Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 6 of The Vampire Lestat
Daddy dearest? More like daddy fearest. The penultimate installment of The Vampire Lestat‘s first season, “Montreal,” climaxes with the long-awaited reunion between child vampire Claudia (Delainey Hayles) and her bloodsucking fathers, Lestat (Sam Reid) and Louis (Jacob Anderson). But we don’t want to give you any false hope of a happily ever after for this tragedy-prone family unit. Ripped out of the purgatorial afterlife she’s resided in since her (second) death in Season 2 of Interview with the Vampire Claudia’s ghostly return is full of sound and fury — and much of that fury is directed at Louis.
Clocking in at almost 10 minutes, the showpiece sequence isn’t found in the book version of The Vampire Lestat. Instead, writers Ryan Kattner and Kevin Hanna lifted it from the seventh installment in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Merrick, named for Merrick Mayfair, the powerful witch whose presence bridges the author’s Interview and Mayfair universes. (It joins a growing list of crossover moments that AMC has been sprinkling through its various Immortal Universe series, which include Interview/Lestat, Mayfair Witches and the since-canceled Talamasca: The Secret Order.)
In “Montreal,” Louis and Lestat pay a visit to Merrick (played by Sarah Afful) who contacts Claudia’s spirit in the great beyond and opens the door for her to return. “Claudia is truly my girl,” Hayles tells Gold Derby about getting to slip back into her alter ego’s skin at last. “I love her inside out and upside down. How she met her end last season was just disgusting, so I’m very happy that she gets to come back and get some stuff off her chest.”
Specifically, Claudia wants Louis to know that she’s still furious at him for not finding a way to save her or her vampire companion, Madeleine, who was also killed by the Parisian vampire coven led by Armand (Assad Zaman) last season. And to make matters even more tragic, she hasn’t been able to locate Madeleine’s spirit, forcing her to endure the eternal void of the afterlife alone. Small wonder that she tears into Louis without any concern about his professed feelings of guilt and sorry.
“I wanted to say the goodbye I didn’t get to say, and tell you I hope you found a bit of quiet,” Louis pleads to his daughter’s spirit. “Here’s some truth, you sad boy,” Claudia replies, going on to single out Lestat as her “favorite” father and revealing that she had contemplated ditching Louis decades ago for someone “more worthy” of her. “Get this into your nappy little head,” she rages. “I hate you, more than anything or anyone I have ever known.”
Harsh words — but Anderson insists that Louis needed to hear them. “I think Louis always knew that, to be honest,” the actor muses in a separate interview. “For all three of them, there’s an inevitability about how this reunion is going to go, and to some extent it’s almost a relief.
“It must be hard for Louis to hear, but as Jacob, I kind of want to tell Claudia, ‘Whack him again!'” Anderson adds with a laugh. “I’m like ‘Good for you, Claudia.’ I wouldn’t want to hang out with Louis either.”
While this sequence represents the first we’ve seen of Claudia since her Parisian execution, Hayles has appeared throughout The Vampire Lestat as Regina, a human waitress who Louis considers to be a dead ringer for his dead daughter. He’s even gone so far as to pay Regina to pretend to be Claudia, an act of desperation that horrifies both her and Lestat.
“Playing Regina has been a different end of the stick, because it’s almost sexualized,” Hayles notes. “Here’s this rich guy that is paying her [to be Claudia], so she thinks of it as: ‘This is what I do for my job.’ But it’s actually much deeper that what she perceives it to be.”
The actress had to reach deep inside herself while preparing to act out Claudia’s furious return. Hayles says that the entire sequence was filmed over two days, and director Jane Wu initially allowed her to move freely about the set trailed by two handheld cameras. But it quickly became clear that more rules would be required.
“They would tell me, ‘There’s no lighting there,’ or ‘There’s a massive shadow over there,'” she remembers, laughing. “So I kind of had to minimize how much I moved. They also told me that I could destroy things, but that got stripped away, too. Like, I would pick up a cello and they would tell me, ‘Delainey, we only have one cello — please don’t throw it.’ Or I’d pick up a vase, and they’d say, ‘Please don’t throw that.’ I was like, ‘Guys, she’s really angry. She needs to throw something at them!”
Afful also got to share in that rage by channeling Claudia before Hayles inhabits the character’s ghostly form. “I don’t often get to let that kind of fury out,” the actress tells us in a separate conversation. “In some moments, I tried to embody the little kid that Claudia was, and then other times I would speak as closely to Delainey as possible. I researched how to bring the authenticity of voodooism into this scene, and a lot of my process was changing the chemistry inside my body. I tried to keep my eyes as soft as possible, and not allow for too much movement when her spirit arrives in Merrick’s body. I wanted to make it feel like time was irrelevant for her.”
While Afful can’t reveal whether we’ll see more of Merrick beyond this one scene, she already feels that she’s gotten the full Vampire Lestat experience — up to and including some bloodletting. When Merrick first makes contact with Claudia, the vengeful spirit slams the witch’s face into her desk, resulting in a bloody mouth and broken teeth.
“I come from a theater background, so I love that stuff,” Afful says with a smile. “I met with the stunt coordinator beforehand and got it down in 15 minutes. While we were filming, I did it over and over and over again, and getting to spit fake blood everywhere was just the best. They also took a 3D image of my mouth and rebuilt my jaw and teeth as a prosthetic. That whole sequence was just a really full experience for me.”
Anderson similarly characterizes the scene as a delightful full-course meal, even if he spends the majority of it on the receiving end of some serious verbal abuse. “That was such a fun scene to play, because I got to constantly change how Louis felt about things,” he observes. “I would jump between pure shock and relief to finally hear her say those things. He had locked that part of Claudia away in his telling of who she was in the previous seasons. But now it has to come out.”
“If you can get Louis credit for anything, it’s that he’s constantly trying to understand himself and his own story,” Anderson adds. “He wants to understand how he’s perceived and how his actions affect others. So this reunion is a part of that; he wants Claudia to tell him who he is to her, because he has an inkling, but he needs to hear it from her.”
For her part, Hayles says that while this version of Claudia isn’t filtered through Louis’s adoring gaze that defined the show’s previous seasons, it also isn’t her truest self — as evidenced by the fact that she lets Lestat off the hook, despite his own less-than-fatherly behavior during her undead lifetime. “Her whole life was an injustice, and because Louis was closest to her, she feels the most betrayed by him,” the actress observes.
“Honestly, the saddest part of the whole scene is that Claudia is calling out for Madeleine,” Hayles continues. “The one thing Claudia wanted was a companion who loved her without any conditions. So there’s a part of her that sees that Lestat and Louis are back together after everything they went through and just thinks, ‘How unfair.’ They were supposed to have died, but they get to have each other again, and she can’t be with the one person who she was supposed to be with forever. It’s another injustice.”
Maybe Claudia can take some solace in the fact that her dads’ on-again romance appears to be off-again… along with both of their heads. The episode’s shocking final season finds Armand and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) joining forces to decapitate the duo before Lestat can take the stage at his big concert and reveal more vampire secrets to the general public. Secrets like the fact that he unwisely awoke Akasha, the Queen of the Damned — a several millennia-old vampire whose return spells trouble for both vampire and humankind.
“They’re the Ross and Rachel of vampires,” Anderson jokes about how Louis and Lestat have a demonstrated track record of falling apart just as they’re on the verge of getting back together. “The scene where they’re on the bench talking to each other is the most vulnerable that Louis has ever been. He’s basically telling Lestat, ‘I can see a future, and you’re involved in it that. Would you like to join me?’ It’s a big thing for him to say something like that — and then you obviously have to cut that short.”
Compared to the tongue-lashing he received from Claudia, losing his head wasn’t a hardship. “It was properly silly,” Anderson says of the decapitation. “Sam and I were sitting there with these green masks over our heads, and had to stay completely still. It was another one of those, ‘This is our job?’ days. They also had to make these head molds for both of us, and It was pretty creepy seeing my own head every time I went to the makeup chair.”
In case you’re wondering, Anderson did not keep his severed head as a souvenir. “I have two young children, and I just imagined them sorting through my stuff decades later after I’ve died and they find their deceased dad’s head preserved at the age of 35,” the actor says, laughing. “That was a horrific idea, so I didn’t take it. If it hadn’t looked so gory, I maybe could have put some glitter on the neck wound and kept in a jar at my house, Futurama-style.”
Paging Dr. Zoidberg…
