AMC’s Interview With the Vampire series has rounded out its core trio of actors. Young actress Bailey Bass has been cast as Claudia, the vampire forced to live a torturous existence in a child’s body. Bass joins Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid — playing Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, respectively — in the series, which is set to debut on AMC and AMC+ sometime in 2022.
Bass most notably garnered fame when it was revealed she had been cast as Tsireya in the upcoming Avatar sequels, the follow-ups to James Cameron’s record-breaking 2009 film. She also recently wrapped production on A Jenkins Family Christmas, based on Douglas Lyons’ play Chicken & Biscuits, and will move right into work on Interview when the eight-episode series begins production later this year.
Bass will play a key role in the series, based on Anne Rice’s novel, as the victim of Louis’s feeding frenzy after being turned into a vampire. Already sick with plague, the young girl is turned into a vampire by Louis’s own mentor, Lestat, making her the third member of their unusual undead family. Eventually, Claudia comes to resent her two mentors for trapping her in the body of a young child for eternity, never to mature into an adult, which creates serious predicaments for both men.
Bass is now the second actor to play the young Claudia on screen, after Kirsten Dunst performed the role at only eleven years old in the 1994 film of the same name starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. AMC’s adaptation comes after the acquisition of eighteen of Rice’s novels in 2020, with plans to franchise them overseen by Mark Johnson. Alan Taylor, who recently directed The Many Saints of Newark, is set to direct the series’ first two episodes, as well as joining the show’s team of executive producers. In a recent Collider interview with Taylor, the director confirmed the series will begin filming in New Orleans this December.
Interview With the Vampire is created and written by Rolin Jones, who serves as showrunner, and will executive produce the series alongside Johnson, Taylor, and Anne and Christopher Rice. The series will premiere on AMC and AMC+ sometime in 2022.