Cast on Ending Silly Vampire Comedy

(This story contains major spoilers from What we do in the shadows the series finale, “The Finale.”)

Nothing ever changes in the “Vampire Residence” in Staten Island, New York.

The creaky, dusty floorboards and musty tapestries of the Victorian residence never get a makeover. Vampire-turned-bodyguard-turned-private-equity-brother Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén) never quite realizes what it’s like to live as a bloodsucking creature of the night. The many goodbyes and stomach-churning deaths endured over the course of six seasons of FX’s What we do in the shadows always end with the roommates in the shabby old house reuniting again and again for hijinks, petty squabbles and farcical life-threatening dilemmas.

Season six of the Emmy-winning show ended Monday grappling with the idea that the cyclical nature of living — especially when you’ve been doing it for hundreds of years — as it tied the knot on a much-loved 61-episode run.

“For the vampires, I think that’s exactly the case,” says Mark Proksch, who plays energy vampire Colin Robinson. The Hollywood Reporter of the series finale. “A hundred years from now, these idiots will still be in their house going through the exact same motions that they’ve been going through for 200 or 300 years. And I find that refreshing somehow.”

Proksch adds, “It’s just a tough, silly, stupid comedy. It doesn’t try to teach you anything, it doesn’t push any kind of agenda, and it doesn’t make you reflect too much on your own life and the problems you had to have.”

What we do in the shadowsbased on what creator Taika Waititi recently called a five-minute idea which has given fans six seasons and a film of the same name, follows four vampire companions played by Proksch, Kayvan Novak, Natasia Demetriou and Matt Berry, along with their human familiar, Guillén, as they tackle the wear and tear of human norms with the quirkiness and absurdity that comes with being immortally ill-equipped for the modern world. Kristen Schaal also stars as a vampire, referred to simply as the Wizard, who is always just on the outside of the roommates’ found family.

Over its six seasons, the show has featured cameos and guest spots from the likes of Nick Kroll, Paul Reubens, Tilda Swinton, Wesley Snipes, Mark Hamill, Jeremy O. Harris and Sofia Coppola, to name a few.

Gullién’s character, Guillermo, is the only human mainstay of the bunch – aside from the in-show camera crew filming the series mockumentary-style – and dutifully acts as an avatar for the audience, often shooting sidelong and knowing glances at the camera when something goes wrong. In the series finale, Guillermo’s mortality makes him the only roommate who struggles with the idea that the documentary conceit must come to an end, and with it the show.

Just like for the audience of the critically acclaimed comedy, the film crew packing up and going home means that Guillermo’s time with these four quirky, terrible and lovable vampires is also coming to an end. While the vampire coven of Nandor the Merciless (Novak), Nadja of Antipaxos (Demetriou), Laszlo Cravensworth (Berry) and Colin Robinson simply fall seamlessly back into the cycle of what ordinary vampiric roommate business vampires do, Guillermo is consumed with concern over , that what has been the greatest time in his life is over; that he will slip into darkness and find himself back to dealing with the mundane, whatever life was before he knew vampires existed.

While Gullién may not be existentially unable to move on, he agrees that it will be hard to say goodbye to a show, and the people who helped create it, a show that has become of an escape for him and so many others.

“We’re making a silly show that has heart, and people have told us in person at Comic Cons and whatnot, ‘This is the show that got us through the pandemic.’ But apart from the pandemic, it is something that resonates with people,” says Guillén.

What we do in the shadows has for some fans been the reason they started talking to their father again, says Guillén, or what helped an uncle get through chemotherapy. Although the main characters are ancient, often violent, vampires who kill people and most of the time are only concerned with themselves, What we do in the shadows has been dealing with a Waititi brand of wholesome, clean comedy.

“The show has made people feel good and that’s our job. We created an escape, and we did that for six seasons,” continues Guillén. “It’s been a tough decade. We have to escape a little bit once in a while and just be in this silly world of a documentary with vampires and their familiar people. That 30 minutes a week is enough, so it gets you to keep wanting to keep going.

“We were lucky that we were able to do that for people,” he says.

Part of what helped the show gain such a cult following, in addition to the 2014 film written and directed by Waititi and Jemaine Clement, was that its second season premiered in April 2020, just as the pandemic locked nearly everyone in their homes. No matter what someone and their roommate argued about in a month-plus of lockdown, you could be sure that the vampires and Gizmo, born Guillermo, had bigger, funnier problems to deal with.

Yet, despite the comedy series’ critical and audience acclaim during its six-year run, the series won only one Emmy for Outstanding Costume Design in a Fantasy or Sci-Fi Series in 2022, while garnering 29 nominations.

Then last December, FX announced that the show would end after finishing the last half of its two-season renewal. While the show’s ending may have caused some consternation for some fans, showrunner Paul Simms told an audience at New York Comic Con in October that he felt “it’s better to go out on top, and better too early than too late.”

Knowing it was the final season meant they didn’t take anything for granted and were able to give season six everything they had, Schaal says.

“What was a great gift knowing that it was over is that everyone didn’t have to take a second of being on that set and being with those people and stepping into those incredible costumes for granted,” says Scale THR. “(Working on this show) has always been a dream, but endings are hard and it’s really hard to say goodbye.”

It’s especially hard when you say goodbye to the cast, who now, rather than back on set at the Victorian mansion that serves as their characters’ Vampire Residence, answer questions and talk about what it means to see the last of their six year long journey enter. world.

“Around this time, we would be in Canada now filming another season,” says Novak. “There’s definitely a strong kind of sensory memory that you experience in this show, you know, with the accents and the hair and the makeup and the clothes and the sets. It’s an incredibly immersive experience, not only for the viewers, but we really live it a lot the time while they capture it.”

Novak may not have been quite ready to hang up Nandor’s mantle, joking that this would likely be “the last episode of the last season of the last show of the last job of my career.” But there’s a sense for him and among the cast that they’ve been lucky to spend as much time as they did living with these characters and making such a “silly, stupid” show.

“Six seasons, man. I mean, I’m from Britain, the British do eight episodes and they feel like, ‘That’s it, it’s over,'” Novak says. “We did 61 episodes. I’m incredible.”

Guillén says that after they shot the pilot, he doubted the show would ever go on, since so many shows in Hollywood end before they ever get started. But then they shot the entire first season, and now, six seasons in, this one What we do in the shadows cast and crew say goodbye on their terms, with a little message that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“It’s easy to get tired after working on shows for a long time,” says Guillén. “It’s about finding that perfect balance where you need to know when it’s a good way to leave a nice gift for everyone that everyone can always look back on and just have a perfectly linear story, as opposed to to look back and say ‘well, that was the season they (fell off),’ you know? We didn’t, we had the perfect package.”

Of course, neatly wrapping up six seasons of a show that started as just a five-minute idea without getting long in the tooth—a feat no doubt—doesn’t mean Guillén, and perhaps the rest of the roommates, wouldn’t be willing to drop by the old house again and revisit these characters they’ve come to love.

So maybe just goodbye, for now.

“Will these characters come back to visit and say hello again? Maybe, you know, anything is possible,” says Guillén. “We’re open to a quick visit with these characters and these people because we love the time we spent together, and look forward to every opportunity to spend more time together in the future.”

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What we do in the shadows now streaming all episodes on Hulu.