Claudia Meets Another Vampire in Interview With the Vampire Episode 5 Clip

Last week, AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire introduced viewers to Claudia (Bailey Bass), the teenage girl brought into immortality by Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid) to complete their little vampire family. By the end of the episode, while Claudia’s body remained eternally that of a child, she’d matured far past her years and come to realize the heartbreaking consequences of the Dark Gift after she accidentally killed her first boyfriend. It’s a turning point for the character and now, in a new clip from this week’s episode, “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart”, we see Claudia out on her own where she comes into contact with another vampire who isn’t Louis and Lestat for the first time.

In the clip, Claudia is accosted by a white student as she’s leaving a school with the student telling her what she can and cannot do and accusing her of theft of books from the library. As he’s harassing her, another man rides up on a motorcycle and it’s soon revealed that this other stranger isn’t just some random guy — he’s a vampire as well, which he reveals by speaking to Claudia telepathically and flashing her one of his fangs. You can check it out for yourself below.

While this take on Claudia is a bit different than the one from the books, Bass previously told ComicBook.com that even though the character you see on screen is different, she has the same essence of Claudia from the novel.

“At the end of the day, she is the same Claudia,” Bass told ComicBook.com. “She has the same essence in the book. You see this feral, powerful, strong, craving independence person, that little vampire that’s stuck in this body. The only difference is now she’s 14 and I’m Black. Anne Rice was one of the most pro-diversity, pro-LGBTQIA people, and because of that you see it translate so effortlessly in this world. All we did was just make it in 1910 and changed what the characters look like a little bit, but it just opened the door to having more expression on screen.”

Bass went on to explain that for her, a big part of that expression was Claudia’s hair and getting to embrace a natural texture as part of the authenticity to this take on the character.

“A big part of it was hair for me,” Bass said. “I feel like curly hair is not represented on screen a lot and if it is, it’s not in a way that’s always embraced. And I made it an effort to make sure that we are representing Claudia’s hair throughout her entire life, throughout her experiences. She never conformed, I actually debated that. I’m like, ‘should she try and straighten her hair in some of these scenes?’ And I’m like ‘No, the beauty about Claudia is she never wants to be like anyone else.’ Despite being stuck in this body, she doesn’t want to be other women, she wants to be herself just older, and that’s the beauty of her. She’s so strong.”

What is Interview With the Vampire About?

A sensuous, contemporary reinvention of Anne Rice‘s revolutionary gothic novel, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire follows Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), and Claudia’s (Bailey Bass) epic story of love, blood, and the perils of immortality, as told to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). Chafing at the limitations of life as a Black man in 1900s New Orleans, Louis finds it impossible to resist the rakish Lestat de Lioncourt’s offer of the ultimate escape: joining him as his vampire companion. But Louis’s intoxicating new powers come with a violent price, and the introduction of Lestat’s newest fledgling, the child vampire Claudia, soon sets them on a decades-long path of revenge and atonement.

Interview With the Vampire airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC. You can also stream new episodes on AMC+.