The film doesn’t go into enough clear detail about Lestat & Louis’s relationship, so for viewers who’ve never read the books or seen the play it is easy to assume that Louis is Lestat’s only love.

In the ill-starred musical from 2006, it is made clear that Lestat makes both Louis & Claudia into vampires in a last desperate attempt to assuage his loneliness, picking them out of fleeting sense of attraction combined with a stronger opportunism. He doesn’t seem specifically to love either in a one true love’ sense, though he has a powerful attachment to both and is crushed when they betray then abandon him (though some of his disappointment stems from ego). In fact, the play and the novels suggest that Lestat’s true passionate loves in life and death were back in Auvergne - his best friend of youth Nicolas ‘Nicki’ de Lenfent, and his mother Gabrielle de Lioncourt. Lestat turns both into vampires with mixed results - Gabrielle while on her deathbed and to great success, Nicki in his most suicidal depression and resulting in his derangement - and he wanders the world with them for decades. Lestat mentions both Nicki & Gabrielle several times in each book, even in the ones in which they do not appear or to which they are irrelevant characters, and all through the play. In the novels, Lestat even outright says that he falls for Louis because he is so like Nicki.

[quote] From the first VC book, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: ‘Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas. He had Nicki's grim intensity, his rebelliousness, his tortured capacity to believe and not to believe, and finally to despair.’

[quote] From the second VC book, THE VAMPIRE LESTAT: ‘"Ah, you are a dreamer!" he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled. "And I'll know people like you," I went on. "People who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we'll sit in cafes and we'll drink together and we'll clash with each other violently in words, and we'll talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement." He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me....

[quote] ‘....words began to pour out of me as they had out of him, and soon we were talking about a thousand things we had felt in our hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words seemed to be essential words the way they did on those rare occasions with my mother. And as we came to describe our longings and dissatisfactions, we were saying things to each other with great exuberance, like "Yes, yes," and "Exactly," and "I know completely what you mean," and "And yes, of course, you felt that you could not bear it," etc. Another bottle, and a new fire. And I begged Nicolas to play his violin for me. He rushed home immediately to get it. It was now late afternoon. The sun was slanting through the window and the fire was very hot. We were very drunk. We had never ordered supper. And I think I was happier than I had ever been.’

[quote] ‘...there had been the eternity of growing up and growing old before us, and so much joy even in misery, even in the misery - the real eternity, the real forever - the mortal mystery of that. But the moment faded in the shimmering expression on his face. "Come to me, Nicki," I whispered. I lifted both hands to beckon. "If you want it, you must come..."

[quote] From the fourth VC book, TALE OF THE BODY THIEF: ‘I remembered being in the loft of the barn on my land in France, and drinking cognac just like that, and even making that grimace, and my mortal friend and lover, Nicki, snatching the bottle greedily from my hand.’

Lestat also comes to have a great affection for the ancient guru vampire Marius, feeling for him like a student does a beloved teacher.