Sarah Afful Explains Her Connection to Claudia (Exclusive)

The Vampire Lestat Episode 6 introduced a Mayfair witch that Anne Rice fans know well. Sarah Afful debuted as Merrick Mayfair, the titular character of book seven in The Vampire Chronicles. She hasn’t debuted on Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches on AMC, and as of the time of publication, it’s not known if she will. Lestat (Sam Reid) connected the threads of AMC’s Immortal Universe when revealing that he was in a book club with Merrick and Cortland Mayfair (Harry Hamlin) in Episode 6. Merrick also has unique connections to Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia (Delainey Hayles). Here, Afful explains her Mayfair witch. Warning: The Vampire Lestat Episode 6 spoilers ahead.

Episode 6 was the Louis and Lestat-heavy episode that Interview With the Vampire fans have been waiting for in Season 3. With “Fraudia,” a.k.a. Regina (Claudia’s doppelgänger played by Hayles), out of the picture and Louis shaken up by their time together, the exes decided to hire Merrick for a séance that would summon the spirit of their departed daughter. This story is adapted from a chapter in Merrick, as is Claudia’s enraged monologue. Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 5 also adapted Louis’ suicide attempt from Merrick, but the circumstances are different. In Merrick, Louis attempts suicide after the Claudia séance.

Afful’s Merrick warned Louis and Lestat not to go through with their plan, but they did it anyway. When they meet in Lestat’s Montreal apartment for The Bad Idea, Merrick says she heard stories about Louis and his brother, Paul (Steven G. Norfleet), from her great-grandmother. The de Pointe du Lac family joked about the Mayfair witches in Season 1 Episode 1, and Louis said he didn’t get along with the Mayfairs in this episode. Afful says that Merrick felt “a pull toward Louis from the very beginning” before this Montreal gig. She knew of Claudia’s ghost, too, because Merrick can connect with the spirits of the deceased.

“According to the book, she’s known about Claudia through visions and dreams from her ancestors,” Afful explains. “So it’s a deep knowledge and very connected. She’s surrounded by ghosts. These are her people. Despite being in the present world, she is surrounded by people in other realms. So she feels Claudia, she knows of Claudia, but she’s not been able to reach her and probably doesn’t want to because Claudia is the ghost of all ghosts and is a frightening presence. So it’s not something that she’s tried to go after, pulling Claudia into our realm, our human realm.”

Sophie Giraud/AMC

That’s why she warned Claudia’s vampiric parents not to bother her. But they did anyway, and it resulted in a painful scene where Claudia appeared in the Montreal apartment in the dress she was wearing when she was murdered. Her lover, Madeleine (Roxane Duran), is nowhere to be found in this hell that Claudia’s been living in since she died, and she’s been roaming the afterlife with her Achilles tendons still cut to the bone, an injury inflicted by Armand’s (Assad Zaman) coven in Paris so she couldn’t escape the trial. Claudia laid into Louis and Lestat for calling her up and said how much she hated both of them. Hayles, Anderson, and Reid discuss filming this scene in the video interview above from our Vampire Lestat aftershow, Backstage Pass. For another deep dive with Anderson and Hayles, see here.

Afful explains why Merrick sees Claudia as “the ghost of all ghosts.”

“She is a child who has suffered her whole life and through eternity,” Afful tells TV Insider. “She’s lived a very long time and that life has had some beautiful moments and some deep loves with her two fathers and this woman that she fell in love with, but she has been pounded into the ground by society, and she carries all of that in her. She’s, to me, a representation for the suffering child or the suffering woman because her body does not grow, but she does. So there’s a lot in her, a lot of darkness. And to feel into that as a conduit, it’s an impressive energy.”

To prepare to be possessed by the ghostly vampire, Afful and Hayles met for lunch before filming Episode 6 so they could get to know and each other and Afful could get a sense of Claudia’s essence and how she moves and talks. “I love Delainey,” Afful says, adding, “We talked about everything other than acting, just our lives. I think that is a very natural way to get someone’s rhythms and movements and energies.”

Claudia’s feelings were clear on the page, so channeling her rage was easy when acting as the possessed Merrick. In dressing room rehearsals with Hayles, Afful “would just try to breathe with her.”

“When she would stop, I would stop,” the Canadian actor explains. “That gave me an idea of what she as Delainey interpreting Claudia was doing or feeling. That was my process, my attempt to be her in a way.” The writing of the scene made “the sensation of [Claudia]” very clear, according to Afful, so watching Hayles work was the final piece of the Claudia puzzle.

AMC

For those who don’t know Merrick from the books, Afful explains that “she is not immortal” in The Vampire Lestat.

“She is very mortal. She is a working witch,” Afful says, but Merrick does experience time in a unique way in this adaptation.

“Time is real and time is not in the way that they’ve adapted it from the book,” she reveals, “so we’re sort of in time and out of time, if that makes any sense.” This seems to be a nod to Merrick’s ability to commune with the dead.

Afful has experienced a séance in real life, so she pulled from that for this scene, among other connections to her ancestry. Two nights before filming, Afful was thinking about talks with director Jane Wu about wanting to make the séance “as authentic as we can within the TV world.”

Afful shares what she brought to Merrick that wasn’t on the pages of her script in order to do this.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

“I come from Ghana, West Africa, originally. I was born in Calgary, Alberta, but I was raised by two Ghanaian parents,” Afful shares. “My mom’s way of helping me through hard times in my life was to bring me to her church, which mixed ancestral beliefs about spirits with Christianity, which is essentially what voodooism is. It was covering up Christianity or covering up voodooism with Christianity in order to be able to practice because of the slave trade and the slave trade saying, ‘Black people, you’re not allowed to practice your ancestral beliefs.’ So what I brought to it was trying to bring in the beginning of dance and breath, but within seconds, because that’s all I had.”

“I created a breathwork movement thing at the beginning,” she continues, “and there was a lot of deep channeling of, this sounds so silly, but I was really trying to channel the spirits with deep, deep breath and movement while being seated. And I came up with something a couple nights before and it helped me to actually do the scene because it was very revealing and vulnerable. And with all the people around, I just needed something to really ground me and to make me feel like I was actually doing it. So that’s what I brought to it and also my ancestry. I do feel connected to the Merrick that is an African woman who lives in New Orleans, who’s been going through the things that people in New Orleans go through.”

Louis and Lestat went on a walk to process what Claudia said in the séance. After spending the whole episode together, and experiencing Claudia’s shocking words together, they seemed ready to get back together and find some kind of peaceful life, if that’s possible for them at all. Armand and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) had other ideas. When Louis and Lestat were distracted by each other, Armand decapitated Louis, and Daniel decapitated Lestat. And now, there’s only one episode left in the season. Does Merrick know how to magically reattach vampire heads? Asking for some friends.

Learn more about the filming of The Vampire Lestat Episode 6 in the fill video interview above.

The Vampire Lestat, Season Finale, Sunday, July 19, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+