“I’ve learned through this that I work well under pressure, so when I’m doing it, the ball’s just rolling,” she continues. “Only when you come away, you’re like, ‘Wow.’ When I got sent the first episode, I was like, ‘Oh my, that’s what I’ve been doing last year?’ That is so crazy to finally see it fully come together. It was a thing that I had actually struggled to comprehend.”
Hayles made Anne Rice’s eponymous 1976 novel her bible as she quickly studied Claudia. Constant communication with Jones answered her many questions, but Prague itself helped her really figure out the forever-teenage vampire. “The city is very vampiric, so the vibes started seeping into me,” Hayles shares. A walk with Anderson during her early days in Prague also helped ease any nerves she had about taking on this challenge of blending Bass’ Claudia with her own.
“We went for a walk around Prague, and he was just like, ‘Claudia’s yours, so make her yours,’” says Hayles. “Coming into it, it was going to be hard, and it’s hard to not have a tiny bit of imposter syndrome, which I hate, which I hate. But then hearing him say that solidified, ‘No, I know what I’m doing. I’ve got this.’”
Larry Horricks / AMC
Rice’s novel was written as a way to process the grief after her 5-year-old daughter died of cancer. Claudia is 5 years old in the book, 9 in the 1994 movie (played by a young Kirsten Dunst), and 14 in this series when she’s turned into a vampire. She’s a child who was supposed to live forever, but tragedy cut her immortal life short — tragedy brought about by the mistakes of her vampiric parents, Louis and Lestat, who broke one of this vampire world’s Great Laws when turning the child into an immortal being. In every iteration of Interview With the Vampire, Claudia was doomed from the start. Even if she could get through the trauma of her mind growing old but her body stuck in childhood for all eternity, there are those who want to see child vampires dead. The Parisian Théâtres des Vampires coven also wants Louis and Claudia killed for their attempted murder of Lestat back in New Orleans.
The tragedy of Claudia is that she suffers the consequences of her parents’ mistakes. They never should have made her into a vampire. As Bass’ Claudia told Louis in Season 1, the fire where he found her didn’t kill her; there was time to get her to a hospital. Out of desperation for redemption, Louis begged Lestat to turn her. Claudia’s vampiric birth was painted in a more favorable light in the first season. During the unforgettable trial episode of Season 2 (the penultimate of the season and one of 2024’s best episodes of TV), the truth of the night she was turned was revealed. Whereas Louis seemed more heroic before, here he was falling apart from guilt, the result of his belief that his murder of Alderman Fenwick (John DiMaggio) caused a deadly riot that burned down Black neighborhoods in New Orleans. To Louis, Claudia was his chance at absolution. But as shown when he was dragging Claudia’s burned body across the floor of his and Lestat’s bedroom in the Season 2 turning, Claudia’s wellbeing wasn’t as top-of-mind as he let journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) believe in Season 1. This was a repressed memory of Louis’ and one of the many details about Claudia’s life that came back to the surface as he got closer to learning the depths of Armand’s (Assad Zaman) deceptions.
Revisiting Claudia’s turning in the trial during Season 2 Episode 7 gave Hayles her first and only chance to be on the set of the New Orleans house. The crew recreated those sets in Prague with extreme attention to detail, Hayles says, even down to the colors of the lightbulbs illuminating this dark scene. Dragging Claudia was an idea that she, Anderson, Reid, and Jones devised on the day of filming. For this retcon of the scene, they realized they needed to get Claudia off the bed where Louis and Lestat laid her down. Dragging her across the floor was their favorite option.
“It solidifies Claudia always being compared to a doll,” Hayles explains. “It was very heartbreaking. There’s a lot of metaphors in it. And it’s another thing that actually I didn’t like watching. It felt, ‘Oh, this is all she is to you guys again.’”
Coming into this set as the new Claudia “felt like I was coming in on a world that I would love to know more about, but it was like, ‘Oh, this is a secret. OK, I’m here. I’m in this room. What’s going to happen?’” Hayles says. It’s bittersweet that she’ll never know what it was like to film Season 1, just as it’s bittersweet to know that Bass’ take on Season 2’s plot will never be seen. This adds a real-world layer to grieving Claudia for viewers. But one benefit of being new to this environment, according to Hayles, was that it added to Claudia feeling “an element of more danger” as she and her character were both 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 bed while they filmed the new version of Louis and Lestat’s argument here. “I didn’t have any lines to say. I was just watching these two guys do a masterclass in acting,” she raves of her costars.
Claudia finally found a love of her own in Season 2 with the French seamstress, Madeleine (Roxane Duran). They had criminally little time together before they were murdered in the trial. Before Madeleine declared that her “coven is Claudia,” thus giving Claudia the undying love she never felt with her family, one of Claudia’s final words was crying out on stage that Louis and Lestat never prioritized her. “I was just a roof shingle that flew off of your house,” she said in front of the bloodthirsty crowd at the sham trial. Hayles says that despite the circumstances, Claudia died knowing Louis loved her and that Madeleine did, too. After the trial episode came out in June 2024, Hayles told us that the final look she gave to Reid’s Lestat as she burned alive was a look of someone “turning to her parent to help her.” Hayles reveals another devastating layer to this in the video above: On top of the “pain of the burning,” Hayles says that questioning if Lestat maybe did love her as his daughter all along was Claudia’s last thought. But there wasn’t enough time for her to get an answer.
“She’s left with this question of, ‘Oh, maybe I did mean something to him. Why is he looking so distressed?’ But then she’s combusted. It’s a last question in her mind, and then she’s gone,” Hayles explains, adding, “The look was, ‘Help me, Dad,’ and then she didn’t know what his response would be, but then she saw his eyes and the pain in them, and it might’ve been a slight question in her head.”
Whether or not Hayles will come back as a haunting presence in Interview With the Vampire Season 3, which starts filming this month in Toronto, there’s no part of the series that isn’t impacted by Claudia’s death. As Anderson previously told us, “All of it is the aftermath of her death. All of it in Dubai, everything in the present, she’s echoing through it.”
Find out more about Hayles’ Claudia in the full video interview above.
Interview With the Vampire, Season 3 Premiere, 2026, AMC