Assad Zaman credited as playing...
Armand
- Armand: How was your walkabout, Mr. Molloy?
- Daniel Molloy: Michelin fish in the desert. I burned my entire per diem.How many people in the world know what you know, Rashid? How many Rashids, Rashid?
- Rashid: I suspect just enough to help them stay hidden.
- Daniel Molloy: No, that's how billionaire vampires do it. How does your average Jo Mo vampire keep people like you in line? Unspoken threats?
- Rashid: The threat is always there. He could kill us both now. But he doesn't. They are peaceful beings.
- Daniel Molloy: They drain and disappear us.
- Rashid: They have a biological imperative that is in conflict with human morality. But what is that morality other than rules agreed upon?
- Armand: Thank you, Rashid. A romantic answer to your question. The average vampire has minimal contact with humanity. When exposed, they feed or run or kill themselves. And I'd say we're multi-millionaires. Not quite a billion. It was wrong of Louis to enter your memories yesterday. You were invited here as a guest.
- Armand: It was 1556 when the Roman coven sent me to lead the shambolic Paris coven. A face from the subcontinent, French my fourth and poorest language, I had never led anything in my life. We called ourselves the Children of Darkness. We lived in squalor, hunted in shame, all in strict obedience to medieval laws put in place to protect us from humanity. And though I managed to maintain a discipline and humility for by the time Robespierre was beheaded, I was, by any measure, failing. Our ways were finished. We were embers on a waning pyre. Lestat was the wind to scatter.
- Daniel Molloy: I really gotta meet with this guy.
- Armand: I felt his presence before I saw him. Sired by one of my deserters, Magnus, this was something new, something I hadn't felt before. The fourth of our Great Laws was writ: "No vampire shall ever reveal his true nature to a mortal and let that mortal live." And here he was, prancing and preening in front of 500 mortals a night, like some patronized, tarted up dervish.
- Daniel Molloy: To hear Louis tell it... Lestat becoming a vampire was a horror show.
- Armand: That may be. But he made a remarkable recovery shortly thereafter. How else could you explain his hand feeding the audience? How words came out like canaries, summer fruit in the dead of winter. They were all in love with him. He had that effect on everyone. He...
- Daniel Molloy: Was a natural?
- Armand: Entirely un-natural. Using the Dark Gift for what? His vanity? It was heresy. I had to bring him under my control by any means. I followed him for weeks. His rejections only inflamed me. And the longer I allowed him to exist outside the coven, the more unsettled my children became. They watched in secret, fascinated by his disregard for the laws I told them could never be broken. He took a mortal lover. More heresy. I'd tolerated his presence too long already. I had to act or he'd destroy what little I had left.
- Armand: I'm evil, evil as any vampire who ever lived. I've killed over and over and I will do it again. Why does that make you as evil as any vampire? Aren't there gradations to evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf one falls into with the first sin?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I mean, kinda. It's not as logical as you're saying, but it's dark and it's empty, and I can't see the bottom of it.
- Armand: But if evil is without gradation and it does exist, this state of evil then, only one sin is needed. That's your argument.
- Jean-Paul Sartre: [COUGHS POLITELY] Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract what is concrete.
- Armand: Jean-Paul.
- Jean-Paul Sartre: Armand.
- Armand: This is my friend, Louis.
- Jean-Paul Sartre: Bonjour. Now, will you two kindly shut up, so I can hear the music, hmm?
- Armand: Your argument assumes God exists.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I don't know that God exists. From what I saw in the war, he doesn't.
- Armand: Then surely, there are degrees and variations to goodness? The goodness of the child which is innocence. The goodness of the nun who lives a life of self-deprivation and service. The goodness of the saints, the goodness of the midwives. And how is this evil achieved? How does one fall from grace?
- Daniel Molloy: You let it happen?
- Armand: Yes.
- Daniel Molloy: You led him there, so he could destroy it.
- Armand: His words had been my thoughts for half a century. If it had come from me, they wouldn't have believed it.
- Armand: My children left. They roamed the streets of Paris, wreaking havoc with mortals. Some could not reconcile the life I had made for them with the life Lestat had told them was possible. They went mad, ended themselves. The only thing that kept me from the fire... were the old rituals.
- Daniel Molloy: Cell phones.
- Armand: You were rude, but he crossed a line.
- Daniel Molloy: Artificial intelligence crunching improbable data.
- Armand: I offer my apology...
- Daniel Molloy: How do you hide from the cloud?
- Armand: ...on his behalf. We should probably wait for him.
- Daniel Molloy: Probably.
- Armand: He'll awaken when the sun sleeps. Your cell phones make you slaves to your fetishes and data retrieval is primarily about profits, so I suspect no one at Amazon is trying to sell us blenders.
- Daniel Molloy: You kill, nightly.
- Armand: And sometimes you've watched that kill on the local news. You've never been easier to distract. You're at the height of wilful ignorance. We exploit it. This is, was... Lestat's prophetic vision.
- Daniel Molloy: Lestat de Lioncourt?
- Armand: Yes.
- Daniel Molloy: We were shadows crouching behind stone prior to his transformation.
- Daniel Molloy: I'm listening.That's my job, right?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: They went at it on the floor. Armand taught Lestat the Mind Gift. And a week later, Lestat was gone.
- Daniel Molloy: The question was how do vampires hide from Google, not how did Lestat break his heart.
- Armand: But because you were a good listener, you got answers to both.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: When he went to open the theater the next night, he was met by the lawyer, Pierre Roget I.
- Armand: Waiting for me with a trunk full of cash and instructions to cover the theater's cost in perpetuity.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: He abandoned Nicky. He abandoned Armand. He abandoned the coven. Lestat is, was, and will always be, for Lestat.
- Daniel Molloy: Never say I love you to a raging narcissist.
- Armand: And I locked away those words for another 150 years. And then he arrived... and shattered that lock. This is what... frightened me most about you.