Interview with the Vampire's Delainey Hayles and Rolin Jones 'Leaned Into Grotesque Beauty' for the Trial's 'Horrifying' End

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Interview with the Vampire Season 2, Episode 7, "I Could Not Prevent It."]

For a series that loves to indulge in the ostentatious, Interview with the Vampire knows when to bring down the curtain in silence. The penultimate episode of the AMC gothic drama's second season ends on a hushed note: no final lines of dialogue, no swelling score from Daniel Hart — just the sound of a dress being swept out of a pile of ash, the click of a vengeful vampire's boots, and the din of chatter from an unsuspecting audience. After the devastating finale to the perversely theatrical trial put on by Armand's (Assad Zaman) theater troupe, which sees Louis (Jacob Anderson) hauled off to be buried alive while Claudia (Delainey Hayles) and Madeleine (Roxane Duran) are burned to death by a harsh beam of sunlight, there is no other way this hour could have concluded.

Since Season 1, the series has been making it clear that Claudia is no longer part of Louis' life in present-day Dubai, while her diaries — with all their mysteriously missing pages — have acted as a major source of information for Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) as he conducts his interviews. And while those familiar with Anne Rice's novel have long known where this has all been heading, Sunday's episode finally revealed the horrifying truth of her fate. Directed by Emma Freeman, "I Could Not Prevent It" picks up in the direct aftermath of Episode 6, which ended with Louis, Claudia, and Madeleine bloodied, disoriented, and put on trial for Louis and Claudia's near murder of Lestat (Sam Reid) in front of a room full of jeering theatergoers. "Sacks come off, you're characters in a play," Daniel observes in 2022. "Props," Louis corrects. "Props in a play. A play that's been fully designed, and rehearsed, and every actor on stage has scripted lines, except for us."

Though series creator Rolin Jones told TV Guide that he and the writers view Episodes 6 through 8 of the second season as a complete package, he noted that Episode 7 was a particularly challenging task, one he'd been thinking about since the first season. He ended up considering it Season 2's "second bottle episode, to an extent" (the first being the fifth episode, "Don't Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape"). "Honestly, it was the one up on the board that I was like, 'This thing's never gonna work,'" he said. "How do you make a stage play cinematic?" Neil Jordan's 1994 film adaptation notably didn't tackle the trial, and Jones was quick to point out that even Rice doesn't spend much time on it. But for a season so steeped in the theatrical, it felt necessary to "pay off that theater," Jones said. "It's a theater company! Come on! Go for it. Do it, do it."

First, the return of Lestat, back from the dead and ready to tell his side of the story, had to be addressed. "We had starved the audience of Sam Reid, and here he came," Jones said. Though Reid appeared as "dream Lestat" in the first leg of the season, and he was seen briefly at the very end of Episode 6, Lestat's entrance into the trial proceedings is treated with a rock star-like gravitas. "The instructions to everybody when we sat down the first time [were], 'Get out of the way. It's Lestat's episode for the first 35 minutes.'"

The trial's star witness, Lestat recounts the full series of events that led to his attempted murder, with Santiago (Ben Daniels) goading his every word. Much to the irritation of the coven, Lestat goes off script several times — "You cannot script a hurricane," as Armand puts it — but his most crucial contribution is his revisiting of a couple of important scenes from Season 1, which had previously only been shown from Louis' perspective: Claudia's transformation and the violent fight that ended with Lestat dropping Louis out of the sky. In the first flashback, we see Louis swear he'll stay with Lestat if he turns a dying Claudia into a vampire, going against Lestat's better judgment, as well as the ancient laws that disallow children from being becoming vampires. In the second, Louis fights back more against Lestat, and hurls more cruel insults, than he did in the version he told Daniel in the first season.

When it came to choosing which scenes to revisit, Jones said it all came down to what was in service of Louis' narrative. "There's probably two or three more, if we had another 20 minutes, things we could have revisited," he said. "What are the most important things for Louis' story? Because it's not all a buyback for Lestat."

Of these "raw and messy and fraught" scenes, Jones remembered what a shake-up they were for the cast and crew. "For the actors who have been playing certain truths for a long time, to get a script like that, you're like, 'Wait, what?'" he said. "There's this really lovely moment when Louis is begging, begging him at his feet to turn Claudia. Look, sitting on the sidelines watching Lestat advocate for Claudia in the way that he does for the first time, people who had been working on the show were just sitting there not prepared. They had read it, and they hadn't been prepared to see Lestat say it." While present-day Louis tells Daniel to go with Lestat's version in his book, Jones noted these redos are "a culmination, but not the end of the story."

This, though, is as much Claudia's episode as is Lestat's. Disarmed and beaten down, she's forced to remain silent and seated as new details of her own story are revealed to her for the first time. "I think a lot of things are coming to light that she didn't think Louis would be involved in or would do," said Hayles. "I don't think her love for Louis is lost, but [her] frustration is at its peak, and she feels betrayed." She tries to speak up for herself, and for Louis, a handful of times, but the script has already been written. From Hayles' view, she thought that the ever-perceptive Claudia saw the writing on the wall long before Louis and Madeleine understood what would happen to them. It's part of why, Hayles said, Claudia makes such a scene before her death, telling every member of the crowd bearing witness to her suffering that she plans to "come back and f---ing kill" them all. "If you're gonna do it, then you better do it your worst," Hayles said. "If you're going to bring the sun, bring the hottest sun you have, because I'm not going out without a bang. She's a fighter, and she is Lestat's daughter, so she can't let them win fully."

Perhaps the most devastating detail of the whole ordeal was how quickly the romance between Claudia and Madeleine was cut short — giving "a taste of what could have been, or what could be, for her," said Jones, made their deaths all the more haunting. While Hayles wouldn't reveal exactly what she and Duran whispered to each other just before their characters are killed, she recalled receiving a note from writer Hannah Moscovitch to speak to Duran in French. It's a tender moment that comes after Madeleine rejects the coven's offer to live out the rest of her days among them. "Claudia gives her a look like, 'Choose the coven,'" Hayles said. "And then Madeleine chooses her and puts her first, and she's never had somebody do that for her in these circumstances. I think in a way that she could go happily knowing that somebody put her first."

For the mechanics of the scene, Jones was wary of showing yet another burn sequence, especially after Louis' suicide attempt in Episode 5, and knew the show needed to make Claudia's send-off into a "meaningful, defiant death." "We really leaned into grotesque beauty," he said. "I think when you watch the last shot, as horrifying as it is, when you see it the 20th time, there is a sort of Francis Bacon beauty to it that [visual effects supervisor] Ted Rae and all the magicians who worked on the special effects for that were able to achieve. And her body blowing into the camera that the audience is watching, it just seemed like the way to go, and to frame that as Lestat's point of view."

As Armand tells it to Daniel, Lestat is last thing Claudia ever saw on Earth, and he looks down at his daughter in horror as her body vanishes before him. Hayles remembered how much the narrow vision provided by her vampire lenses helped in the moment: "When you face forward, the stage lights are staticky, you just can't see," she said. "And then when I turned to him, away from the light, it was the first time that you could see somebody, but [it was] an outline. And I was concentrating so hard on his face, and it was so sad." She understood Claudia's last look to Lestat as how any child would look to a parent in a moment of distress. "The way that she looks is like all hope is lost, like, 'Dad, I need you.'"

Hayles still isn't entirely sure how to interpret Claudia's death: liberation or punishment? Still, she described Claudia's demise as an emancipation from the body that has caused her so much pain. As she burns, Claudia reprises the anthem she was forced to sing in her role as Baby Lu, "I Don't Like Windows When They're Closed," one last time. "Sometimes I think about it as her being like, 'Oh, I'm free,'" Hayles mused. "'Let me just give them one more show.'"

Season 2 of Interview with the Vampire airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.