Warning: This post contains mild spoilers for the first episode of The Vampire Lestat
After much-deserved fanfare, AMC’s The Vampire Lestat has finally premiered, and the season’s first episode brings us inside a night where Lestat is performing for a small-yet-fervent crowd.
It’s also where we’re first introduced to Jarda Klapek, a construction worker from the Czech Republic who became Lestat’s human body double/alibi while the real Lestat went off on blood-draining benders.
Reid also played Jarda, a goofy goon who Lestat describes in the first episode as “Neanderthal me.” In a press conference hosted by the Television Critics Association, I asked Reid how he made Jarda so distinct from Lestat.
“It was mostly physical, because we had a very short period of time to change him around [from Lestat],” he said. Those changes involved a monobrow and using a set of test teeth originally created for Lestat in season one. “[We] filed the fangs off, and then they were slightly too big, so they gave him a bit of a buck tooth and [makeup artist Tami Lane] painted a gap in the tooth.”
Jarda also went through an unexpected transformation close to production. Originally, Reid said, Jarda was Swedish in the scripts. The actor prepped accordingly, working with a dialect coach and researching what a Swedish man that age would likely be like: someone who spoke English very well and had military training. Reid shared his polished accent with showrunner Rolin Jones, who hated it. “Rolin was like, ‘Oh no, that’s too clean. I want a thicker accent, so [Jarda] at the very last minute… he became from the Czech Republic, so we got a much thicker accent.”
All in all, Reid said, performing as Jarda was about “trying to bring him down a bit” and to “make sure he was grounded,” even though the actor said he was tempted to amp it up sometimes.
And then, of course, there were the wigs, which Reid pointed out could serve as a metaphor for the season. “We had double wigs going on, which was a really fun thing to do: a wig, on a wig, on a wig, which kind of felt like what we were doing with the show.”
New episodes of The Vampire Lestat premiere on Sundays on AMC and AMC+.
