Delainey Hayles Played Claudia’s IWTV Tragedy Like a Volcano

“The moment that Lestat walks onstage is the moment that she reaches peak frustration.� Photo: Larry Horricks/Larry Horricks/AMC

Spoilers follow for the Interview With the Vampire episode “I Could Not Prevent It,� which premiered on AMC June 23.

Vampires are supposed to live forever. And in all versions of Interview With the Vampire, from Anne Rice’s 1976 novel to the 1994 film to the AMC TV adaptation, the death of the young vampire Claudia is a tragedy. Trapped in the body of a child as she ages and punished for breaking edicts she was never taught, Claudia shoulders the mistakes of nearly every adult male vampire around her — and had only recently begun flourishing on her own terms. In Rolin Jones’s TV adaptation, she’s made when father figure Louis (Jacob Anderson) begs his lover Lestat (Sam Reid) to turn her after she nearly dies in a fire — although Lestat understands that Claudia’s destiny to be stuck at 14 years old forever is a kind of curse. Through the years, Claudia becomes the third wheel in their romance, is sexually abused and held captive by her own vampire love interest, and plays second fiddle to Louis’s passions again when the two try to kill Lestat and flee to Europe, where Louis falls in love with Armand (Assad Zaman), the leader of a vampire coven which doubles as theater troupe Théâtre des Vampires.

All that parental negligence and sexual frustration could have made Claudia pitiful, but actress Delainey Hayles, who took over the character in season two from Bailey Bass (who left the series after joining the Avatar franchise), plays her like a dynamo. She’s disgusted when Louis ignores her after Armand enters his life, infuriated when she realizes the coven and its lead actor Santiago (Ben Daniels) only want to leverage her eternal youth when they cast her as the infantilized “Baby Lu� in one of their avant-garde plays, and sympathetic toward Madeleine (Roxane Duran), a woman scorned by her neighbors for her affair with a Nazi who eventually becomes Claudia’s companion. Hayles gives Claudia a profound inner life and vibrant personality, complete with spitfire line readings like “Now I know what two blood-fat cocks slapping hands feel like, so thank you for that.� But to play Claudia is to know, Hayles says, that she’s “a doomed character.�

That doom comes in season two’s penultimate episode, “I Could Not Prevent It,� in which Louis and Armand finally tell journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) what happened to Claudia. “I’m a chronic overthinker, so that was always on my mind,� Hayles says of Claudia’s immolation death sentence, enacted by the coven for breaking a number of the vampiric Great Laws, including her attempt to kill her maker Lestat. Her final line of dialogue as she’s burning into ash, “I don’t like windows when they’re closed,� repurposes a line the coven made her sing as Baby Lu but puts her own fuck-you energy into it. “I think the way the writers wrote it was, she’s the strongest vampire and she would only go out this way,� says Hayles. “It felt like, whew. I thought I’d feel more stress before, with the anxiety of filming, but actually, it was afterward. It felt like, Oh my God, her story’s done.�

Claudia’s death is such a climactic moment. I know you read Anne Rice’s novel after being cast. What were some emotions you anticipated bringing into this scene?
The thing I thought about mostly was anger. Claudia’s not going to go out without a fight. And then I also thought, Is there a bit of relief in it? Because the circumstances are so torturing. Is it like, She’s singing, and that’s representing that, in a way, she’s finally free? I was combatting both, and then director Emma Freeman put everything together for me. She said I know Claudia better than anyone, so I should do what I feel she would do. Which is what I did. There’s other elements that come into play, like CGI. But she told me that’s not something I need to think about. Just think about the performance, which is obviously what I know how to do — better than special effects.

Take me back to what you felt that morning of filming. Did you feel like you had everything honed in, or did you leave some fluidity?
I’ll always leave fluidity. I was trying to stay relaxed because I can start doom-thinking. [Laughs.] I really wanted to do her justice. It was a heavy, heavy movement. Before we started filming, I had a conversation with writer Hannah Moscovitch and Sam about the last looks between Lestat and Claudia. You have your own interpretation, and then you hear others and you meet in the middle. After every take, Emma and Hannah would both come to me and Roxane and be like, “That was great. Here’s one thing we’re gonna tweak.� They did that each time, just to make sure we were still okay with what we were filming or if it was taking a toll. It was really lovely to not be by yourself. I felt very hugged by everyone.

Claudia doesn’t beg for her life. You have a great “Can I cry and say that I’m sorry, too?� line where Claudia mocks all the sympathy the coven and audience are giving Lestat. What kind of emotional arc did you want to give Claudia during the trial and before her death?
She feels, in the beginning stages, a lot of confusion. When the bag is ripped off her head, she’s just trying to get her bearings, and she’s the first that puts together what’s happening before Louis and before Madeleine. That’s when reality sinks in — when Lestat walks onstage, it’s like, Let’s get this over with now. She’s a realist, so she knows what’s to come. The moment that Lestat walks onstage is the moment that she reaches peak frustration, and then from there, she can only go up in frustration when the story is being told. She’s bubbling and then she’s boiling and then she’s overflowed. [Pantomimes a volcano exploding]

Was there one aspect of the scene that felt easiest for you, and one aspect that felt most difficult?
I felt so supported by Sam in that last look. He had a job to do, but he was really supporting me through it. It’s not very fun to do when you’re screaming and his little face is crying. That was what brought everything together.

The hardest thing was the start of the death, because I was dealing with the shock of Santiago and the sun hitting and reacting at the same time. But I was very thankful Roxane was there and we had each other. I haven’t seen the full episode yet; I’ve seen drafts of it. But when Madeleine disintegrates first, that was very, very sad.

What technical details went into filming the sequence?
We did it a couple of times, and then the special-effects team mapped out what we did naturally, however I held Roxane, and told us to keep doing that, because we were focused on leading with the performance first. There were moments where I would kind of change it — not purposely, just because I was in the scene — and they would come afterward and be like, “Can you lower your hand a tiny bit?� And Tami Lane, the makeup head, was liaising with Ted, who supervises VFX. The practical process was we’d film a bit, and once everybody was happy with that, we’d go back to prosthetics with Tami, have another element thrown on us, go back and do it all over again, and once that was good, we’d add more. I think we had four or five rounds of prosthetics added until I reached my final form. We reached a crescendo where it was like, “Let’s go full out.�

During the trial, Santiago imitates your voice, and there’s an animated caricature of Claudia as part of the projections. It felt to me like there was a racial, xenophobic element to how the coven presented you and Louis. I’m curious if you felt that too.
I don’t think that’s something that we talked about in filming, but I can see how that would be construed. I think it was just that the coven is so terrible. You could be God himself and they would not care. You’re coming to their coven and you need to behave correctly. That was mainly what we were focusing on. Santiago mocking Claudia was just another instance of, he’s an actor, it’s what he does. He mimics Louis, that’s his thing, that’s his niche, to take the piss out of you and get you riled up. If, in another world, Lestat was on trial, he would also imitate a French accent. It’s just his way of pissing off everybody.

And he’s very good at it!
He’s very good at it. I love Ben so much. His Santiago, I was struggling to keep a straight face. He would ad-lib a lot, so you’re in a scene, you know what line comes next, and he’d throw something completely different. And you’re like, “Oh, I really love that! Okay, let me stay in it.� Ben is wicked.

You were in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on the West End. I’m wondering if there was an aspect of your theatrical training or experience that helped you play Claudia doing theater as Baby Lu.
Her first performance, I wanted to portray that she was a bit nervous, because when you do your first performance, you know what you’re doing, you’ve rehearsed so long, and then the moment comes and you’re like, Actually, do I know what I’m doing? But she does. And then she just hates it from there, so that was really fun to play.

What I loved about Levan Akin’s direction is that he treated it like every performance was a theater performance. We had new extras and audience members, and it was the first time they were seeing it. Each time I did it, I’d have new faces to see. They were confused, but they were enjoying it. And in the trial, we had audience members and they got told to react how they wanted to. There were bits where they heckled, and I think those got kept in. That’s what the directors and Rolin wanted, that element of it being real for the actors, because we did perform in front of strangers. And you want to do it well, because you’re like, They’ve never seen it before. And, yes, I’m wearing this blue costume, but just keep watching, it gets better. When Claudia hates it, I could see that some extras were confused, like, Why is she not doing it properly? [Laughs.] I think I work best when I have a little bit of pressure on me.

One of the tragic things about Claudia is that she’s stuck at 14 years old physically, although she ages mentally. Was there any quality of yourself at 14 that you thought about during this performance?
What stuck with me was how uncomfortable I was at 14 and how that is Claudia’s constant circumstance. I don’t really remember myself at 14 because I think I blocked out all those memories.

Me too. I’d have the same answer if I asked myself this.
Yeah, and I think that’s what I remember — that thing of trying to find yourself, but that’s not yourself. Or trying to find your people, but you don’t know your people ’cause you don’t know yourself. That’s kind of what I connected with, with Claudia, her being constantly uncomfortable, in a way, but asserting herself to seem like she’s okay in who she is.

“I Don’t Like Windows When They’re Closed� is a real bop. Did it get stuck in your head while you were performing it?
Rehearsal is what really made it stick in my head. Before takes, I’d start singing it, and then I’d walk around and I’d hear catering singing it, and then I’d hear Gustave, one of the other vampires played by Jake Cecil, singing it. It got stuck in everyone’s head. It was a really catchy song, however much Claudia hates it. I can still sing it right now. I’m not going to.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.