It’s becoming increasingly hard to predict what Kieron Moore will do next. In Blue Film, he gives a fearless, deeply unsettling performance as Aaron, while Code of Silence sees him play Liam with a much quieter, more restrained vulnerability. Vampire Carnival pushes him somewhere else entirely. As Eric, the carnival’s self-proclaimed Man Who Feels No Pain, Moore plays a former outcast whose body can no longer be hurt even as grief, loneliness and resentment seem to have consumed everything underneath. He is theatrical, volatile and at times genuinely frightening in the role, but what makes the performance so compelling is how much sadness he allows to surface, turning what could have easily been a one-note villain into something stranger, more tragic and far more human.
It is a phenomenal performance, strange and volatile and far more vulnerable than the character initially appears to allow. Eric can be funny, frightening, petulant, deeply sad and genuinely monstrous, sometimes within the span of a single scene, and Moore never tries to smooth those contradictions into something easier to understand. If anything, he seems to relish them. The result is a character who increasingly becomes one of the most fascinating parts of Vampire Carnival, precisely because it is difficult to decide how much sympathy he deserves.
Directed by David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell from a screenplay by Jason and Peter Filardi, Vampire Carnival centers on Gemma (Nell Verlaque), a grieving young woman who visits a mysterious traveling carnival with her friends and discovers a hidden world of vampires who feed not on blood, but on despair. Somewhere inside that world is Eric, Gemma’s former boyfriend, now transformed into something considerably more dangerous and nursing grievances that have had plenty of time to fester. Jason Isaacs, Paulina Chávez, Eoin Macken, Alicia Sanz and Alvise Rigo also star.
Moore has a simpler word for Eric: “Possessed.”
“Obviously that leans into the entity that he’s become, but also he’s just really humanly possessed by grief and revenge,” says Moore. “There’s something quite deeply human about him.”
Eric had spent much of his human life being bullied and regarded as weak, lost both of his parents and eventually found himself with power far beyond anything he had possessed before. Moore became fascinated less with the power itself than what being given it might do to someone already carrying that much resentment.
“What does that turn you into?” he asks. “There’s no real responsibility or consequence. It made me ask myself, what would I be? If you could just cause chaos and then wait 100 years for it to go away, what would you become? Would you be as forgiving with people as we are in the limited time we have as humans?”
“I just think he’s deeply, deeply troubled, probably a bit broken. But I actually quite pity the character. I think he’s the anti-hero of the film.”
Moore’s sympathy for Eric never becomes an excuse for him. There are moments where the character’s anger feels completely understandable and others where he is clearly capable of horrific things, and Moore seems far more interested in the uncomfortable space between those two realities than deciding that Eric is secretly good underneath it all. He is wounded, yes. But he is also dangerous.
There is something almost adolescent about him too, despite everything that has happened to his body and the amount of time that has passed. Moore consciously kept Eric’s voice young, preserving what he describes as a “nerdy aspect” of the person he once was even after his transformation. The body may have changed but some part of the boy inside it did not.
It proves to be one of the performance’s smartest choices. Eric can swagger around the carnival with all the physical confidence of someone who believes he is untouchable and then suddenly seem like the same lonely young man who desperately wants the people who once dismissed him to see what he has become. Even his obsession with Gemma contains something Moore describes as almost “high school romancy,” an immature conviction that if he pushes hard enough, becomes powerful enough, he might eventually get the girl.
“I think for him there is a world where [their relationship] was much bigger than what it was to Gemma,” Moore says. “We always have a point of blame, but also obsession, something to focus on during that time. And I think for him it was her.”
He is also quick to remind us that Eric is “chaotic and nuts.”
“He’s extremely flippant. He’s unreliable. I think there is a monstrousness in there,” says Moore. “But I hope audiences do feel conflicted and sympathize in certain ways and understand him, because this guy has had a bad journey.”
Getting to that version of Eric required Moore to approach the role differently from anything he had done before.
“The only way into Eric for me was to be obsessed by Eric,” he says.
It is not something he says lightly. Moore’s process changes considerably depending on the character, but Eric lingered beyond the set in ways others had not. “He did come home with me in ways that other characters haven’t,” he admits.
Rather than constructing a rigid biography detailing exactly what Eric had done during every missing year, Moore worked from the inside out. He surrounded himself with paintings and imagery that captured emotions he associated with the character, trying to understand not necessarily every event that had happened to him, but what years of grief, loneliness and resentment might have eventually turned those feelings into.
“I was looking at art all the time and these depictions of emotion that I thought were really interesting and vivid,” he says. “I wouldn’t say that I created a step-by-step [backstory]. What I tried to latch onto was the birth of these emotions and what they’ve become.”
The feeling he kept returning to was hunger.
“I just wanted him to feel like he was hungry, just starving,” Moore explains. “He’s being denied the one thing that he thought he would get from becoming this thing.”
Immortality has removed one kind of suffering and intensified almost everything else.
“Feeling no pain is just a physical thing,” he says. “Everything else becomes so intensified.”
Underneath all of it, Moore imagined Eric as profoundly lonely. Not simply after his transformation, but long before it.
“I just imagined him from this very early age being extremely lonely,” he says. “That was kind of the driving force.”
That loneliness takes on a grotesquely literal form in Eric’s carnival act.
During our conversation, Moore reaches for the mood board he built while preparing for the film and pulls up a painting he found in New Orleans. The image helped crystallize something he had been thinking about since first reading the screenplay: what would happen if somebody who had spent years in emotional pain suddenly discovered that his body could no longer physically hurt?
Moore imagined Eric trying to remove one through the other.
“I always had this vision of this pain inside him that he would literally rip himself open and try to dig out, but it was just always there,” he says.
The wounds heal. The thing underneath them does not.
For Moore, the act became partly masochistic and partly performative, an ugly externalization of something Eric cannot actually reach.
“It goes back to a sadness,” he says. “It’s like the ugly part of pain, isn’t it? It’s something that is just trying to claw at you.”
He drew from his own experiences with mental health while also reading first-person accounts of how other people described their own, becoming particularly interested in descriptions of distress as something almost physically lodged beneath the skin.
But there is another layer to Eric’s act, one that makes the scenes considerably stranger and more uncomfortable to watch.
“There’s something weirdly exhibitionist about it,” Moore says. “It’s horrific, but there’s also something really subtly erotic about it.”
Eric is not merely demonstrating that he cannot be harmed. He wants people to watch him prove it.
“He’s very much like, ‘Look at what I can do. You can’t hurt me.’”
There is something almost embarrassingly human underneath that display. Eric has become physically stronger than the people who once made him feel small, yet he still needs those same people to know it. He invites former classmates to his show. He turns invulnerability into theatre. The revenge is not complete unless somebody is there to witness it.
Moore makes that need visible without making Eric pathetic. His physicality is far more assured than the person he describes from Eric’s past, but the performance constantly betrays small traces of that younger version underneath. A glance can become needy. A threat can sound petulant. Even when Eric appears completely in command, Moore leaves enough instability in him that it never feels particularly difficult to imagine everything collapsing.
That unpredictability becomes particularly effective opposite Jason Isaacs’ Toussaint, the patriarch of the carnival’s vampiric family and one of the few people capable of exerting any real authority over Eric.
Moore had been a fan of Isaacs long before they met.
“From Peter Pan all the way to Mass, he’s just a super talent,” Moore says. “So I was extremely intrigued and, I guess, a bit scared.”
Isaacs was the first cast member he encountered during a fitting in London, and Moore quickly got the impression that his co-star was quietly testing him.
“I think he was checking to see if I’d done my homework,” he laughs.
More interestingly, the two discovered that they did not necessarily agree on their respective characters.
“I think we disagreed a lot about each other’s characters, which I think is the point,” Moore says. “His view of Eric compared to my driving force of Eric was supposed to contrast. They’re both looking at it from a different way.”
Moore began using that disagreement rather than trying to resolve it.
“I found myself a lot of the time obviously in awe of Jason, but also in the back of my head being like, I’m going to use what he thinks Eric is in my performance as a complete 180. I’m going to push back on that.”
What emerges between them is much sadder than a conventional conflict between authority figure and rebellious subordinate. Moore believes Toussaint genuinely loves Eric. Eric is simply too consumed by what he wants to fully recognize it.
“There are these little pangs of conscience where he knows what he’s sacrificing to get this fulfillment, but he’s just so contaminated by it,” Moore says.
“My respect for [Jason] as Kieron kind of gave me all of the disrespect as Eric.”
The wider carnival family carries a similar sadness. Eric is its newest and youngest member, surrounded by people who have lived with their condition for considerably longer. Moore began thinking about him almost as a reminder of who they themselves once were, before time dulled whatever hunger, anger or excitement initially accompanied their transformation.
That became particularly clear during a scene with Isaacs, Alicia Sanz and Alvise Rigo, who play other members of the carnival family. As tensions rise and Eric’s actions threaten to bring dire consequences for the group, the others confront him and effectively shun him, closing ranks against the youngest member of their makeshift family.
“I remember we cut and I was like, ‘It feels like a gothic tragedy.’ There’s something quite sad about this,” Moore recalls.
The actors did not rigidly choreograph that dynamic before shooting. Moore actively resists doing so.
“All I can do is bring as many ideas to the table for Eric and then just surrender,” he says. “You can’t ever control what people are going to do. I think you can’t really plan a scene ever. I think it’s insane to do that.”
That desire for spontaneity has increasingly become central to the way he works. Moore likes keeping certain choices from his scene partners until cameras are rolling, trusting them to genuinely react rather than reproduce something already settled in rehearsal.
“It’s really hard to find room for surprise in performances because you both know what you’re going to say. You both know where the camera is. You both know what’s got to be seen,” he says. “I like to keep as many cards to my chest as possible and just trust that they’re going to really listen.”
Isaacs did.
“That’s what was really vibrant with Jason, because he did the same thing.”
Moore employed a similar tactic opposite Reed Birney while making Blue Film, occasionally pretending he did not know his lines in order to momentarily disrupt whatever expectation had settled into the scene.
“It’s the little gags, really,” he says. “You just pray that whoever’s in front of you wants to find something as much as you do.”
For Moore, making Vampire Carnival also carried a significance that had very little to do with Eric.
The film was shot in Spain, including Pamplona, a city he knew extremely well. Years earlier, Moore had filmed Vampire Academy there, playing fan-favorite guardian Dimitri Belikov. The Peacock adaptation was cancelled after one season, ending before Dimitri could ever undergo the transformation fans of Richelle Mead’s books knew was waiting for him. Returning to the same city to make another vampire project unexpectedly gave Moore a sense of closure.
“I never got my fangs in Vampire Academy because of obviously the cancellation,” he says. “So I guess there was secretly a little bit of a hole in me.”
He did not know that hole existed until Vampire Carnival offered him a chance to fill it.
“Everything sort of led to, ‘Do this. It will be good for you.’ Even if it doesn’t see the light of day, you can close this chapter now.”
Going back to Pamplona ended up becoming far more emotional than he had anticipated.
“It was kind of beautiful to go back to this city where it all started for me and realize how much I changed.”
A lot has changed.
Since Vampire Academy, Moore has steadily built one of the more interesting young careers around, refusing, sometimes quite deliberately, to settle into one recognizable version of himself. In 2025, he starred opposite Rose Ayling-Ellis in ITV’s Code of Silence, playing Liam Barlow, an emotionally guarded hacker caught between a criminal operation and an increasingly complicated relationship with Ayling-Ellis’ Alison Brooks. The series went on to win the BAFTA Television Award for Drama Series, and filming on a second season is now underway with Ayling-Ellis returning, although Moore is not currently among its announced cast.
For anyone hoping Liam might eventually reappear, Moore is not closing the door.
“I would always keep that door open,” he says. “I loved Liam so much, but part of me feels like his story was told up until that point. I think the show should be focusing now on Alison and what that life means to her.”
He would rather leave the character alone than bring him back simply because audiences miss him.
“I don’t want Liam to be brought back just to continue something that could be furnished at a better time,” Moore says. “But if there’s room for him to come back in season three and affect the story in a way, I hope audiences would want to see that as much as I do.”
Liam remains deeply personal to him, particularly because Moore has occasionally seen fans interpret his absence from discussions around the second season as indifference.
“That just isn’t true,” he says. “I love every character I get to play, but Liam specifically means a hell of a lot to me.”
Still, Moore is increasingly comfortable with allowing a character to end before he has exhausted everything audiences like about him.
“Sometimes it’s good to miss people a little bit,” he says.
The role that seems to have changed him most, however, may still be Aaron Eagle.
Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film, Moore’s feature debut, premiered at the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival before beginning a long, unconventional road through festivals and eventual release. The provocative chamber piece follows Aaron, a fetish camboy paid $50,000 to spend a night with a masked client played by Reed Birney, only for the encounter to slowly reveal a connection to Aaron’s past. It is abrasive, deeply uncomfortable and extraordinarily demanding of Moore, who gives a fearless performance that proved almost immediately how little interest he had in taking the safest possible route into a film career.
The film was rejected by several major festivals before eventually finding its audience, something Moore now describes almost as part of its identity.
“It’s truly beautiful that it’s finding its way like it is,” he says. “It almost feels like an act of rebellion because it was denied so many times.”
The response has begun opening doors for him too.
“It’s helped me break into different casting rooms. I’ve got a new agent, which is great,” he says. “It’s just really exciting.”
There is one downside to having a role like Aaron arrive so early.
Finding another one.
“I’m struggling to find things that give me as much as Blue Film did,” Moore admits. “But I’m being patient.”
He remains immensely proud that it became his first feature.
“I’m so glad it was my debut.”
That patience is beginning to affect how Moore thinks about whatever comes next.
Every job has given him something, he says, but Eric made him particularly aware of how much he is willing to pour into a character and how much a role can take back from him in return.
“Going back to Eric a little bit, I realized how much, when I go there, it takes out of me, and how much I want to bring to the table,” he says. “So it just means being a bit more specific.”
Moore has auditioned and met for projects he describes as “truly tremendous” over the past year, increasingly limiting himself to material that genuinely excites him rather than chasing work simply for the sake of working. The competition has changed too. He finds himself going for roles alongside actors whose careers are considerably further along than his own, something he chooses to view less as a frustration than proof that he is entering rooms he once would not have reached.
“I’m amongst the superstars in some ways now, which is really a win,” he says. “Seeing some of the boys that do get the jobs that I’m going for is really motivating.”
More importantly, he is starting to understand what he wants his eventual body of work to look like.
“I think I’m realizing what kind of actor I am,” Moore says. “I just want to look back on it and they’re all different.”
It is difficult to imagine a cleaner illustration of that ambition than the run he has already put together. Dimitri’s disciplined restraint in Vampire Academy has very little in common with Liam’s guarded softness in Code of Silence. Liam bears almost no resemblance to the carefully constructed masculinity of Aaron in Blue Film. And Eric, starving, vindictive, wounded and practically vibrating with everything he refuses to let go of, feels like another creature entirely.
“There are wins in all realms of what we do, and they come in different sizes,” he says. “A win could be landing a lead role, of course, that’s great and you can be at the front of something. A win can also be working with someone that you want.”
For now, he cannot say what that next win will be.
But if the last few years of his career have proven anything, it is that wherever that is, he has very little interest in repeating himself.
“For as long as I can get away with playing really different characters,” Moore says, “I’m happy.”
Vampire Carnival is now available on digital.
