Kirsten Dunst as Claudia in Interview with the Vampire (1994)

In Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, released on November 11, 1994, Kirsten Dunst played Claudia. She is a vampire with a child’s face and a mind that keeps aging, and she is one of the best-known child figures in modern gothic cinema. The film sets her beside Tom Cruise’s Lestat and Brad Pitt’s Louis. Britannica describes Dunst as stealing scenes from both stars, and the role earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress at age 12.

Anne Rice wrote the screenplay from her own novel. Claudia is the story’s emotional hinge: the child Lestat and Louis raise together, who gradually realizes that her body will never catch up with her mind. That makes her useful for anyone studying the gothic child, a figure who looks innocent and is not.

Where Dunst was before Claudia

Dunst was not an overnight discovery. Britannica notes that she began modeling and acting at age three. She had an uncredited part in Woody Allen’s New York Stories (1989) and a first credited role in Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). By the time Interview with the Vampire came along she had screen experience, but nothing on this scale.

This was a major studio production with two of the biggest male stars of the decade. It also had a gothic, adult story built on a long-running, much-loved novel.

What the part asked of her

Claudia changes more than any other character in the story, and the film asks the actor to show it through behavior, not makeup or dialogue alone. Early on she is a child learning her new nature. As the decades pass, her stillness, her stare and the way she speaks to the two men who made her should read as someone far older than she looks.

The film puts the story’s central tension on her. Claudia is both a daughter to Louis and Lestat and a prisoner of the life they gave her. She has no way out of it, and her resentment drives the second half of the film. Dunst had to carry that arc opposite actors who were far more experienced than she was.

The production around her helped. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Original Score. Its candlelit, decaying interiors and Elliot Goldenthal’s music give Claudia’s story its tone, but the performance still holds the center of the scenes she is in.

What changed afterward

The role made Dunst a recognized name. In the years that followed she appeared in Little Women (1994) and Jumanji (1995), then moved into teen and adult roles including The Virgin Suicides (1999), Bring It On (2000) and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002). Britannica notes that she later took on more complex work, including Melancholia, which won her the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, and The Power of the Dog (2021), which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Claudia after the film

Claudia has stayed a central character in the Vampire Chronicles. AMC’s series Interview with the Vampire debuted in 2022 with Bailey Bass as a teenage Claudia. On March 31, 2023, the network announced that Delainey Hayles would take over the role for the second season. Each version of the character is measured against the one Dunst played in 1994, which remains the film performance most people have in mind.

Dunst today

Dunst’s recent work includes Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman, in which she plays Leigh Wainscott, and Alex Garland’s Civil War. In March 2026, Variety reported that she had joined the cast of the A Minecraft Movie sequel. She plays Alex, and Warner Bros. has dated the film for July 23, 2027. She has also joined Sydney Sweeney in The Housemaid’s Secret, the follow-up to 2025’s The Housemaid, which is currently scheduled for December 17, 2027.

More than three decades later, the 1994 film is still the title most often linked to her name, and Claudia is still the part that first showed what she could do.