‘Interview With the Vampire’: Roxane Duran Says Madeleine’s Illicit Affair Was ‘Not About Love’
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 7, “I Could Not Prevent It.”]
Madeleine was determined to survive. The dressmaker, played by the captivating Roxane Duran, met a tragic fate in Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 7 alongside her immortal companion Claudia (the powerful Delainey Hayles). But even that end was Madeleine’s definition of survival, according to Duran. As the actor told fans on X (previously called Twitter), she could either “live in darkness or die with light by your side.” After choosing the former many times before, Madeleine finally chose the latter.
Madeleine’s life before Claudia was filled with darkness. From tuberculosis wiping out her entire family to living through the German occupation in World War II, hardship was the norm. Profound desperation during the war led to Madeleine’s brief affair with a Nazi, Duran tells TV Insider. She says this relationship “is not about love” at all, but rather, it gave Madeleine a moment of reprieve from the bleak reality of the war. She made the wrong choice during a time of extreme circumstance, and she considered herself a “monster” for it afterward, as said in her interview with Armand (Assad Zaman) before she received the dark gift.
This plot was based on the true history of French women who were punished for “collaboration horizontale” (horizontal collaboration) after the liberation of France in 1944. Women who had romantic and/or sexual relationships with Nazis during the occupation were considered traitors and their heads were shaved to make them identifiable in public. We saw this memory flash through Madeleine’s mind as Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia turned her into a vampire in Season 2 Episode 6.
When it comes to this plot, “we’re all relying on what we’ve learned more or less in history classes about World War II and the liberation and France being occupied by Germany,” Duran explains. “The reality was that people were starving by the time that liberation happened. People were almost dying because they didn’t have any food left. Food was rationed to intakes that today just sound delirious.” The Nazis created a “brutal” reality, Duran says, one where most people were impoverished and life was almost unlivable. Madeleine was internally crying out for a way to survive.
“I don’t want to explain her choices or justify them, but I find it really interesting that we dig into that and say, well, this is not an ideal world. Madeleine is not perfect,” Duran says. “She made mistakes, she made choices. And that’s how we’re viewing her.”
Larry Horricks / AMC
The actor shares the unseen backstory of this controversial affair. “She’s a dressmaker. This young boy maybe came around and said, ‘Oh, I’d like to buy cloth for my sister and my mother in Germany.’ He comes once, twice, and leaves a pack of cigarettes or some alcohol or butter that you haven’t seen in ages,” Duran says. In a moment of weakness, Madeleine accepted the little reprieve she was being offered to combat “the absence of warmth” in her life.
“The relationship is not about love. It’s about warmth. It’s about connecting with anyone, and the second they got in touch with each other, she became ostracized,” Duran adds, noting that it was a decision Madeleine regretted and didn’t excuse. She knew that punishment would continue to come after.
“The moment when we see her being attacked in [Episode 6] is this moment that she’s been dreading. She knows it’s going to come, and she doesn’t know how many times they’re going to go back at her because she failed,” Duran explains. “She failed her country, she failed her morality, she failed all the men around [the French soldiers], and she failed herself, essentially.” And Madeleine is given a “constant reminder” of that.
Knowing she’d be targeted again one day, Duran says Madeleine developed “this sort of beautiful defiance.” “It’s like, come get me. Come do what you have to do, because I can’t stick around waiting for you to attack me, for you to really make me pay for it,” she continues. And she stayed defiant to the very end.
Before Claudia and Madeleine were murdered by the Théâtre des Vampires, they shared a peaceful life outside of Paris that was all about undoing years of trauma for them both.
“There’s a lot of trauma massaging out of them,” Duran says. Their life together was a lot of “opening up, really telling everything that you want to tell, sharing everything that you want to share,” she adds, as well as figuring out what healing looks like to them. “Usually with people that have been through a lot of trauma, it seeps out in moments where you don’t expect it,” Duran says, “Loud noises or with tension somewhere.” Their all-too-short time together was spent “mending each other and figuring themselves out” to make “something peaceful.”
That meant burying the bodies of the humans they drained and growing a garden on top of them instead of having an incinerator in their backyard like Claudia had in New Orleans. As Duran says, “They don’t really want to do whatever’s been happening in a previous life. They want to make their own rules, and they want to stick to them.”
While they deserved more time, Duran takes comfort in the fact that “they had these moments.”
“They had joy,” she says. “That’s why Madeleine was like, you’re my coven. You’re my life. I don’t need anything after that. This is enough.”
Interview With the Vampire, Season 2 Finale, Sunday, June 30, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+
