Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for The Vampire Lestat Episode 5. We’re closer to the finale of The Vampire Lestat now, so it should come as no surprise that the show is pushing into even more deeply personal territory for its eternally mercurial lead. While Louis (Jacob Anderson) has been spending his time with an eerily convincing Claudia (Delainey Hayles) lookalike named Regina, Lestat (Sam Reid) takes one look at his fledgling’s waitress-turned-paid-companion in this week’s episode, “New York,” and immediately knows that she’s not the same person. Yet in the aftermath of sizing Regina up, Lestat finds himself back in the recording studio where he’s been working on his first album with the band to write what might be his most soul-baring song yet about his biggest failure as a maker. As it happens, the resulting Episode 5 track wasn’t just tricky to get right from a composition standpoint, but also when it came time to perform and shoot the final emotional number.
Both Sam Reid and Daniel Hart Had the Hardest Time With This Episode 5 Song

When Collider had the opportunity to speak with The Vampire Lestat’s cast and creative team before the season premiere, we had to ask Reid and series composer Daniel Hart about which song was most difficult to pull off — and they both had the same answer in “Stained Glass Eyes,” the song that Lestat writes about his biggest memories of Claudia, including the moments leading up to her death in Season 2’s penultimate episode, “I Could Not Prevent It.” According to Hart, the song was rewritten more than once before he and series creator Rolin Jones agreed on its final iteration:
“… it’s the only song of the batch that is in Season 3 where I rewrote it from the ground up three separate times — different music, different lyrics, fully formed demos, fully fleshed out. I turned one in, and Rolin was like, ‘I think that’s not quite right.’ The second version, completely starting over, completely new ideas, completely different music style, different lyrics. I finished it, I listened back to it, and I was like, ‘I think that’s completely not right.’ The third time, I finally found what I was looking for. And then it plays a huge role in Episode 5, which was always the intention. That was a writing assignment that I got from Rolin, was like, ‘We need a song about Claudia.'”

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Reid’s answer was the same, though we did make a point to ask him, specifically, about which song was hardest not from a performance standpoint, but because of the greater emotions at play for the character. Per Reid, episode director Levan Akin suggested shooting the sequence where Lestat writes the song like a music video, but the biggest consideration in his mind was to avoid it veering too far into musical theater territory. “We shot that like we would have shot a scene, and that is kind of trippy, to be singing a song while doing that. So, it was sort of like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to get my mind around doing this and not make it feel like a musical, as well? Like, make it feel justified?'” Reid also told us that he considers the “Stained Glass Eyes” sequence to be “one of the bolder choices of how the show ended up being,” which is certainly saying something, considering everything that has played out across the last four episodes so far. Similarly, Lestat’s band also considers the song a major left turn for their sound, but is ultimately overruled when Lestat decides to scrap everything they’ve been working on and rerecord the album, using “Stained Glass Eyes” as their template. What will this change do for the album, especially in the wake of Armand (Assad Zaman) knocking off the band’s lead guitarist, Larry (Noah Reid)? Looking back on the episode’s game-changing song, though, Reid admits that he can’t really revisit the moment on his end: “I sort of watch that with my eyes closed a little bit.”

New episodes of The Vampire Lestat premiere Sundays on AMC.