Should ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Keep Delaying the Inevitable?
Ultimately, this isn't The Claudia Show—unless ...?
Interview With the Vampire is back with a new season and a new Claudia, but given what we know about her arc in the Anne Rice novels, maybe it’s best if we don’t get too attached.
Interview With the Vampire is thus far fairly faithful to the source material, but if you haven’t read Anne Rice’s novel or seen the 1994 adaptation—starring lil Kirsten Dunst as Claudia—and you’d rather remain spoiler-free, click away now.
We first meet Claudia in season 1 of Interview With the Vampire, when Louis (Jacob Anderson) rescues her from a fire. Played by Bailey Bass, Claudia is just 14 years old when Louis and Lestat (Sam Reid) decide to “save” her by turning her into a vampire. Of course, having a child is the worst possible way to salvage a toxic relationship, and Louis and Lestat quickly learn this lesson in the most violent way imaginable. Claudia isn’t just a teenage girl—she’s a juvenile vampire, which makes her twice as reckless and impulsive as the average troubled teen from a dysfunctional family. As the bodies pile up, Claudia’s emotional instability only worsens; Louis and Lestat saved her life by dooming her to spend an eternity in the body of a 14-year-old girl.
By the end of season 1, Claudia has convinced Louis to help her kill Lestat so they can leave New Orleans in search of other vampires. Ever the softie, Louis all but ensures Lestat’s survival and eventual return by refusing to burn his body. At the end of the first season, Bass exited the series due to a scheduling conflict with the upcoming Avatar sequel (which she’s presumably contracted to film for the next 20 years), and was replaced by Delainey Hayles, who makes her debut as Claudia in the season 2 premiere—accompanied by a delightful title card that announces, with appropriate theatricality, that the role of Claudia will now be played by Hayles.
Interview With the Vampire season 2 picks up with Claudia and Lestat making their way to Europe only to find that the humans are really mucking up Claudia’s big vacation with a World War sequel. By the end of the episode, the pair have made it to Romania, where vampirism seems to be going the way of the dodo. But what’s notable about the season 2 premiere where Claudia is concerned is that the series seems to be taking its time, really building and exploring the relationship between Louis and Claudia, to the point that it’s easy to forget what happens to Claudia in Interview With the Vampire.
Paris, in case you’ve forgotten, is the beginning of the end for Claudia. In Paris, Claudia and Louis meet Armand (Assad Zaman) and join their troupe of vampires. But Armand and Louis’ burgeoning relationship frustrates Claudia, who fears that she’ll be abandoned by Louis again, so she convinces him to turn a dollmaker named Madeleine into a vampire, ensuring she’ll always have a companion. When Armand learns that Claudia attempted to kill Lestat, he sentences her (and Madeleine!) to death by sunlight.
While I’m eager for Louis and Claudia to make it to the Théâtre des Vampires—especially because Claudia will have a blast getting away with murder in front of a paying audience—I’m also relieved that the show isn’t in a rush to get there. Ultimately, this isn’t The Claudia Show (unless …), and our favorite little vampire will have to meet her horrific end sooner rather than later.
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