People of a certain age remember Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, both with fangs, playing Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lion court in the 1994 movie version of Anne Rice’s book Interview With the Vampire. The movie posters were dominated by a picture of Tom Cruise as a vampire, with the words “Drink from me and live forever” written over him.
At the bottom of the poster, there were two small people. One is clearly Brad Pitt, who, even when he’s not moving, is Louis. A young girl, who is another figure, is coming toward him. Claudia is her name, and a young Kirsten Dunst plays her in the movie. In the show, actress Bailey Bass is putting herself in her small shoes. Bailey is a little bit older than Kirsten was when she played Claudia, which makes you wonder how old Claudia is in AMC’s Interview With the Vampire.
In the ‘Interview With the Vampire’ series on AMC, how old is Claudia?
So far, all we have for the new Interview With the Vampire series is a trailer. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t tell us much about Claudia. Bailey Bass turned 19 on June 18, 2022, so she was probably around 17 or 18 when the series was made. That would make her about 7 years older than Kirsten Dunst was when she acted in the Interview With the Vampire movie in 1994.
Claudia was only 5 years old in the book. Vampires have an unspoken rule that children shouldn’t be turned, so her age is a big plot point. Twilight: Breaking Dawn would later take this idea and use it to make a move that was just as controversial, even though Renesmee was not a child vampire.
Due to laws about child labour, it makes sense to hire an older actress. Also, the show’s subject matter might be too much for a younger actor to handle. Claudia got more and more angry about not being able to grow up in the book and movie, so it will be interesting to see where the series goes from here.
Claudia was modelled after Anne Rice’s late daughter.
In a 1995 interview with Anne Rice for Rolling Stone, writer Mikal Gilmore said he learned that Anne’s 5-year-old daughter Michele died of granulocytic leukemia. A few years later, Anne would write Interview With the Vampire, which was about an immortal girl named Claudia who was 5 years old.
When the subject of being obsessed with death came up, Anne said that since moving back to New Orleans, where she was born, she had come to accept death. For a very long time, she was horrified by how meaningless death was, and it was this senseless feeling that made her angry.
“It scared me, not because my life will end, but because it made me think that the Holocaust might not have been important after all. Or the pain my daughter goes through might not matter, “she told me.
Anne Rice was raised Catholic, and this is clear in most of her books. However, she went back and forth between being an atheist and a Catholic several times in her life. She rarely talked about her daughter in interviews, and she rarely brought up the fact that Claudia was her daughter. But a little more than a year before Anne died, a connection between the two was brought up again.
On August 5, 2020, the anniversary of Michele’s death, Anne’s son Christopher will post a tribute to Michele on Facebook, which he says Anne asked him to share with her fans:
“My daughter Michele Rice died of leukaemia on this day in 1972. Today is the day that our family mourns her death. She was the model for Claudia’s beauty in “Interview with a Vampire.””
Anne died in December 2021, so she didn’t get to see Claudia in her most recent form. But it’s clear that Anne wasn’t thinking about small things when she made the character. Instead, the character was based on something much more important than age, which is just a number.
