Written by: Athena Kalaganis

Edited by: Anya Pan

When Jacob Anderson was announced to star as Louis de Pointe du Lac, it was evident that AMC’s television adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire would diverge from the 1976 novel. The show would not depict Louis as a plantation owner, nor Claudia as a blonde child. Instead, Anderson portrays a Black vampire from Jim Crow New Orleans, recounting his tumultuous relationship with his maker, Lestat (Sam Reid) and the tragedy of their adopted daughter, Claudia. Here, the white five-year-old of Rice’s imagination becomes a Black fourteen-year-old, condemned to mature yet be eternally perceived as an adolescent. Claudia’s character resists manipulation and exercises autonomy, revealing an evolution of the treatment of Black women in the greater vampire subgenre. 

Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire 

In 2022, the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) calls upon journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) to write a book on his life’s story¹. Louis begins by recounting his meeting with the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt as a thirty-three-year-old man in 1910 New Orleans…

 On the altar of St. Augustine’s Church, Lestat made Louis into a vampire, offering romantic companionship and immortality². Their relationship, although passionate, soured with Lestat’s infidelity and Louis’ inability to distance himself from humanity³. When white residents set Black neighbourhoods on fire in retaliation for Louis’ murder of a member of local government⁴, he saved a teenager named Claudia from her burning building⁵. He dragged her charred body across the floor and begged Lestat to turn her into a vampire to save her life⁶. Lestat only agreed to do so to keep Louis in his good graces. The trio briefly lived as a happy family, yet their fantasy of normalcy shattered when Claudia poisoned Lestat and fled to Europe with Louis, a plot she orchestrated to rip herself and Louis away from Lestat’s manipulative control⁷.

Louis continues his interview by outlining his and Claudia’s encounter with the Parisian vampire coven, operating under the front of the Théâtre des vampires. Briefly an actress for the Théâtre, Claudia starred in a play, where the audience laughed as her character, an infantilizing minstrelsy role, falls to her death⁸. The coven deliberately humiliated her by forcing her to act out one of her deepest insecurities, her childlike appearance, on a stage for 500 shows. Claudia and Louis eventually try to break away from the coven. However, their hopes of independence are disrupted when they are put on trial for breaking the coven’s laws, leading to Claudia’s death⁹. The second season closes with Louis finally embracing vampirism, his daughter’s dress displayed behind him¹⁰.

Race & Relevance

Along with the amplification of Louis and Lestat’s relationship, the serious changes of Claudia’s character underline the strengths of the show. Assad Zaman, who plays Armand, a South Asian vampire, initially Slavic, states that race is not an added layer to the show, it is the show. Claudia struggles for autonomy in the Jim Crow South; she faces harassment in the form of racial slurs¹¹, and is subjected to the norms of segregation throughout¹². Even as a vampire, she cannot escape the struggles of the Black experience. AMC’s Claudia allows for the reinterpretation of a gothic heroine while not disregarding the implications of her new identity as a Black woman.

Claudia & Autonomy 

Claudia overcomes the traumatic event of her transformation, occurring through a backdrop of racial violence, by embracing vampirism. In the event of her transformation, both her wellbeing and consent are an afterthought to Louis and Lestat. However, she resists the constraints of her predicament by using her newfound monstrosity as a source of power. In Rice’s original piece, Claudia’s monstrosity represents her overturning “the boundaries of the hierarchy she is placed within,”¹³ namely the limits of her child body—the 2022 adaptation remains consistent with this characterization. AMC’s Claudia, unlike guilt-ridden Louis, has no qualms about consuming human blood. She revels in the kill to the extent she writes down her victims’ final words and keeps physical souvenirs such as fingers and torsos¹⁴. Lestat later refers to her as a “consummate killer” in which he “see[s] the best of [his] vampiric self.”¹⁵ Claudia’s monster is compelling, yet Hayles describes Claudia being “constantly uncomfortable” in her fourteen-year-old state. Her vulnerability allows for her monstrosity to be multiplicitous in its implications. She exerts some agency by becoming an apt predator and thriving in vampirism.   

In addition, Claudia yearns for independence, a desire shut down by Louis and Lestat, fueling her resentment towards them. Isolated from others beyond her fathers, her loneliness leads her to question Lestat on the origins of the vampires to find a community¹⁶. Lestat deliberately withholds any information that could potentially see her leaving the household, even calling her a “mistake” when Claudia tries to make her own vampire¹⁷. This blatant treatment as an afterthought enrages her to the tipping point of subduing Lestat through an intricate plot, allowing her to break free of New Orleans¹⁸. Despite her rage, Claudia defies the caricature that depicts Black women as irrationally angry¹⁹. Her anger is not left unexplained²⁰; it stems from her treatment as secondary. Even as Louis and Lestat have held her back, Claudia pursues her desires for companionship, exhibiting agency over her romantic ambitions. She meets her first love, Charlie²¹, and later finds a companion within Madeleine, an acquaintance that blossoms into a romance²². Claudia’s sexuality as a Black woman is not shied away from. She is able to love and be loved, even with fathers who try to keep her locked in a golden cage, reflecting the change in our media environment’s perception of Black women’s desirability. 

Despite the brutality of her ensuing death, Claudia exhibits control of her fate. In Paris, Louis, Claudia, and Madeleine are kidnapped by the Parisian vampire coven who orchestrate a sham trial, posing as a play, to eliminate them²³. In the end, Louis is saved by Lestat, yet Claudia and Madeleine, embracing each other in death, suffer under the heat of the sun. Her vampire life both ends and begins with her being secondary to the “stormy romance”²⁴ of her fathers. As her beloved turns to ash in her arms, Claudia controls how her own death will be remembered. First, she sings Baby Lulu’s theme song, plunging the theatre into silence. Then, she turns away the audience in an act of defiance, not allowing them to see her in death when they mocked her in life. Finally, she looks at a weakened Lestat: her father’s mortified expression being the last thing she sees²⁵. Regarding her last moments, Hayles adds that “she’s the strongest vampire and she would only go out this way.” She cannot escape death, yet she defies those exerting control over her by promising retribution from the afterlife and perpetually haunting Lestat. Although brutally unjust, her death subverts common tropes related to Black women in fantasy, given that it is not depicted as a form of deserved violence²⁶. Claudia’s fate is not justified through the plot; the showrunners effectively highlight the injustice of her situation while underlining the resistance she presents to it. 

Claudia & Black Women in Vampire Media 

A discussion of AMC’s Claudia naturally invokes how her character fits into the greater narrative of Black women in vampire media. When Black women are included in vampire media, they often appear as victims, yet are rarely turned. For instance, in Interview with the Vampire’s 1994 film predecessor, the sole woman of colour is enslaved and murdered by Louis²⁷. The few that are turned, for instance True Blood’s Tara, are brought into vampirism as selfless means to save the white protagonists. Additionally, the romantic potential of Black women in fantasy is muted. The Vampire Diaries’ Bonnie and the aforementioned Tara both fall victim to the characterization of Black women as “undesirable and disposable.” Though the book shows vampire Damon falling in love with Bonnie, the show includes him in the love triangle with Stefan and Elena²⁸. The powerful witch is instead written into a recurring relationship with Elena’s brother, Jeremy. However, their sexual relationship is only explored midway through the show’s fifth season²⁹. Tara’s relationship with Sam paints her as the “less than satisfactory replacement” to his true desire, Sookie, the white protagonist. Tara’s own romantic affections towards Sookie remain unrequited. 

While AMC’s Claudia does overcome many of the pitfalls that Tara and Bonnie exhibit, the writing of her character exhibits shortfalls, namely, the lack of screentime accorded to Claudia and Madeleine’s relationship. Although comforting to see her experience unconditional love, the only lesbian relationship of the show up to this point is treated as idealist, not allowing room for the complexity that is accorded to the other queer relationships, notably that of her parents. 

Final Thoughts

Throughout the show’s first two seasons, Claudia continuously overcomes the challenges to her autonomy. She embraces vampirism, surmounting the unconsensual events of her transformation. She forcefully grabs her independence from the constraints imposed by her fathers and finds companionship. Finally, even in death, Claudia subverts the coven’s expectations of her succumbing to fate without resistance. Claudia’s character marks a shift in the vampire genre. Interview with the Vampire returns for a third installment, The Vampire Lestat in April 2026. While Claudia is not expected to return to the land of the living (dead), Delainey Hayles will be featured with Sheila Atim taking on the role of Akasha, originally made iconic by Aaliyah in The Queen of the Damned (2002).

Bibliography

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Footnotes