Wild Tales From ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Final Season

The greatest vampires that pop culture has ever known—or, at least, the most iconic ones to ever reside on Staten Island—have closed their coffins for good. And, while it’s against their cold-blooded nature, they’re rather verklempt about it.

We’ve spoken to the cast, creators, and best-in-biz production team of What We Do in the Shadows several times over the course of its six-season run on FX. We’ve even, as is the vampire tradition, been invited inside their house, so to speak.

For years, that house, an actual facade of a decaying Staten Island Victorian-style mansion, stood on the side of a busy thoroughfare in Toronto, where the Emmy-winning series filmed.

On their commutes to and from work, busy Canadians could glance out their window to the practical set and maybe see a vampire suspended from a bungee cord, flying through the air. At a soundstage meters, on any given day, four demented vampires and their well-meaning familiar were alternately running amok or having the most mundane day that a supernatural blood-sucking immortal being ever experienced.

What We Do in the Shadows, then, was TV’s most impressive action comedy, with its cast zooming through the sky to battle werewolves, face-off against the actual New Jersey Devil, or suck civilians’ blood. It was just as much the era’s most endearing, if dopiest (complimentary) “friends hanging out” sitcom.

A few months before the show’s final season began airing—its finale aired in December and all episodes are now available to stream on Hulu—we made a final return to the Shadows set, dismayed to see that the house on the side of the road had already been dismantled.

The cast had just done the table read of the final episode of the series, and were—fittingly, considering the characters they play—in a liminal space about it. They were hugely emotional about one of the most significant chapters of their lives and, as they unanimously praised, the greatest job of their careers ending, but were attempting to stifle sentimentality so that they could be intently focused on the task at hand: making hugely funny comedy.

What We Do in the Shadows launched in 2019, a TV spinoff of the film written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. Adopting a The Office-style mockumentary format, the series followed four vampire roommates in Staten Island, whose centuries-old ways hilariously clash with a modern world that routine baffles them, and whose lackadaisical absence of urgency and propensity towards buffoonery is at odds with their supposed purpose of ferociously and menacingly taking over New York City.

Over its run, the series accrued nearly 30 Emmy nominations—competing alongside blockbuster comedies like Modern Family, Veep, Ted Lasso, and The Bear—and appeared on a dizzying number of year-end Best TV Show lists, including taking top honors of The Daily Beast’s own ranking once.

Through its adorably clueless characters’ eyes, Shadows forever changed how we think about March Madness and the Superb Owl (spelling intentional).

My trip on set took me past a Rube Goldberg machine-esque contraption that is pedaled by a raccoon in order to better facilitate dildo-assisted masturbation, the double sided dress made to accommodate a scene in which one character has sex with another while in the body of a different character while the baby doll inhabited by a ghost kinkly whips them, and the eerily realistic animatronics made that were half-animal, half-human.

It’s, suffice it to say, a singular show.

In recent months—and especially in recent weeks—I’ve been asked relentlessly, because of my job, what people should watch in order to, for lack of a better description, wind down and relax. I’ve been consistently going back to my old favorites, reliably hilarious shows that I can bank on lifting my spirits. Now that What We Do in the Shadows is fully wrapped, I’d say it’s the perfect time to revisit it and add it to that canon.

With that, and with the show currently nominated for four Critics Choice Awards, including Best Comedy Series, at Friday’s ceremony, we thought now would be a perfect time to share my favorite anecdotes from my time with the cast and creative team as they shot the series’ last episodes.

(Full disclosure: I had planned to publish this story during the final season, but life introduced a Category 5 hurricane of chaos that prevented me from doing the good job on it that the show deserved. So I’m publishing it now because, just as vampires live forever and are, to pop culture fans, forever fascinating, so too should this show be perennially discovered, celebrated, and written about.)

The pressure of a finale

“ We knew that when we got to the final season, we didn’t want to make it a, heavy, you know, the NBC announcer voice, ‘This is the final season,’” Paul Simms, the series’ executive producer, showrunner, and writer, said. “We wanted to make it—I hate to say—just another funny season.”

In other words, a Very Special Season would be disingenuous to the spirit of a series in which a centuries-old vampire checks his email for the first time in 10 years, sees a chain letter warning that if he doesn’t forward it, he would be cursed, and thinks it’s real.

“I think a lot of times, final seasons get caught up in feeling like they have to tie up all the lore and the mythology, and I think that’s very off-putting to people who haven’t seen the show before,” Simms added. “So this is a final season, but you can watch any episode out of order. I mean, the last episode might be a weird one to watch first.”

Sam Johnson, another Shadows executive producer and writer, set up a fun image: “Paul has a vault in his house that has miles and miles of note cards that have all the ideas from all the seasons.”

If the series wasn’t working up to some sort of poignant climax typical of other comedies, consider it instead, in the ribald Shadows way, an orgasm of the best gags and gimmicks the writers never got to use.

“There are so many dumb ideas, so many ideas that we’ve tried to use that percolate up and we set them aside,” Johnson said. Simms laughed and glanced at the publicist who was supervising the conversation: “Susan hates it when we refer to our own show as dumb. But I do it. I do it proudly and I will stick by it.”

The story behind the crazy voices

Natasia Demetriou and Matt Berry played by Nadja and Laszlo, the married vampires whose eternal life has infused them with an unbridled, wanton spirit. They’re sexually voracious, and spin through each day like a tornado of frayed wires, sparking whatever whim their id sees fit for the moment.

Indelible to their comedic appeal is their characters’ unique voices.

Nadja’s is a crass foghorn, who giddily delivers tone-deaf arias in a dialect that is European by way of Miss Piggy. Demetriou’s family is Greek-Cypriot. “It just made sense to me that she would have that voice,” Demetriou, who has a warm British accent in real life, said. “I hope it wasn’t too big or too ridiculous.”

Berry’s loquacious line deliveries as Laszlo has become the stuff of legend among Shadows fans, single words delivered with syllables you’d never expect added in as flourish—all with a sophisticated, baron’s flair of opulence. So it’s funny, then, to learn that Laszlo’s was never a character voice at all.

“ I was asked by Jemaine to do this. And then I said, ‘Well, what sort of accent would you like me to do?’ Because I was, you know, sort of ready to do whatever he wanted,” Berry said. “And he said, ‘I’d like you to speak in your own accent. Exactly how you sound now.’ So that’s it. I just did what I was told.”

It’s hard to pick the wildest episode

Each season of What We Do in the Shadows took full advantage of the opportunity provided by its supernatural characters to do the most outrageous action-comedy bits, while at the same time contrasting that against the hilarity of mundanity: having these vampires bumble their way through a casino, or attempt to create a Build-a-Bear at a suburban mall.

We asked Kayvan Novak, who plays Nandor, the imposing and formidable warrior who is rendered as insecure as a pubescent teenager by his unfamiliarity with the modern world, what he’ll remember as the wildest thing he’s ever done because of this show.

“Are you assuming that, in years to come, I’m going to be boring the s--- out of you?” he answered, laughing. We reminisced about one particular episode in which Nandor trains himself to go to outer space, falls back down to Earth, and lands naked on a Gay Pride float with his hair fully erect like a Troll doll.

“Going to space was fun,” he said. I mean, I didn’t actually go to space, but you know that. I’m sure I will be boring my kids at some point, when they’re old enough to show them the VHS or whatever.”

For Demetriou, it’s the juxtaposition of the absurdity of what the cast’s vampire characters were doing against the real-world backdrops that reliably cracked her up—and that she’ll miss the most: “There’s been so many times that we’ve stood on set and there’s someone dressed as the Sire, there’s the Baron, there’s a bunch of vampires, a doll, And we just look at each other and, like, we’re in a supermarket. You’re like, this will never happen again, ever.”

They didn’t want to Urkel the whole thing

A fan-favorite character, from the very beginning, has been Mark Proksch’s Colin Robinson, the energy vampire. What is an energy vampire, you might ask? Instead of feeding on blood, they feed on a person’s energy, draining them by boring them literally to death. So Colin’s whole schtick was, essentially to be boring—which isn’t exactly the most conducive prompt for a dynamic character.

“After Season 1, I went to Paul and said, I feel like if I keep draining, I’m going to become Urkel, that type of character, really annoying. And Paul was already ahead of me on that,” he said, referencing Family Matters’ Steve Urkel.

A storyline mid-series that had Colin Robinson die, only to be reborn as a baby that had to be nurtured and raised by the fellow vamps, broke that monotony. “Colin being reborn was the moment it felt like there was something fun and new with the character.”

The Working Girl references we didn’t know we needed

The biggest change of the final Shadows season was getting so many of the characters out of the house and into the real world. Guillermo (Harvey Guillen), Nandor’s familiar who, at this point, is stuck between vampire and human life, gets a corporate job. To spy on him, Nandor gets hired at the same company as a janitor. Nadja cons her way into a position there, too, and, lo and behold, kills it as a business woman.

The hilarity, of course, is that their reference points for what life at the office is like is about as updated as the classic movie Working Girl. “I just love the film Working Girl, and I get to wear massive shoulder pads and the sort of hair that my Greek family have that I somehow really didn’t ever get,” Demetirou said. “That was probably the peak of what I was hoping for [in a final season]. If the hair and shoulders can get any bigger, it did this season.”

“ I remember the first day we were shooting in that set, we were like, whoa, this feels very jarring to watch our characters in a Wall Street office,” said Sarah Naftalis, Shadows supervising producer and writer. “It is fun to see Nadja in whatever [clothes] she’s cobbled together from victims over the past however many decades. And to see what her concept of what a working woman is like. She wants the lingo, she wants the small talk, she wants stocks going up, up, up! That’s very funny.”

Dolly forever

A highlight of my life will be getting to not just hold Dolly, the miniature version of Nadja that is possessed by her ghost spirit as well, but seeing prosthetics designer extraordinaire Paul Jones operate the robotics that allow it to function as a practical character on the show.

I’ll also never forget the first time I asked Demetriou how she felt about having Dolly, a miniature version of the character she created. “When I first saw it, honestly, my womb fell out my bum,” Demetriou said. “It’s so awful because you just ignore the human [puppeteer] in the green suit, and you’re like [wails in adoration] at this inanimate object.”

How was she feeling about saying goodbye to Dolly?

“I’m so deranged about that doll,” she said. “I’m not being just a mad woman. It’s so lifelike. Obviously, you go through your head and you’re like, am I ever going to be in a show or film again where there’s a doll that’s made in the likeness of me? That me trapped inside it? No, probably not.”

Shadows is a very silly show. But one of its loftier achievements has been its ability to skewer modern culture, because the show is able to refract all the absurdities of it through the eyes of these out-of-touch, non-human creatures.

“From the very beginning, from before we even did the pilot, that was sort of one of the appeals of it, is seeing just regular life and how we live through someone who’s seen it with fresh eyes,” Simms said.

But why Staten Island?

Despite the core vampires’ indisputable status as B-level heathens, the show’s Staten Island location was never meant to be a “punchline,” Simms swore. One advantage of setting it in that borough instead of Manhattan or Brooklyn is that it had remove from the bustling cosmopolitan nature of the big city. “So it wasn’t the glitz and the glamor,” he said, and therefore more ripe for real-world humor.

“Also, I think in a good way, them being Staten Island vampires…it’s not like they have a chip on their shoulder, but they’re used to the Manhattan vampires going, like, ‘Ugh, Staten Island vampires…’ When, actually, Staten Island is probably a more fun place to live than Manhattan,” Simms said.

Staten Island, it seems, almost reflexively embraced the spirit of the show. In 2021, FX had the Season 3 premiere of the series on Staten Island at an outdoor venue. And wouldn’t you know who showed up to infest it: bats.