Mark Waters knows a thing or two about bringing mean girls to screen, so it should come as no surprise that his latest feature, Vampire Academy, has a queen bee bully with some serious bite (no pun intended).
Based on the first of Richelle Mead’s six-book series, Vampire Academy hones in on Rose and Lissa (Zoey Deutch and Lucy Fry). Their St. Vladimir’s curriculum is loaded with the usual suspects – lectures, math class, lunchtime, gossip, etc. – but if you’re like Lissa, you may also have Basics of Elemental Control on your schedule and if you’re like Rose, perhaps it’s Advanced Guardian Combat Techniques. That’s because St. Vladimir’s is no typical boarding school. It’s a school for Moroi vampires like Lissa and Dhampir guardians-in-training like Rose to study up so they can preserve their bloodlines and defend themselves against a vicious race of vampire called Strigoi.
However, even when there’s no threat of Strigoi nearby, Rose is still on high alert because the resident mean girl, Sami Gayle’s Mia, is determined to ruin their reputations. Of course, there’s no excuse for bullying, but in order to unleash Mia’s wrath upon Rose and Lissa, Gayle had to first simply approach the character as a human being and pinpoint the sources of her insecurities, some of which are quite reasonable.
With Vampire Academy’s Friday, February 7th release right around the corner, we got the chance to sit down with Gayle to discuss the driving force behind Mia’s rage, the challenge of portraying her as a stone-cold villain but also as someone with heart, what it took to get into “Mia mood” and loads more. You can catch it all for yourself in the video interview below.
