Bailey Bass Kills It 

Claudia is one of the most tragic characters in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles and possibly the reason the book series exists. The late author created this immortal child in Interview with the Vampire after losing her five-year-old daughter to leukemia.

But Claudia has continued to grow. She was aged up to be played by an eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst in the 1994 movie, and in AMC's new take on the story, nineteen-year-old Bailey Bass plays her as an eternal fourteen — a special kind of hell.

"When you're fourteen," Bass says, "you hate your body. And she's stuck with that body — it's a prison."

For the new Interview with the Vampire series, now on AMC and AMC+, Bass embraced Claudia's physical limitations and developed mental stages for her to age through — a "baby" Claudia, a "tween" Claudia, et cetera.

"I realized that her prefrontal cortex will never develop, and that's why she feels so much," the actress says. Bass also wore a binder on set to deemphasize her breasts, as Claudia's will never develop. "I wanted to explore what it was like to not have a figure," she says.

But the most important — and most subtle — way she expresses Claudia is via posture. "With baby Claudia, I was hunched over almost all the time. When she wants to be seen as a full woman, she stands straight."

The yearning to be a woman, perhaps a mother, is key to understanding this new Claudia's heartbreak. "She wanted a simple life, the picket fence," Bass says. "And now she has to cope with the fact that she'll never have that." Instead, there's a more complicated journey, with first coffins, first kills, even first loves.

And, for Bass — soon to be seen in Avatar: The Way of Water — there's a new world of fake fangs, colored contact lenses and acrylic nails. The latter was Bass's suggestion. "They were just going to do press-on nails, and I was like, 'Guys! We need to go to the salon!' So we all got nails pointy enough to aid us in our kills."

Which was handy, because, as Bass proudly notes, Claudia racks up the most victims in season one.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #11, 2022, under the title, "Killing It."