Claudia

This year, the classic vampire novel turns 50. we met up with the late Anne Rice's son, author Christopher Rice, at Gallier House.

Gallier House was, according to my mother, the model for the home that Louis Lestat and Claudia make together in their vampire existence.

I don't think there's anyone who has anything to do with vampires who doesn't know who Anne Rice is.

She made the vampire a figure of passion and compassion.

And then... post uh louis's departure from france he shuts up he's completely absent from the book

true and in fact that's something that i i noted as we went as he kind of starts talking again at the very tail end i was like oh yeah you're here i mean we're here i mean however this works so geordie there's some real big characters in this book To be honest, I think you could talk about this entire book basically framed around Louis, Louis and Lestat, Louis and Claudia, Louis and Armand.

And that is the entire novel.

So Louis is a...

The book would have you frame it initially as like they're roomies, like they live in the same house.

That's their relationship.

But obviously it's significantly greater than that, especially when Louis is preparing to leave Lestat with Claudia and suddenly he's reticent.

And he cannot provide an actual reason for him to be reticent to do it, because there's nothing that he apparently likes about Lestat.

And that's where I think she won the Oscar, actually.

For that movie? For Claudia, yes.

You know, I didn't remember that.

Yes, she played Claudia, which was the infant vampire created by Lestat.

And yeah, I mean, it's Anne Rice.

You can never go wrong with it.

Spoiler alert, really, kind of tragically, but kind of transformationally for all of them.

Least effectively for Claudia, arguably, but still, you know, they transition on to the rest of the Chronicles and the story continues.

But it was that image.

It was the three of them.

If you have not read Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil and you are planning to, I am about to say something that could be perceived as spoilery.

So I'll be very brief.

So if you want to advance the episode 30 seconds past this, when I finished that book, I wrote V.E. Schwab and said, this story is what if Claudia grew up and took revenge against Lestat and Louie? That's how I describe that book.

Okay.

Yeah, so they added that, which was really great.

They added, I think in the original draft, Claudia, and sorry if this is a spoiler, the book's 50 years old.

Claudia and Louis leave Lestat for dead, and then he just dies.

But in this one- La,

la, la, la, la.

so much sense because one of the things that I kept underlining in these books was all of the existentialist, stuff in there and all of the crises of fate sounds like someone who deconstructed and then reconstructed her spirituality over and over again so

i want to dive into all these things but first the context i thought might be interesting because i think it is about the existentialism because it's really an existential philosophy the book yeah um and then the fan fiction thing is that she actually started writing this after her five-year-old daughter died And so I think there's something like the book really when you start thinking about Claudia, the character, we haven't talked about the plot yet, we'll go into it in a minute, but when we start talking about it, there's something about Claudia that crisis of his brother Paul dying Claudia's death and the idea of um life after death how you go on after meaning after life it's so

much a book about grief like so you go back and read it now later in life and you're like wow like obviously there's all the weird erotic blood stuff and there's all this other stuff would be like wow it is so fundamentally a book about grief that you don't can't you can't kind of conceptualize that as a kid yeah really kind of like brought me back to like oh wow yeah makes so much sense that she wrote this after she lost her daughter and she went into like a deep depression and became an alcoholic and all of those terrible terrible things

and

stuff of the

afterlife.

And then why they all love Louis, like Armand, Claudia, Lestat, is because he's closer to humans still.

Like he won't relinquish his humanness and they're all kind of fascinated by it.

It's what Louis does.

Louis and Claudia, who is another vampire, they spend a lot of time looking for other people like him, who are not like Lestat, who they think was cruel, but other people to give their life meaning and to explain their existence.

So the vampires live in immortality, seeking each other.

They are kind.

And Lestat falls in love with the nun and has sex with the nun.

Very nice loving sex and loves the nun.

And when he later gets his body and now becomes Lestat de Leoncourt again with all his vampiric powers, he visits the woman he raped and gives... her something very expensive when he was in the body of a human he was saying i didn't find her to be beautiful i found her apartment to be this and that he really talks negatively about her but he says now as a vampire i could see her beauty i could see everything that she held and i was sorry that i had raped her and then he goes to the nun with the full intent of turning the nun into a vampire and the nun would embrace him as himself but the nun is very surprised and scared and refers to him as the devil or something you see what Anne Rice does when Anne Rice's beautiful character Lestat has sex with a mere ordinary woman it has to be in violence it has to be in taking something of her because Lestat can only be with a nun a woman who has never had sex before otherwise having sex with a normal woman is just impure and it has to be in violence for this prince charming Lestat and the only other connection he can have with women it's either with Akasha the queen or with his own mother who is the only strong woman that Anne Rice has created in this the other woman she has created is Claudia who is a child because to Anne Rice the only way a woman can be extraordinary is if the woman is a child the woman is a nun or the woman is a mother for the ordinary woman Like you and me.

For Anne Rice.

She switched the perspectives, and within five weeks, there was no TikTok there, she had written a 338-page novel.

Stop her! I know! With Michelle's death serving as the inspiration for the character of the child vampire, Claudia.

icon yes but good god like what a an awful tragic thing to happen and then that's kind of spurred on this really like i don't think there had ever really been anything like the character of claudia in fiction before because she's such a particular entity i mean she's like a she's

wrong she's like there shouldn't be a child vampire and that's what makes her so interesting Interview with the vampire changes the game of vampire fiction forever, I think.

shoot it like literally like four weeks before um so christian slater stepped in at the last minute and donated his entire salary to phoenix's favorite charities and the film is dedicated to him in the end credits uh like such a oh it's so sad um

one of my favorites

Talent Scouts discovered 10-year-old Kirsten Dunst, who became the first actor tested for Claudia.

Although originally they looked at hundreds of six-year-olds to match the book's exact age, they realised a younger actor couldn't deliver the intense monologues, and they returned to Kirsten Dunst.