Interview with the Vampire, the AMC series that reimagines the 1976 Anne Rice novel (and the 1994 film), is the breakout hit you should be watching; with a 99 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s the No. 1 ranked new series on AMC+, and one of the top-rated new dramas on traditional cable.

Sleek, sexy, and super scandalous, Interview with the Vampire offers a modern, culturally relevant take on the source material by making Louis de Pointe du Lac, played by Jacob Anderson, a Black man in early 20th century New Orleans––and queer. As in the book, Louis is “tuned” by the villainous Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), who is white, and through their hella toxic, hella problematic romance, Interview with the Vampire explores and unpacks a whole universe of intense topics including the ways interracial relationships can get complicated, the power dynamics at play when one partner controls the pocketbook, emotional violence, physical violence, and what it means to be bound to somebody who is no good for you at all.

Further complicating their bad romance is the introduction of Claudia, played by Bailey Bass, who, when we meet her in Episode 3, is a 14-year-old girl about to die in a house fire when she’s saved by Louis and then “turned” by Lestat. Claudia becomes like an adopted child to Louis and Lestat––a (mostly) welcome addition who helps bring some levity to the lovers’ tense house. But because she’s dealing with the dual nightmare of her early teen years and learning to navigate her new, immortal body, things take a turn for the worst, pretty quickly.

“She's the only female in her house,” Bass tells BET.com via Zoom recently. “She’s the only woman among these men. And those dynamics -- there can be many of them -- can be metaphors for what women go through every day.”

It’s hard being a girl in a man’s world, even harder being a Black girl, and unimaginably strange to be a Black girl in a body frozen in time. Over the course of the episodes, Claudia, like the rest of the characters, experiences the passage of time, yet doesn’t ever show signs of aging––a terrible predicament for a person in her 20s, 30s, or 40s, and wants to experience all the normal things people in those age groups do, yet having the body of a child. Coupled with her increasing rage at Lestat for how he treats the man who saved her, Claudia is very much like a kettle about to boil over. Bass, now a 19-year-old beginning to navigate the world as an adult Black woman herself, says she felt so connected to Claudia it sometimes became hard to separate from her.

“When I was filming this show, I was Claudia more than I was Bailey,” she says. She’d become so connected to Claudia that, after filming ended, she had to take some time off and get therapy to detach from her. “When people ask me questions about her, I'm thinking as her. I think you take something and learn something from every character you play.”

One way she connected most with Claudia was simply leaning fully into her identity as a Black woman. Bass is biracial; her dad is Black and her mom is Belarusian Russian. She grew up in Brooklyn, but in a deeply Russian community, speaking Russian. “I felt more accepted around people that were Belarusian, Eastern European than I did sometimes with Black people because I just didn't communicate with a lot of Black people; I spoke Russian.”

It was around age 16 that Bass began to connect more with her Black heritage, and landing the part of Claudia helped pushed that initiative into overdrive. She describes having the experience that a lot of biracial people do -- not really knowing where to fit in -- but when arriving in New Orleans in those first days of shooting, she felt more immersed in culture than ever.  “With them having such a big Creole population, if you’re one percent Black there, you’re Black. And being mixed, not knowing where I belong…I had a driver be like, ‘Bailey, what do you mean? Why would someone tell you you're not Black?’” It was a moment that helped her reclaim power and solidify her identity. “I came onto the show knowing what I wanted to represent.”

Perhaps the most obvious way fans of the show get to see that is through Claudia’s hair. Initially, she says, the team on the show couldn't find any photos of Black girls in the 1910s and 1920s when Claudia is a girl, and it was, she says, “very difficult to even find my curl type.” But she pressed hair people and even producers to let her tell a story through Claudia’s hair––one that’s authentic to Black women and shows the ways she’s evolving as a person. “One time, I said ‘Sorry,’ because I wanted to have a deeper conversation about hair on screen. And Jacob goes, ‘Bailey never apologize.’ And even the person I was talking to at the time said, ‘No, we need to figure this out. This is really important.’ I thought that I was being an inconvenience when I was talking about something really important.” As such, she influenced choices; the way Claudia wraps her hair before bed, for example, instead of braiding it as you sometimes see in period pieces with white actors. “You know how long it would take me to braid my hair?!” she says. “So it's just trying to show that representation. And I think we did it very well.”