Sheila Atim Played Akasha Like a ‘Fountain of Volcanic Rage’

Spoilers follow for The Vampire Lestat through fifth episode “New York,” which premiered on AMC on June 5. 

Have you heard that Lestat has the blood of Akasha in him? The world’s first vampire is that bitch, an ancient figure who is simultaneously immensely mentally powerful and (for now) physically fragile. As introduced in The Vampire Lestat’s fifth episode, “New York,” the petrified Akasha has been held, essentially against her will, for thousands of years by a variety of vampiric guardians who protect and care for her, exposing her to artifacts from the current age and feeding her ashes to keep her alive — but not too alive. Because if she were too alive, her protector Marius (Christopher Heyerdahl) informs Lestat (Sam Reid), bad things would happen. In other words: Don’t give Akasha any blood.

But it’s impossible for Lestat to disobey Akasha, who chose Lestat to be her new keeper and sent Marius off to find him. Akasha didn’t speak to Marius for 23 years, but in her first moments with Lestat, she’s already telepathically cooing into his mind. When Lestat settles into his babysitting-archaeologist role like he’s doing cosplay of Rachel Weisz in The Mummy, Akasha awards his attention by flicking the ice-cream scoop Lestat gifted her off her plinth — more movement than she’s shown in centuries. And when she purrs “Come to me,” he does — leading to a hugely fanged Akasha drinking from Lestat and then giving him her own blood, creating a bond that will last as long as either of them is alive. “It’s the most aggressive entry into a show we’ve ever had by any one of our characters,” series creator and showrunner Rolin Jones told me. “It should be so compelling that the people at AMC go, ‘Well, we’ve got to have a fourth season. Look at that.’”

The Vampire Lestat hasn’t been renewed yet, so it’s unclear whether this series will reach the narrative of Anne Rice’s 1988 novel Queen of the Damned. But Atim is already thinking about how to further grow the character, and her direct-to-camera speech in Akasha’s final moments in the episode is a barn burner of fury and vengeance that will hopefully secure the series a fourth season. “You want to get the sense that she’s not really of this time,” says Atim. “With that comes a real sense of gravitas, in the same way that when you go to an old building or you visit an ancient site, you feel an energy about those places or those artifacts. I want her to feel like that, in the sort of human-slash-monster form.”

When you were preparing for the audition, what felt like the most important thing to inhabit for Akasha? 
One of the most important things — and it continues to be as we hopefully get the opportunity to think about the next season — is remembering how old she is. Putting her in the context of the ancient world was the grounding point for me. Whenever you go into an audition, you make choices based off the material you’re given and the casting breakdown. I committed to her being thousands of years old and being from a particular part of the world that spans East Africa, the Middle East, ancient Sumeria, ancient Egypt. I use that to evoke a sense of who and what she might be while we see her in episode five — and hopefully in the future, we’ll see her even further on, in the present day.

Did the 2002 movie version of Queen of the Damned with Aaliyah factor into your prep at all? 
The only thing I watched was a small clip on YouTube. I’ve seen it years ago; it’s one of those things where I have more the essence of it rather than specifics. I’m such a huge Aaliyah fan, and that was another reason why I wanted to stay away from it, because I didn’t want to try too hard to pay homage to her and get in my own head.

There’s been two seasons of Interview With the Vampire before The Vampire Lestat, and there have been some departures to the source material. I wanted to leave space for us to come back for season four and have some collaborative conversations about where Akasha could go. And I want that to be informed by my own thoughts, the team’s thoughts, the groundwork and the world that’s already been built up in the first two seasons. It’s really exciting to step into a character like this at this point, because there’s so much mythos that exists around her, and so much anticipation. It feels like a really bright opportunity to do something fresh and interesting. But when it comes to season four, I might have a peek. There might be something nice about creating some connectivity. I haven’t made a decision yet.

Do you remember what scene you did for your chemistry read with Sam?
It was actually a speculative scene that they wrote, where they were imagining a future interaction between Akasha and Lestat. It was so brilliantly written, I hope it ends up being an actual scene. Casting director Kate Rhodes James said in my audition, “The writing is great, and it’s big. The scale at which you want to explore your performance, it’s robust enough to handle it.” It was a scene that so wonderfully encapsulates Akasha’s story, her dynamic with Lestat, what she’s here to do, and all the different ways in which she might be able to achieve that. It was actually good having that as the audition scene, and then the speech in episode five as the first thing I ended up doing. That audition scene helped me get the layers of context that meant I could reverse engineer how to approach this. This speech was four pages long, with no stops, and that could have been quite a lot to just receive off the bat.

When we see Akasha for the first time, she’s a statue on a slab, like something you would find in an old temple. That clearly took a lot of makeup and effort from you to stay still and achieve that effect. 
The physical aspect was pretty intense. I joined the team in the very last days of shooting; everyone had already been through five months of everything you see onscreen. It was about three hours of hair, makeup, and prosthetics. There was an actual statue used for maybe one or two shots, but the vast majority of the shots are me holding my breath or breathing very slowly. There were various states of stoning and un-stoning as she’s waking up, and there were various positions I had to hold. Sometimes I was being supported underneath my lower back; sometimes I was holding myself. There were some really intense moments because sometimes it’s just my face, and sometimes it’s a prosthetic mask. That mask had to be glued onto my shoulders and back at one point, which meant I couldn’t take it off. There was no mouth hole — there were eye holes, and I could breathe, but it was like a sensory-deprivation helmet. I noticed myself getting very quiet on set when I was lying there on the slab, and like, mildly dissociating. I’m not claustrophobic, but I suddenly really understood it.

I have always, as somebody who built a foundation in theater, made sure I’d know my lines when I turn up on a film set, because it gives you so much freedom. When you’re exploring big ideas, when you’re working with text that is robust and muscular, you don’t want to be there thinking, Oh, the lines are just on the tip of my tongue. You don’t want it to be a memory test. You won’t be able to allow space for inspiration and different ideas in between takes. It’s a four-page speech. You have to learn it back to front, inside out, which I did. With this genre, when you’re dealing with monsters and conversations around life and death and everything that encompasses, you need to be able to take some big swings and to really chew that text up and make it yours. I think every actor in this show is so brilliant at that.

Akasha’s speech is so interesting because it goes from third person to first person, from Akasha referring to herself as “she” to “I,” as in “I am the girl, I am the God.” Tell me about how you wanted to perform the speech to show that transition of awareness for her. 
What I really wanted to create with that speech was the sense that she is genuinely stitching it all together in real time: her thoughts and her feelings that have been incubating over the thousands of years that she’s been lying there while she’s been sensing the world around her but unable to actively participate in it. This is the first time she’s been able to speak for thousands of years, and this fountain of volcanic rage is just pouring from her. To get to “I am the girl, I am the God,” she has to stitch together all of these threads that are floating around her. I think it’s amazing that you’ve got the visual image of Lestat also very literally spinning in the air, because that is an external manifestation of her internal dialogue and the chaos that she’s trying to unpack. It’s four pages, but it’s actually not that long a period of time, right? She has to get all the way from there to, And now I know what I’m going to do about it. I have a plan.

It’s important that she reaches that point, because that is the springboard for the destruction that she is able to wreak further down the line. If we’re seeing this long, slow deliberation, it doesn’t quite have the same potency as going from zero to 100 and going, I’ve seen all this stuff over thousands of years, and this is what I’m going to do about it. What’s so beautiful about the speech Hannah Moscovitch wrote is that meandering thought process, with threads of thoughts that disappear and reappear. “Why must she be kept?” comes back quite a few times. It’s very human. With all of these monsters, the moments where we really, really connect with them, and why we love them so much, is because they were once human, and you can still see that. They’ve got this superstrength and these abilities, and their empathy levels are different to when they were alive, but that passion has to come from somewhere. It’s almost like humanity completely unfiltered. To get her to feel what womankind is feeling, you have to root it in something human, and then you’re able to take it to another level.

So much of this season is about vampiric loneliness and immortality as a curse. You recently said that if Akasha had to choose someone else to join a vampire throuple with herself and Lestat, she’d just choose herself again. Given that, I’m curious if you saw Akasha as lonely.
She feels a deep loneliness, but it’s because she’s unique within a unique group of people. She’s the first vampire, and she still has questions about why she is a vampire and why she is in that place. That’s a very specific kind of isolation, alongside the actual literal isolation that she’s been in for thousands of years. She is the center of our own universe, but she has to be. It’s by design, and that in and of itself is lonely.

She’s looking for a match, somebody who can truly step side by side with her. She’s known that Marius isn’t that, and that’s why she stayed silent, and that’s why she chose Lestat. I wonder if her relationship with Lestat is a way of connecting, in the same way that her righteous rage is a way of connecting with the women of the world. Whether she’s consciously aware of that or not is another thing that’s yet to be discovered. 

Poor Marius cannot match her freak at all. 
And he knows it. To Lestat, he’s like, “Listen, you’ve been chosen. I’m out. I can’t do this.”

What do you think Akasha’s favorite The Vampire Lestat song would be? 
“Your Biggest Fan.” I think she would relate to his processing the journey of being turned into a vampire. And I also think she would sing it to Lestat as her chosen partner in crime.