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Delainey Hayles Played Claudia’s IWTV Tragedy Like a Volcano


“The moment that Lestat walks onstage is the moment that she reaches peak frustration.”

All that parental negligence and sexual frustration could have made Claudia pitiful, but actress Delainey Hayles, who took over the character in season two from Bailey Bass (who left the series after joining the Avatar franchise), plays her like a dynamo. She’s disgusted when Louis ignores her after Armand enters his life, infuriated when she realizes the coven and its lead actor Santiago (Ben Daniels) only want to leverage her eternal youth when they cast her as the infantilized “Baby Lu” in one of their avant-garde plays, and sympathetic toward Madeleine (Roxane Duran), a woman scorned by her neighbors for her affair with a Nazi who eventually becomes Claudia’s companion. “I’m a chronic overthinker, so that was always on my mind,” Hayles says of Claudia’s immolation death sentence, enacted by the coven for breaking a number of the vampiric Great Laws, including her attempt to kill her maker Lestat.

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