theatre des Vampires, led by Santiago, held a kangaroo court (although they may have felt that they were within their rights) in which they found Claudia guilty of attempted murder of her maker, and decided to punish her with the death penalty.
Louis tried to protect her from it as best he could, he tried to make a deal to save her life, but failed. In the book:
“ `Listen to me, Lestat,’ I began now. `You let her go, you free her… and I will… I’ll return to you,’ I said, the words sounding hollow, metallic.
3. It kills a part of Louis when Claudia dies. His immediate reaction is extremely sad (not even factoring in the revenge he takes after).
I have a more thorough commentary on this scene here. It’s in this moment that Louis has lost the most precious person, the one who’s told him what to do, someone he could worship and follow, someone who metered out his doses of happiness with her approval. In the movie, he calls her “my child,” Armand tries to correct him: “Your lover,” and Louis compromises with “My beloved.”
In the book, the next night, Louis finds Lestat clutching Claudia’s bloody dress and sobbing over her death, too. Even though he was the very person who testified against her! Even he could not prevent their “justice.”
“And then I saw the thing in [Lestat’s] hands. I knew what it was. And in an instant I’d ripped it from him and was staring at it, at the fragile silken thing that it was – Claudia’s. His hand rose to his lips, his face turned away. And the soft, subdued sobs broke from him as he sat back while I stared at him, while I stared at the dress. My fingers moved slowly over the tears in it, the stains of blood; my hands closing, trembling as I crushed it against my chest.
Louis was expecting Claudia to go on and live with Madeleine, that he would still be in touch with her and see her occasionally. So that potential continued relationship was destroyed, too ;A;
4. What did Claudia mean to the audience/reader…
I know I sympathized with her and very much enjoyed her overall, and I like to think that other readers/viewers agreed, and don’t totally blame her for her actions against Lestat… after all, she was a victim herself. Lestat doesn’t blame her when he speaks of her in canon. We saw the love they both had for her ❤
Is that enough to convince the readers/audience to care enough for her that her death is sad for them? All those factors help!
This is a tough question for many reasons. It’s hard to know what speaks to you about Vampire Fiction, it may be something different than what speaks to me. I think you should watch the movie again and choose a scene that you love!
As far as the “how that fiction portraits male and/or female characteristics,” I’m not sure what your professor is specifically looking for in that regard. Many of the VC vampires do not necessarily conform to gender stereotypes in the way that they act or present themselves. In the real world, gender presentation can vary widely historically and geographically.*
One example that comes to mind, for me, is Lestat’s turning of Claudia.
Lestat says in the book: “I am like a mother… I want a child!”Are men not equally capable of having that desire? Is it a female characteristic specifically? I don’t know the answer. But this is an example of a scene in which using the book would be better than the movie, because this line was not in the movie.
BTW, this line comes at the end of the often-quoted “Evil is a point of view” monologue, where Lestat talks about the vampires being like God. God creates life, and Lestat wants to do so, too. Is God necessarily female in this regard? I don’t know that either.
In the movie, Louis only tries to stop Lestat in one small, feeble attempt, by catching his hand before it starts, and Lestat places some of the blame on Louis by asking him, “Do you want her to die, then?” Movie!Louis seems to accept some of the blame by allowing Lestat to proceed in ‘giving Claudia another life,’ and we see Louis watch like a nervous father might watch his wife giving birth, with equal parts wonder and horror at the obvious pain involved.
In the movie, his wife had died in childbirth, was he present for that?
Does that then give Louis the male characteristics? This scene happened in a slightly different (but significantly so) way in the book, which I’m not going into since this is already a longish post.
Another example is when Louis carries Yvette out of the plantation house.
^In this scene, it’s evocative of the traditional image of a man carrying his wife across the threshold, away from her friends and/or family, into the home they will share together. Louis is doing it in reverse. He’s carrying her out of the house, bc he has killed her, and is now returning her to her friends and/or family. Later in the movie, Santiago tries to convince a mortal woman to become Death’s Bride. Yvette was one, for sure.
So I would say that Louis has the traditionally male characteristics here.
There is so much more to both of these scenes, in my opinion, but I think I’ll stop here bc I don’t know if you are also supposed to do analysis and I wouldn’t want to do your analysis for you! I hope that’s okay with you, and I hope this answer helped inspire you to choose a scene that speaks to you.
Back during the time when it was popular to bash Twilight for both legitimate reasons (Edward being borderline abusive to Bella, the whole child grooming plot point in Breaking Dawn, etc.) and not (REAL VAMPIRES DON’T SPARKLE THATS GAY), I saw this meme on Facebook where it was Louis and Lestat from Interview With The Vampire commenting on Edward’s sparkling and making fun of him for being gay. Like… Buddy My Guy. My Fair Dude. My Dear Sweet Homophobic Idiot. Not only are the Vampires in IWTV super duper gay, you’re lying to yourself if you think Lestat wouldn’t slam dunk his entire body into a tub of glitter on any given occasion. You Fool. You Imbecile.
Louis: Does he ask our pity? He can walk in the sunlight, whereas we, foul creatures of darkness as we are, are forever barred from God’s kindly li –
Lestat, upending a pound of iridescent craft glitter on his head: SHUT UP LOUIS
Everyone on this post is gonna be sued by Anne Rice
Okay, but this is missing out on the glorious tags of the OP: #what kind of SAVAGE AND AN IDIOT would ever imagine Lestat#a man who crawled out of the swamps of new orleans because his ex wrote a book and was /getting more attention than him/#and then proceeded to become a GLAM ROCK DIVA and Slut For Fame™️#just so people wouldn’t forget who was Doing Better after the breakup#wouldn’t just absolutely snort a tub of glitter like so much expensive cocaine#lestat de lioncourt – ultimate nightmare toreador#cowards#have you met him even once
I-want-my-IWTV 