Saying Good-bye to the Funniest Vampires on TV

It’s a gray, chilly April day in Toronto with just two weeks left to film What We Do in the Shadows’s sixth and final season. The FX comedy follows a group of vampires living in an old mansion in Staten Island and participating in an unnamed documentary. The cast is preparing to film a house-meeting scene, so each of the roommates has gathered in the “fancy room”: Nandor the Relentless (played by Kayvan Novak), a once-imposing Ottoman general who’s now a softhearted self-help-books-reading vampire; Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry), a randy Victorian gentleman of science; Laszlo’s wife, Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetriou), a headstrong, scrappy Greek former peasant; and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), a midwestern cubicle-coded “energy vampire” who derives sustenance from sucking the life out of the room. The other main cast member, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), a human familiar turned vampire turned human once more, isn’t in this scene, having once again left the house in the dangerously hapless hands of his immortal onetime employers.

Demetriou holds a pillow in her lap as she’s several months’ pregnant and has spent the season learning every trick for hiding her belly. “Carry a bucket, carry a box, put a pillow on your lap, stand behind a fruit bowl,” she says. Nandor makes his rousing declaration: The roommates will meet here every night to work on their plan for finally conquering the New World, a thing they meant to do upon their arrival centuries ago and have been trying to get back to since season one. He gives this little speech several times, and his roommates react approvingly; the takes are done rapid-fire. As improvised jokes are added and tweaked, they settle on a final one for the scene, in which Proksch honks a horn in approval. After the first couple of takes, Demetriou checks in with director Kyle Newacheck. Is the joke that they’re enthusiastic about the idea, or should she play it more coy? “The talking head undercuts it,” says Newacheck, explaining that Nadja should offer her full, unironic approval to Nandor, which she’ll walk back in a later interview filmed in the show’s mockumentary format. In the final version of her talking-head scene, Nadja chats about her intention to learn the ways of humans. An off-camera voice reminds her of Nandor’s plan, and she responds, “Yes, conquering the New World and that thing, very important to me. Gonna get to it soon,” then adds a thumbs-up.

This loose improvisation is what makes Shadows a particular joy to watch. Based on the 2014 independent film of the same name by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, Shadows has become the last of its kind — a comedy that prioritizes a level of silliness achieved through years of honing an entirely serious skill set. The series has already lasted much longer than anyone anticipated, after unexpectedly finding an audience when season two premiered to a locked-down nation hungry for laughs at the beginning of the pandemic; season two had a 25 percent viewership increase over season one. It has also been a showcase for predominantly British comics operating at the height of their abilities. Berry was nominated for an Emmy this year for his role in the show — he’d already won the 2015 BAFTA for Male Performance in a Comedy Program for Toast of London — while Demetriou has been nominated for two BAFTAs and Novak won one for his work on the prank-call program Fonejacker. Proksch has appeared on The Office, and his fellow American cast member Kristen Schaal co-stars in Bob’s Burgers. Guillén notes that even though he had already been working in the industry for over a decade when he got this role, he was still the only cast member who had never made their own series.

“It’s one of the fastest shows I’ve ever participated in,” says Schaal, who plays a mysterious vampire version of an executive assistant known only as the Guide. “It’s like doing a play.” Shadows is the rare production job that doesn’t regularly stretch beyond a 12-hour filming day. This is thanks in part to its mockumentary style, which requires little setup between takes and allows the performers incredible flexibility. “You don’t want to be overly rehearsed,” Proksch says. “You want to get in some of the fumbling so it reads realistic.” Even Berry, who hadn’t been a fan of mockumentaries, now appreciates the form: “You can have an idea, do your idea, change your idea, do something else, all very quickly.” In their downtime, Berry, Newacheck, and Novak like to jam in the house’s music room, a large space with a piano, a drum kit, and several guitars and keyboards that serves as a sort of break room when it’s not being used for a scene.

The house the vampires share feels quite real — a “360 environment,” as Novak puts it — with entire floors fully built out on separate soundstages. To access the main floor’s living room, you have to go through an actual front door, then through an entryway with a cobweb-covered coat closet on one side and, on the other, a table filled with Amazon packages addressed to 1211 Sandywood Street, Staten Island, NY, 10309, care of “Javier Sucksalot,” one of many jokes the audience never sees but the production-design team added for fun. Paul Jones, whose 36-year career in animatronics and prosthetics includes Blade and several Resident Evil films, has a workshop across the street and swings by whenever a severed head or robotic mutant is needed — particularly necessary whenever Laszlo gets into one of his disturbing scientific experiments. Jones is effusive about the job he has been able to do on Shadows, readily offering that it’s the “best show I’ve ever worked on.” His office is practically a museum of the series’ history, housing full-body casts of some of the actors as well as fully built characters like the Sire, an ancient vampire from whom all other vampires of the world descend, and Baby Colin, who crawled out of the chest cavity of a dead Colin Robinson at the end of season three as part of the energy vampire’s mysterious life cycle.

With the industry cutting back and more serious, grounded comedies like The Bear and Hacks taking home all the Emmys, Shadows, with its ornate weirdness, feels like an endangered species. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to work on a show like this again,” executive producer Paul Simms tells me in his office just above the soundstage. Although he insists the final season won’t be a maudlin affair, the premiere does spark something of an existential crisis for the characters. It introduces us to another roommate they suddenly remember has been asleep in the basement for 50 years — a vampire named Jerry, played by Mike O’Brien — who, upon awakening, begins asking uncomfortable questions about why they’re making a documentary, something they really hope Guillermo can help them figure out.

Back on set, Berry is filming his talking-head sequence, in which Laszlo agrees with Nandor’s plan, saying, “Conquering the New World is indeed job No. 1. It is of the utmost importance, but …” In classic Shadows fashion, Laszlo finds a way to get side-tracked by his own harebrained schemes. They run this scene a couple of times, and as the crew shuffles between takes, Berry waits, tonguing his fangs before suddenly cracking a smile to himself — he has an idea. When “action” is called, he punctuates the line by thrusting his index finger, without warning, directly into the camera on the word one. He pauses, stepping out of character briefly: “How does that look?” It’s undoubtedly hilarious, typical of Berry’s strutting physicality, but it doesn’t make the final cut. It’s just an option, something they found in the moment. A brief opportunity to have a little fun.