Sheila Atim Explains Queen of the Damned’s Ancient Power (Exclusive)

The Queen of the Damned has arrived. After sporadic flashes teasing her introduction in earlier episodes, Sheila Atim tore through the scenery in her debut as Akasha, the mother of all vampires, in The Vampire Lestat Episode 5.

Akasha is the one who must be kept whom Lestat (Sam Reid) mentioned in Interview With the Vampire Season 1, and Armand’s (Assad Zaman) maker, Marius (Christopher Heyerdahl), has been maintaining her imprisonment alongside her partner, Enkil, who appeared to be dead in this episode. Marius passed the torch to a reluctant Lestat in Episode 5, and he looked after her body for 10 years. Akasha must be kept alive for vampires to continue to exist, but viewers don’t yet know exactly why she has to be kept entombed. While her body has been immobilized, her mind is “very much alive,” as Marius tells Lestat. Lestat made the mistake of giving her a drop of blood, which gave her enough strength to move for the first time in god knows how long.

Akasha drank Lestat’s blood, and he drank from her, imbuing him with the most powerful vampiric blood in existence that’s piping hot as it courses through his veins. Akasha’s monologue after her awakening was the roar of a god lashing out against those who dared to control her mixed with her rage over the subjugation of women that she’s witnessed telepathically throughout her imprisonment. Lestat fascinated her much more than Marius, leading to her rekindled desire to break free.

“There is something really interesting that happens to us when we’re physically incapacitated,” Atim tells TV Insider. “The force with which she expresses herself in that moment, it’s the cork popping out of the bottle. But there’s still a lot of questioning because she hasn’t been out of that space for so long, so she needs to go out there and see exactly what the answer is to all of these questions that she has about what she’s been sensing, observing, seeing over the millennia.”

“I wonder even thinking about it now how much powerlessness she’s felt over the millennia, not just frustration at what’s happening but also I could be out there rectifying it all, doing something about it,” Atim continues. “She hasn’t been able to be an active participant in any of it, and there’s been a reason for that: for the protection of vampire kind.” Akasha sees Lestat as her “partner in crime,” Atim adds, who can aid her as she goes to “fix this thing that I’ve been looking at for a very long time that seems to have gone very wrong.” Marius forced Akasha back into confinement in the flashbacks in Episode 5. Lestat’s narrations say that she will return in the present day as of the result of his tour, but we don’t know when.

Up until now, Armand has been the most powerful vampire we’ve seen in the series because of age. The scope of his ancient power is shown through his eyes shaking when he’s angry and his telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Akasha is the most powerful vampire of them all, so figuring out how to show her physical prowess was a big topic of discussion on set.

“That was one of the things that, when I reached Toronto, the writers said, ‘We’ve got to figure out how to make you more powerful than these guys,’ because there’s a lot going on in terms of how their power manifests,” Atim shares. “One of the extraordinary things about Episode 5 is Akasha is still partly frozen to this table, but Lestat is just spinning in the air uncontrollably.”

Sophie Giraud/AMC

“For me, there was something about that image that spoke to me of her power without me really having to do much in the speech or the text of my own performance,” The Woman King star continues. “That physical juxtaposition of her very fixed and very focused on this spewing of whatever this emotion and stream of consciousness is that’s coming out of her and he’s just in absolute disarray in the air as a byproduct of what’s awakening in her, and that’s when she’s not even fully out of stone yet. So yeah, we’ve got to find something really epic and cool.”

Here, Atim breaks down how she and The Vampire Lestat team brought Akasha back to life, and what drew her to the series outside of her previous work with Reid, with whom she costarred in Girl From the North Country in the West End. For more cast insights into The Vampire Lestat, check out our aftershow, Backstage Pass.

When did you first watch Interview With the Vampire, and what really hooked you in?

Sheila Atim: I watched Season 1 when it came out on BBC iPlayer in the U.K. The big reason why I watched it is because Sam was in it and I was like, “Oh, Sam, love Sam. What’s he doing?” And was like, “Oh, this is great.” I knew of the books, obviously I knew of the previous adaptations. And it’s very much my speed in a genre sense. I’m not necessarily a super huge vampire nerd or anything, but I love fantasy. I love fantastical worlds and I love stuff that’s quite noir. So I took to it pretty quickly, to be honest.

I just thought it was so brilliantly made. I remember being really, really impressed at the writing, the acting, the cinematography, everything. I just thought this is a really well-made show in an age where there’s lots of stuff being made and some of it is good and some of it is different. So yeah, I was in just because it’s more than anything, a really good quality piece of work.

A lot of the cast has described this show as an actor’s dream because it’s so collaborative and the material is very meaty. Is that true for you too?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s rare that you get to read scripts, particularly scripts for screen, where you feel like you’re actually going to have an opportunity to delve deeper into something beyond just expositional storytelling where you are essentially setting up plot points to be able to play out a narrative and that’s it. If you do that well enough, then everyone’s relatively happy and goes home.

To actually be able to have some deeper levels of characterization to get to make some exciting choices, to get to have some commentary on broader topics and ideas, and then to do that within a world where partly because it’s fantastical and partly because it’s got such a strong theatrical grounding from its writing, you get to take big swings and you get to have a lot of fun as well. And then you’re working with great people who are also really good at what they do. So yes, it is a dream.

You told me before that you got to collaborate on Akasha’s characterization and appearance. What are some specific contributions you made, and what did you feel was really important to include?

The main thing was just how she sounds, her accent. And the hair as well. The hair was a conversation and both of those things were references from ancient Kemet, ancient Egypt, some of modern day Egypt and East Africa, some of the Middle Eastern parts of the world. That was really important to me to ground Akasha both in a time, at least when we see her this time, of course. If we see her in the future, then she will be in the present day.

But [I wanted] to ground her as somebody who is from thousands of years ago and from a specific part of the world thousands of years ago, because when we hear terms like ancient Kemet, ancient Egypt, ancient Samaria, that just conjures so much for us and immediately transports us to somewhere where we know it was very different back then. And it gives us this sprawling sense of a time when civilizations were huge and all encompassing and lasted for dynasties and had these lineages that went on and on and on, and we still study them in the same way that we can dig artifacts out the ground through archeology and put it in a museum. Akasha is literally of that. So that was really important to me to get that flavor.

And then there will be obviously more to come. I mean, so much of it visually is her in stone. So I left the hair, makeup, prosthetics team to get on with that because I trusted that they knew what they were doing far more than I would’ve known. But yeah, that was my big thing. I just want her to feel like she’s from ancient Egypt or somewhere of the like.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

Do you think that when we see her in present day, she’ll have a modern look? The Aaliyah Akasha [from The Queen of the Damned film] was her ancient appearance at all times. So I’m curious what you envision for her in present day.

I don’t know. I like the idea of modern day, but I want there to be clues, I think is what I’ve said in some of the earlier conversations and I’m constantly thinking about [it]. I’ve got ideas, which I’m not going to reveal, but I’ve got ideas for little tells that, “Whoa, she’s not like us.” But what’s so fun about this show is that they all do so well at masquerading and walking among the modern day mortals as if nothing’s going on other than having to shield their eyes and walk around at nighttime. And they’re all very stylish in their own way, which was another thing I love about the show. I was like, “Oh, everyone just looks great. Costumes are great. The fits are great. Everyone looks like chic and sharp.”

And it’s important because there’s a seductiveness about this world. There’s a magnetism about this world and these people. And there has to be when you’re talking about monsters, otherwise we just go, “Ugh, we don’t want to be a part of that.” But you want to feel drawn in and enticed and seduced by this world. So I definitely want to be a part of that. And it’s more interesting if you are dealing with really powerful entities that are also able to blend in and sit within the tapestry quite comfortably. But little did you know that they’re super powerful.

This is the original vampire kind of thing, yeah. I love the decision to have Akasha bite right into the front of Lestat’s neck, right in his Adam’s apple, which is made to protect someone’s voice. Unpack the meaning of why she bites him right in the front of his throat.

There’s something really brutal about it. Even as a feeling, even when you talk about it, I’m like, oh, imagine somebody just coming and grabbing right where the trachea is. Trachea, esophagus, both of them together. I also love the position he’s in when he gets bitten where he just falls backwards over her lap and she’s just going for it. It’s complete subjugation and surrender. You can’t really do anything from that position. Very much at the mercy of Akasha in that moment. That symbolism is really wonderful.

It’s also interesting because even hearing you talk about it now, he then goes on to use his voice. They connected through music and he’s going around the world not only spreading this music, but also telling aspects of their story and masquerading in this hiding in plain sight thing of, “Oh, he’s a rock star playing a character, but is he really a vampire? Is he not?” And when she reappears in his life, there’s that memory of, “Remember I can take that voice just as easily as you are running around town using it.” And then what a vulnerable place to be attacked.

Did you and Sam experiment with other positions for that bite? What was the collaboration like there?

No, we went for that because that was also with the camera team. Just visually that was the best in terms of angles and also I couldn’t move that much, so it was like I grabbed his hand, he turned, fell into my lap, and then it just naturally did it by itself. Of course, there’d been so much preparation before I arrived, but filming that whole sequence, everything just made sense. A lot was very intuitive, which again, is a sign of working with really great craftspeople.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

Akasha has affection for Lestat. He fascinates her. It’s part of why she wakes up. But she’s also kind of the misandrist of all time, so the act of biting him right in the front of the throat, it’s like, “I’m taking your voice because of what you do with it,” you meaning men at large. What do you think is Akasha’s perspective of humanity and vampire kind after her centuries of being kept in silence?

She’s clearly quite angry. One of my favorite things about that sequence is that when she’s there frozen saying, “Come to me,” and then their hands touch and you hear this crunching sound as Lestat’s body is just manipulated into this position, but she doesn’t have to strong arm him. And she’s still not completely out of stone either. It’s just so easy for her.

To your point about biting the Adam’s apple and the silencing and the retribution for the silencing that she’s maybe experienced, now that she’s coming back to herself, part of the fury that she feels is because she knows how powerful she is. She knows how powerful womankind could be as well. And so there’s this added layer of injustice. ‘How dare you think you can come and run the show? I need to show you that’s not going to be the story anymore. I need to show you how easily I can do that.’ So for her, there’s a genuine real hurt and pain that she’s been experiencing.

And there’s something about her being physically incapacitated for so long as well that means the intensity of that feeling and all she’s been sensing of the world around her over the years is magnified in the way that it is when we are constricted both physically and metaphorically. So I do think that is real and there’s something very human about that. But because she is so powerful in this supernatural way, just the indignation of this ridiculous situation to her. It’s ridiculous that she should be subjugated.

She speaks a lot about a girl in her monologue. She’s talking about herself, I feel, but also about women at large. How would you define exactly what she’s saying?

For me, it actually helps to think of it as women at large when I was learning it because then you get the scale of what she’s feeling and you get to that end point. That’s what’s so beautiful about the speech is it could be both. It could be her own personal story and it could be the story of so many women over the ages and they do intertwine. In order for her to be able to not just thread the loop of, I’m going to go on my own personal revenge arc, but I’m going to take revenge on mankind and reset the scales in the way that she thinks they need to be reset to such devastating effect, it needs to be bigger than her. Because she also says, when will it stop and who will stop it? So she’s talking about the subjugation that continues as well beyond just what she experienced.

What’s great is that the prism through which she’s viewing this all continues to contract and expand as she’s navigating all of these feelings and maybe sorting through which ones are her own and which ones are the experiences and memories of other women that she’s been hearing and sensing all of that time. In order to have that explosion, it has to be this real sense of righteous rage that she’s going to change the world from what she does.

Amen.

Amen.

The Vampire Lestat, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+