Created by Rolin Jones
1.04 “...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding” & 105 “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart"”
Written by Eleanor Burgess (1.04) & Hannah Moscovitch (1.05)
Directed by Keith Powell (1.04) & Levan Akin (1.05)
Starring Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, Bailey Bass, and Eric Bogosian
New episodes airing Sundays on AMC & streaming on AMC+

by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

(The following is part of a larger interview about the entire first season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire series, airing on Sundays in October and November of 2022. You can decide if that first part is true or not, though.)

MovieJawn: So, how is Claudia’s debut in the show?

Emily Maesar: Extremely good! It’s hard, you know, because I’ve really enjoyed so much of this show, that I find it a little difficult to branch out in describing how and why. But yes, Claudia’s introduction is a magical, madness shared by us all. And while she’s not young, young child that Claudia is in the book, there’s something new that’s gained by making this version of the character 14-years-old.

MJ: What does it change?

EM: Claudia is so young in the novel, only five years old. Her existence as a person is shaped by Lestat and Louis, and her relationship with Louis is… questionable. She’s made because Lestat is being a brat and wants to prove to Louis that he’s the same kind of monster that Lestat is. This adaptation allows a very strong rewriting of Louis’s relationship to Claudia and her creation. Lestat still makes her, but Louis finds her and wants to care for her. It’s not a monstrous act against her that put her in this situation, but rather an act of salvation for the two of them.

MJ: She was only five?

EM: Yeah, it’s… a choice. And it’s one that is anecdotally baked into Anne Rice processing her very young daughter dying in. Which is something I didn’t know about until recently when I was on the Monkey Off My Backlog podcast recently, talking about Anne and her Immortal Universe. Anyway, I think it’s a good choice for both the film and the show to age up Claudia (the show makes her even older than the film) and to really hammer home the idea of the relationship between the three of them to be like a family. The film is a weird middle ground, though, but I think the show is doing a great job at setting those boundaries and adapting them into something more palatable.

MJ: Okay, so what does all of that mean for Lestat?

EM: It means, I’m afraid, that the toxic elements of his personality are out in full force. He creates Claudia for Louis because he thinks it will make him happy. And it does… for a while. But there are little things, like the fact that since Lestat made them both, he can no longer hear either of their thoughts—but they can hear each other’s. He can never have a relationship with either of them, like they have with each other. A sacrifice he made to give them both the Dark Gift, that isolates him from them deeply.

And then there’s the fact that Claudia is now fourteen forever. She’s frozen in time in a perpetual puberty—and she’s a killing machine. It’s the only thing Lestat can relate to her about, so he does. Their daddy-daughter bonding time is soaked in blood, which is fun until Claudia kills a boy she likes and then she goes a bit mad about the whole thing.

MJ: A bit mad?

EM: She kind of goes on a killing spree and gets sloppy about destroying or hiding the bodies, which brings their family under scrutiny. It’s something that Daniel has some thoughts on, and I think he’s right. In the modern era, Louis is deeply protective of Claudia and her legacy, which I assume is because her fate in the history of the show is the same (or generally similar) to her fate in the novel. But the show also does something really lovely during these first two episodes with Claudia, it tells the story from her perspective.

MJ: How so?

EM: How else do you tell a story from a teen girl’s point of view? With diaries, of course. They’re artifacts that Louis has finally brought together and has available for Daniel to read through. They were still scattered during their interview in the 1970s, according to Louis. But through Claudia’s eyes, we see the sweetness in Louis and Lestat’s relationship… as well absolute violence and pain. In fact, the book girlies were very upset about the last act of 1.05. I understand why, but I also think it’s within character for Lestat and gives a stronger case for what Louis and Claudia will eventually attempt to do to him.

MJ: The domestic violence, you mean?

EM: Yes. Listen. It’s hard to watch, but I also think the show is doing something and doing it quite effectively. I think I’m only upset that there (still) isn’t a content warning at the top of the episode, like they had for the suicide at the start of the pilot. I think that’s their only miscalculation.

MJ: Oh, that seems bad.

EM: It’s not great, and I hope they change that soon. I think it’s fine to have the content, you know, but I think content warnings are important. And if you’re gonna do it for some things… maybe doing it for all the things (especially when the actors think they should be there too) would be a good idea. That being said, I also want to just briefly talk about Claudia’s sexual assualt while she’s away from Louis and Lestat. I think it’s actually the show taking a big swing—in fact I think it’s actually a bigger swing in terms of changes than the domestic violence.

MJ: How so?

EM: It’s something that’s conceivable within the universe, of course. The sexual assault of a teenage girl in the 1930s is completely believable. But where Lestat and Louis have a deeply toxic and messy relationship already in all versions of the story, nothing quite like this ever really happens to Claudia in the novel. In part because she’s so young, but also because she’s a very different character for a variety of reasons, including age, race, and time period. The swing is that it happens, or we can assume it happens. The swing is that it’s another vampire who does it. The swing is that she clearly wrote about it, but Louis has torn the pages out that could give Daniel any real details. He’s editorializing her history in a very public kind of way, because Daniel can see that it’s happened. Louis is protecting her as much as he knows how, because once Daniel eventually puts her story out there, regardless of their intention with it, they both know that the public will take it and run. “Sexy Claudia Halloween costumes,” Daniel says.

MJ: He’s not wrong.

EM: No, he’s certainly not. But I also understand his anger about being promised the whole truth, but not being given it. And of course Louis’s reaction to Daniel’s pushing certainly warrants the slap Daniel gives him, once it passes. I think their relationship is so infinitely interesting in this adaptation and I’m so curious where it’s going, considering what we know about Daniel’s life after the interview in the book—which is clearly not his direct path.

And ultimately I think this adaptation is so interesting because it’s like us, as an audience, accessing our own memories of the story and coming out with something different that still reminds us of the truth. It’s really succeeding in that way, no matter how angry the Lestat fangirlies are.

MJ: And they are, aren’t they?

EM: So very. Which I get, but even though Lestat is the lead of the rest of the Vampire Chronicles, Interview with the Vampire isn’t his story. It’s Louis’s. And I think the domestic violence, as portrayed in 1.05, is in service of Louis’s story. It grounds what Claudia and Louis are about to do in something much more substantive than it was in the novel. I think it works and it’s done well. I understand loving a monstrous character, but you can’t get mad when they do deeply in-character, monstrous things. That’s just silly.