This post was originally published on this site.
“The Vampire Lestat” has not been shy about the fact that the Queen of the Damned was coming. Sam Reid’s narration warned multiple times about the untold horrors she’s to unleash on the world; Lestat has told so many people he’s got the blood of Akasha in him it’s become a bona fide meme; and at the end of Episode 4, “The Devil’s Road,” he belted his latest song into the microphone, telling us, “I need a ravenous queen.”
Episode 5, “New York,” delivered exactly that. “That’s right,” Lestat tells us in his opening narration wind-up, “I’m finally going to talk about the Queen.”
Enter Akasha, though only in flashbacks — the contemporary carnage we keep hearing about, it seems, is still to come. “New York” bounces between Lestat’s tortured past and his still-tortured rock star rollick down The Devil’s Road, showing us a Lestat devastated by his mother’s abandonment and Nicky’s horrible death. Losing two loves, Lestat goes to ground, where he stays for years until none other than Armand‘s infamous maker Marius (fellow series newcomer Christopher Heyerdahl) digs Lestat up and puts him in charge of The Ones Who Must Be Kept: that’s Akasha, and her worse-for-wear ancient companion, Enkil.
In preparation for taking on the iconic character, who propelled the lore and world-building of Anne Rice’s novels into the stratosphere, Atim largely stuck to the script rather than delving into the books, though she did read “a little bit” of “Queen of the Damned.”
“I read the part where she wakes up, and then everything else I just took from the script from a monologue,” Atim said. “It’s so rich. There’s so much already in there, and I felt it was important to lock into that. Because obviously this TV show is an adaptation, and it’s such a brilliant one. I think the team have done such a great job of threading so many ideas into a tapestry that feels very connected to the source material, but also very fresh, so I wanted to leave that space to allow Akasha to turn into and develop into wherever she needs to be in the future.”
Atim also took inspiration from the somewhat nightmarish physical circumstances Akasha awakes in as an ancient statuesque being, stuck to a slab of stone.
“There’s something really interesting about that,” Atim explained. “Often, as an actor, when you have a physical restriction or some kind of given circumstances that restricts you, and what is then forced out through that moment, or what kind of wants to burst through the character.”
While Akasha’s physical form may be stuck in place, her mind is flying a mile a minute as Atim says she’s “catching up with millennia’s worth of questions.”
“In that moment, I feel there is something very human about Akasha,” Atim said. “The whole speech is, ‘Why? Why this? Why that?’, and I think I really connected to the sense of genuine confusion that she has, and confoundment that she has, about the state of things.”
Akasha’s soliloquy is indeed full of ponderings. “And what am I for?
What is this for?,” Akasha asks. “And why must they, must we, must I, must he, must they, as the millenia unfold?” She asks, and then plenty more, including a treasure trove of tidbits for book readers to obsess and theorize over (seriously, it’s a search-at-your-own-risk monologue for spoilerphobes).
But she doesn’t just ask. In the end, she answers: “I am the girl! I am the god! I am the voice! I am the song! I am the night!” That transition is Akasha awakening to her power and calling herself to action, Atim explained.
“I think the sense of Godlikeness is coming later, and maybe comes towards the end of the speech, where she’s realizing, ‘Oh, isn’t it? I’m right. OK, I’m going to lock in and I’m going to do something about this.’ But for the most part, it was more potent for me to play the pure kind of vulnerability and rage and helplessness that she probably feels still being kind of stuck to that table. And then being able to channel that into, ‘All right, why not? I need to take some action.’”
It’s not just a piece of text that takes Akasha from a millennia of questions to a moment of answer; it’s also a massive piece of text that challenges its actor to keep pace with the frenzied mind of a stirring god-like power. That required a lot of prep before Atim ever stepped onto set.
“I learned the script inside out, back to front. I spent a lot of time in my hotel room in Toronto, pacing, breaking down the four pages, and then stitching them back together again, and trying to learn it backward,” Atim recalled. “I knew I had to turn up on the day and know exactly what I was going to say, because I knew there were going to be lots of moving parts. I was coming in right at the end of the shoot as well, so there’s always that feeling of time pressure, as you know, we’re hurtling toward wrap.”
With just two episodes left in the season, “The Vampire Lestat” is also hurtling toward its own wrap. The series has yet to be renewed, but should it return, Rice’s “Queen of the Damned” is the next book in the chronology and a story that would bring Atim’s striking incarnation of Akasha to the forefront.
“The Vampire Lestat” debuts new episodes Sundays on AMC and AMC+.
The post ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Star Sheila Atim Unpacks Akasha’s Big Monologue: ‘Pure Vulnerability and Rage’ appeared first on TheWrap.