This week’s episode of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire was a turning point for Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson). Not only did the episode see Claudia (Bailey Bass) get turned to a vampire and join Louis and Lestat (Sam Reid) in their slowly unravelling family dynamic, but Louis also was hit with the death of his mother, Florence. Viewers got to see Florence, played by Rae Dawn Chong, lying at rest in her coffin at the wake and while the event and her death both have consequences for Louis, according to Chong there was a detail about her experience filming the episode that was a bit surprising to her: the casket.
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Speaking with ComicBook.com, Chong said that she was surprised by how uncomfortable the casket she had to lie in as Florence was because of how caskets are structured to present the deceased.
“It was surprisingly uncomfortable, and I was just telling somebody else because when you’re dead I guess they take your guts out so they puff out your chest,” Chong said. “So, unfortunately, I was in a real casket and there was this weird uprising in the middle where it would, in a normal bed, be more even. This thing had a puff thing, so my chest was even more puffed out and it was so uncomfortable for the little bit that I was in there. I was surprised at how absolutely uncomfortable it was, and if I had to be in a casket longer, I would ask for another one because that one had this rise right in that weird spot in my body. I was expecting it to be super cozy and it was the opposite because I’m not dead.”
While Chong’s experience playing Florence in her coffin was uncomfortable personally, in terms of the series and the characters, Florence’s death is going to have last impact on her loved ones, especially Louis. Chong also explained that with Florence’s death, she thinks that his eternal life is going to lead him to a different perspective — and it’s the idea that while he may have “everything” with the freedom of eternal life, he’s going to ultimately end up learning about loneliness and all he’s lost.
“I think with Louis, now that he’s eternal, I think all the things when you have that much free time, you will go back and miss that texture, and that he always had me. No matter what was going down, I could hear him, and that is something we miss,” Chong said. “And I think Rolin [Jones, series showrunner] will be able to show that, and I may come back in flashback because of that, just to give us a break from the drone of what they’re always up to. You can only kill and bite and f-ck so much before you need to have a sense of from whence we’ve come. I know that whenever someone passes away, I don’t necessarily get sad about the fact that they’ve croaked. I get sad about the fact that I don’t get to have them as a reference and an anchor. There are many people who have passed on in my life that I miss, not so much because I wanted them to live forever, although I did, but because I no longer can use them to reflect back and ask them questions about life. So, I think Louis is going to have those moments and I think that who he is because of his family, and I think that’s the paradox of the vampire. You learn about loneliness.”
Interview With the Vampire airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.
