“I’ve realized by means of this that I work properly underneath strain, so after I’m doing it, the ball’s simply rolling,” she continues. “Solely whenever you come away, you’re like, ‘Wow.’ Once I bought despatched the primary episode, I used to be like, ‘Oh my, that’s what I’ve been doing final yr?’ That’s so loopy to lastly see it absolutely come collectively. It was a factor that I had truly struggled to grasp.”
Hayles made Anne Rice’s eponymous 1976 novel her bible as she rapidly studied Claudia. Fixed communication with Jones answered her many questions, however Prague itself helped her actually work out the forever-teenage vampire. “Town may be very vampiric, so the vibes began seeping into me,” Hayles shares. A stroll with Anderson throughout her early days in Prague additionally helped ease any nerves she had about taking over this problem of mixing Bass’ Claudia along with her personal.
“We went for a stroll round Prague, and he was identical to, ‘Claudia’s yours, so make her yours,’” says Hayles. “Coming into it, it was going to be arduous, and it’s arduous to not have a tiny little bit of imposter syndrome, which I hate, which I hate. However then listening to him say that solidified, ‘No, I do know what I’m doing. I’ve bought this.’”
Larry Horricks / AMC
Rice’s novel was written as a approach to course of the grief after her 5-year-old daughter died of most cancers. Claudia is 5 years outdated within the ebook, 9 within the 1994 film (performed by a younger Kirsten Dunst), and 14 on this collection when she’s was a vampire. She’s a baby who was purported to dwell eternally, however tragedy minimize her immortal life brief — tragedy caused by the errors of her vampiric dad and mom, Louis and Lestat, who broke certainly one of this vampire world’s Nice Legal guidelines when turning the kid into an immortal being. In each iteration of Interview With the Vampire, Claudia was doomed from the beginning. Even when she might get by means of the trauma of her thoughts rising outdated however her physique caught in childhood for all eternity, there are those that wish to see youngster vampires useless. The Parisian Théâtres des Vampires coven additionally desires Louis and Claudia killed for his or her tried homicide of Lestat again in New Orleans.
The tragedy of Claudia is that she suffers the implications of her dad and mom’ errors. They by no means ought to have made her right into a vampire. As Bass’ Claudia informed Louis in Season 1, the hearth the place he discovered her didn’t kill her; there was time to get her to a hospital. Out of desperation for redemption, Louis begged Lestat to show her. Claudia’s vampiric beginning was painted in a extra favorable gentle within the first season. Through the unforgettable trial episode of Season 2 (the penultimate of the season and certainly one of 2024’s finest episodes of TV), the reality of the evening she was turned was revealed. Whereas Louis appeared extra heroic earlier than, right here he was falling aside from guilt, the results of his perception that his homicide of Alderman Fenwick (John DiMaggio) induced a lethal riot that burned down Black neighborhoods in New Orleans. To Louis, Claudia was his probability at absolution. However as proven when he was dragging Claudia’s burned physique throughout the ground of his and Lestat’s bed room within the Season 2 turning, Claudia’s wellbeing wasn’t as top-of-mind as he let journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) imagine in Season 1. This was a repressed reminiscence of Louis’ and one of many many particulars about Claudia’s life that got here again to the floor as he bought nearer to studying the depths of Armand’s (Assad Zaman) deceptions.
Revisiting Claudia’s turning within the trial throughout Season 2 Episode 7 gave Hayles her first and solely probability to be on the set of the New Orleans home. The crew recreated these units in Prague with excessive consideration to element, Hayles says, even right down to the colours of the lightbulbs illuminating this darkish scene. Dragging Claudia was an concept that she, Anderson, Reid, and Jones devised on the day of filming. For this retcon of the scene, they realized they wanted to get Claudia away from bed the place Louis and Lestat laid her down. Dragging her throughout the ground was their favourite possibility.
“It solidifies Claudia all the time being in comparison with a doll,” Hayles explains. “It was very heartbreaking. There’s a number of metaphors in it. And it’s one other factor that really I didn’t like watching. It felt, ‘Oh, that is all she is to you guys once more.’”
Coming into this set as the brand new Claudia “felt like I used to be coming in on a world that I might like to know extra about, but it surely was like, ‘Oh, it is a secret. OK, I’m right here. I’m on this room. What’s going to occur?’” Hayles says. It’s bittersweet that she’ll by no means know what it was prefer to movie Season 1, simply because it’s bittersweet to know that Bass’ tackle Season 2’s plot won’t ever be seen. This provides a real-world layer to grieving Claudia for viewers. However one advantage of being new to this surroundings, in line with Hayles, was that it added to Claudia feeling “a component of extra hazard” as she and her character have been each a stranger to that room in that scene. Hayles says she tried to sneak a peek at Anderson and Reid as she laid on the mattress whereas they filmed the brand new model of Louis and Lestat’s argument right here. “I didn’t have any strains to say. I used to be simply watching these two guys do a masterclass in appearing,” she raves of her costars.
Claudia lastly discovered a love of her personal in Season 2 with the French seamstress, Madeleine (Roxane Duran). They’d criminally little time collectively earlier than they have been murdered within the trial. Earlier than Madeleine declared that her “coven is Claudia,” thus giving Claudia the timeless love she by no means felt along with her household, certainly one of Claudia’s last phrases was crying out on stage that Louis and Lestat by no means prioritized her. “I used to be only a roof shingle that flew off of your own home,” she stated in entrance of the bloodthirsty crowd on the sham trial. Hayles says that regardless of the circumstances, Claudia died figuring out Louis beloved her and that Madeleine did, too. After the trial episode got here out in June 2024, Hayles informed us that the ultimate look she gave to Reid’s Lestat as she burned alive was a glance of somebody “turning to her guardian to assist her.” Hayles reveals one other devastating layer to this within the video above: On prime of the “ache of the burning,” Hayles says that questioning if Lestat perhaps did love her as his daughter all alongside was Claudia’s final thought. However there wasn’t sufficient time for her to get a solution.
“She’s left with this query of, ‘Oh, perhaps I did imply one thing to him. Why is he wanting so distressed?’ However then she’s combusted. It’s a final query in her thoughts, after which she’s gone,” Hayles explains, including, “The look was, ‘Assist me, Dad,’ after which she didn’t know what his response can be, however then she noticed his eyes and the ache in them, and it’d’ve been a slight query in her head.”
Whether or not or not Hayles will come again as a haunting presence in Interview With the Vampire Season 3, which begins filming this month in Toronto, there’s no a part of the collection that isn’t impacted by Claudia’s demise. As Anderson beforehand informed us, “All of it’s the aftermath of her demise. All of it in Dubai, all the things within the current, she’s echoing by means of it.”
Discover out extra about Hayles’ Claudia within the full video interview above.
Interview With the Vampire, Season 3 Premiere, 2026, AMC