‘The Vampire Lestat’ Boss Explains Their Take on Gabriella

Warning: The Vampire Lestat spoilers ahead! This article contains discussion of sexual assault and incest.

Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) has been a troubling force in The Vampire Lestat, a.k.a. Interview With the Vampire Season 3. The Italian noblewoman turned soulless vampire has an incestuous relationship with her son, Lestat (Sam Reid), who turned her into a vampire in 1700s France. As seen in Episode 3 (streaming now on AMC+), she gets a perverse thrill out of testing the boundaries of her and Lestat’s pact to end their sexual relationship, which sends Lestat into emotional distress, especially when one of these tests was intercut with discussion about his nonconsensual vampiric transformation.

Gabriella’s characterization is much more feminine-presenting. Anne Rice‘s Vampire Lestat novel supports the idea that Gabrielle (renamed Gabriella for the AMC series) is transmasculine or nonbinary. As of Episode 3, the TV adaptation has not depicted any gender exploration for this character. But The Vampire Lestat writer and executive producer Hannah Moscovitch hinted to us that Gabriella’s gender identity may be touched upon this season, saying that “there’s an absolute liberation when she’s a vampire. That full liberation out of being a mother or a woman or anything leads to what it leads to.”

Gabriella has been mentioned since Season 1 Episode 1, when Lestat told the de Pointe du Lacs about his family. And as showrunner Rolin Jones told us in Season 2, Gabriella was present in the flashback scene with Nicki (Joseph Potter) at the Théâtres des Vampires in Season 2 Episode 3, but Armand (Assad Zaman) intentionally excluded her from his retelling of that memory to Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). That scene was remade in Season 3 Episode 3, this time including Gabriella and excluding some of the sexier details with Lestat that Armand told Daniel.

While Gabriella is finally onscreen in Season 3, it’s Lestat’s point of view of his mother and first fledgling. But just like with Louis’ (Jacob Anderson) perspective of Lestat in the first two seasons, there is still truth to the characters Lestat describes, even if his perspective is not necessarily how the character sees themselves. Moscovitch explains what she believes is the key essence of their Gabriella.

“I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to be an Italian girl at 15 and to be moved from your hometown and married to a grinning villain, a total piece of s**t, what it would be like to be married off and have that be your life, have your life be a cage,” she says. “And then, what would happen if a ton of your children died in stillbirth or died when they were little, and then what it would be like to have your two older sons be carbon copies of their dad, like he just 3D printed himself using your uterus. Then I thought about what it would be like if one child, one golden child was just like you, and where that would go.”

Moscovitch hints that there’s more to be explored with Gabriella moving forward.

Sophie Giraud / AMC

“I think we arrive back at the place Anne Rice wanted us to, I hope, I hope,” she says. “But I think that’s where we were. That’s all I’m thinking about this season: What is it like to become a vampire when you’ve lived in a cage and you’ve lived a life that’s only deferred dreams and spoiled hopes?”

Gabriella and Lestat’s incestuous relationship “came from a really specific vision in conjunction with Anne Rice and what she has on the page,” Moscovitch says. “We had a very specific idea about what that incest was, where it came from. It has a bunch of different elements in it.”

“Gabriella is living in a cage because she’s living in a particular era as a woman, and she’s locked into this horrible marriage and being forced to have all these babies who die or are just like their dad, on one hand,” Moscovitch explains. “And then the only kid that is like her, or that she has anything in common with, is Lestat, of course, so there’s a natural pull between them. And then, of course, for her, there’s an absolute liberation when she’s a vampire. That full liberation out of being a mother or a woman or anything leads to what it leads to.”

While the relationship is never explicitly sexual, Rice’s novel does depict an incestuous dynamic between Lestat and his mother. It’s rooted in Gabrielle’s desire to live vicariously through her son, the man she could never be. She calls him her “phallus” and describes a sexual fantasy to him in detail. That fantasy is depicted almost word-for-word in The Vampire Lestat Episode 2, when Gabriella is treating Lestat’s wounds after he killed a pack of wolves.

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Book Lestat says that their mother-son dynamic was erased when their dynamic shifted to maker and fledgling, and show Lestat also argues that “it’s different for vampires,” although Reid told TV Insider, “I don’t think he really believes that. It’s kind of weird. It’s impossible.” That line is more how Lestat copes with this difficult dynamic that’s more traumatizing than he can currently admit.

After they’re both vampires, book Gabrielle starts cutting her long hair short. In one of the book’s most compelling scenes about gender identity, Gabrielle cries in horror when she realizes that her womanly appearance at the time of her turning is how she’ll look for all eternity; her hair will grow back every single day after she cuts it. She pulls her hair back moving forward and dresses in men’s clothes. Ehle told TV Insider that Gabriella cuts her hair into the blunt bob every night when she wakes up, but we just don’t see it happen onscreen.

For both the book and show versions of Gabrielle/Gabriella, vampirism gave her the power to live completely outside of social norms. In the show, Gabriella is determined to make more vampires through the Great Conversion, an unnatural surge in the vampire population that started before Daniel and Louis’ memoir was published.

The Great Conversion increased after the book outed vampires to humans, who cared about that for about five minutes before chalking it up to fiction and moving on with their lives. But how will Lestat using the cloud gift during his concert in Episode 3 impact things?

The Vampire Lestat, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+

If you or someone you know is the victim of sexual assault, contact the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network‘s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). If you or a loved one is in immediate danger, call 911.