[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 4, “I Want You More Than Anything in the World.”]
Claudia and Louis have reached a point of no return in Interview With the Vampire Season 2. Delainey Hayles tells TV Insider that “trust is gone” between them after Claudia learned Louis (Jacob Anderson) concealed Armand’s (Assad Zaman) knowledge of their history with Lestat (Sam Reid) from her in Season 2 Episode 4, “I Want You More Than Anything in the World.” This led to a blowout fight between the father-daughter duo, during which Hayles says Claudia was still trying to take care of Louis despite her “seeing red” because of him.
Armand threatened Claudia for spending time with the human Madeleine (the alluring Roxane Duran) and away from the theater in the episode, which aired Sunday, June 2 on AMC. Given her murderous history, does Claudia now want to kill Armand?
“I think she wants to kill Louis first,” Hayles says. When Armand reveals what he knows, what he’s always known, she first feels “fear and then it’s pure anger towards Louis.”
“She does want to kill Armand, but she knows that would come with a lot,” Hayles goes on. “Her going back to Louis, she’s going to one person who she trusted who is supposed to keep his end of the deal, and he doesn’t, so she’s just seeing red.” Because of this, “the trust is gone,” she explains. “Louis was her person and he’s always been her person. And that was the last straw for her because she’s given him so many chances.”
Even as their relationship is experiencing what could be a permanent shift, Claudia is still taking care not to trigger her traumatized father.
Larry Horricks / AMC
“Claudia has a lot of trauma [because] of Louis and Lestat’s relationship, so when she argues with Louis, it’s never a case of her invading his space,” Hayles says. “When she argues with him, there’s always distance between her and Louis. She’s scarred from Season 1. No matter how angry she is, she’s never really in Louis’ face like Lestat was. She’s still caring for him. She saw what he went through. She doesn’t want to put him through that, but at the tail end of it she’s furious.”
She wasn’t invading his space, but she was cutting deep emotionally in a desperate attempt to make him see that his Armand blindspot has inflicted a familiar pain. “Let me guess, he’s your companion finally? Well, good for f***ing you!” Claudia says in a righteous rage in their Parisian home before she invokes his “you and me” speech from the premiere. “You and him, him and you, you and f***ing him! Picked another one over me!”
Related‘IWTV’: Delainey Hayles on What Claudia Really Thinks of Louis & the Coven
“Louis is like, ‘I’m responding, but I also cannot hear you right now,’ which is why she storms out. He said to her, ‘Doesn’t sound like him,’ and that’s when the ball drops. She’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve picked your side now,’” Hayles explains. “‘Love makes you stupid and fickle and weak and blind.’ She’s trying to list off all the things, all the words to make him realize what he’s doing, but it’s going in one ear out the other for him.”
Hayles says there’s no merit to Louis’ response saying that she left him for the coven: “He just said that as a response, but he knows that it’s not [true]. He can see that she doesn’t like doing the play.” Part of her rage comes from the fact that Claudia has “suppressed her vampire tendencies to be comfortable with Louis.” She does this “because she loves him,” Hayles notes, and “she doesn’t want to risk their relationship” because of that. “She’s done stuff to appease Louis, as Louis has for Claudia,” but Claudia feels that commitment to her fading.
She’s appeasing the Théâtres des Vampires as well. Claudia hates playing Baby Lu in My Baby Loves Windows, but she plays along willingly at first for a heartbreaking reason. “If I just subject myself to this just a tiny bit, it’ll only go on for so long and then I’ll be a real part of the coven,” Hayles says of Claudia’s thought process, but “this is not how she envisioned her leading role.”
The 1927 theater company helped create the coven’s plays this season, and two of their real-life company members are in the Season 2 cast (Suzanne Andrade as Celeste and Esme Appleton as Estelle). Look up the company and you’ll see how their animated projections inspired the show’s on-stage productions. Andrade and Appleton choreographed My Baby Loves Windows in addition to appearing in the play as their characters, and Hayles reveals that while viewers only saw some scenes from the production, an entire short play was created.
“I rehearsed it when we were filming another episode, so when I would have free moments, we’d go into a warehouse and the women of 1927 were making it as we were filming other scenes,” Hayles shares. “I think I had approximately five rehearsals over the duration of a month, and each time I’d come in, they’d adapt something more. So we had the outline of what my movements were going to be, and then I had to go away and make a routine myself. Well, add bits of Claudia. They made all the projection in the background, and it was a lot of fun. It kind of felt like a secret mission when I was filming. I’d go to this warehouse and be like, nobody knows I’m dancing right now.”Delainey Hayles as Claudia, Esme Appleton as Estelle and Suzanne Andrade as Celeste in ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Season 2 Episode 4 (Larry Horricks / AMC)The Claudia bits Hayles added were the tap dancing and what she calls the “Claudia swag,” but above everything else, Hayles “wanted to play with how many different versions of hate could she experience for the performance.”“I wanted to explore the seven levels of hatred in a way where it’s like, ‘I f***ing hate this. Oh, this is funny. Look at all you f***ers watching me dance. OK, now I’m tired. OK, now I’m distraught. OK, now I hate this,’” she says. Claudia’s hatred for this particular show is because of the infantilization and degradation, not a hatred of the artform. In fact, Hayles says Claudia inherited a love of the stage from her father, Lestat. The coven putting her through this torturous show is tainting her happy childhood memories with Louis and Lestat.RelatedWhy That Major ‘IWTV’ Character Was Left out of Episode 3“A part of her knew that she was going to be on stage, just not in the manner that it is,” Hayles shares. “She has Lestat’s blood. I think they both have a tendency to love theater. Lestat and Louis brought her to loads of theater shows to watch, they watch a lot of films and stuff. It’s something that she’s always been interested in because her dads have been interested in it, so that won’t escape her. She loves the theater, but not what [this one is] subjecting her to.”Claudia “fully” looks back fondly on those happy times with her dads. “Those are her growing up memories and they stay with you,” Hayles says. “If you asked her, how would you remember Lestat? I think she’d give you answers about him that were like, ‘He was an asshole. He was terrible.’ And then if you really got to the core of it, there were lots of fun moments that they had together as well. But her hatred for him will be the first thought always.”Hatred is the powerful surface-level feeling she has for her slain dad, but Hayles admits that Claudia does feel nostalgic when thinking about Lestat. Louis “broke up” with Dream-stat at the end of Episode 4 after spending several episodes projecting the best parts of their decades together. How would a Dream-stat appear for Claudia?“I think he would appear in her conversations with Louis when her and Louis are disagreeing with each other,” Hayles reveals. “I actually think she envisions Lestat on her shoulder being her lawyer in a way, like, ‘Louis, you’re not listening to her properly.’ But she hates him, so that would also wouldn’t happen. I don’t think she would have a Dream-stat. Her hatred for him is just too blinding. But really digging down to the core, I think she does think about him a lot.”If only Claudia knew that Louis projected Dream-stat into their fight and made him a supportive presence for them both. “The wilderness that is our daughter,” Dream-stat said with an empathetic look after she stormed out. When we see Claudia and Louis together again, their relationship dynamic will be unrecognizable. It’s a good thing she has Madeleine to lean on.Interview With the Vampire, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming Sundays on AMC+
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