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For five seasons, Staten Island has been the fictional home to a wily group of vampire roommates in the Emmy-winning FX show What We Do in the Shadows. We’ve seen them fight, make love, transfigure into bats and each other, dominate the city and Vampiric Council and they’ve made us laugh out loud at their absurd behavior time and again.
The sixth and final season, which just debuted on Monday, sees Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), their human friend Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) and their vampire bureaucrat acquaintance, The Guide (Kristen Schaal), enter the workforce, visit New Hampshire, go to a human dinner party, fête The Baron and conjure a demon.
It’s been a wild ride, and as a fan and “Nandermo” shipper, we’ll miss their hijinks and the insane lines they come up with. That's why when I had the opportunity to interview some of the cast and executive producers at New York Comic Con this year, I jumped on it.
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On Friday, I sat down with Kayvan Novak (Nandor), Harvey Guillén (Guillermo) and Executive Producers and Writers Paul Simms, Sam Johnson and Sarah Naftalis for a few minutes each to discuss the last season, the show’s New York City setting and some of their favorite places around the city.
What’s your favorite pizza spot in NYC?
Guillén: I took Kayvan to Emmett’s on Grove. It’s the best thin crust pizza and fried olives—everything there is really good and they like the show as well. So that was nice. I think that’s my favorite pizza place.
Novak: [deadpan] They could’ve given us a discount.
Any other spots around New York you love?
Guillén: There’s a lot. I like Bad Roman. It’s a really great restaurant. Sesamo is really good—the Japanese-Italian fusion, which I’ve never done before.
What was your experience with Staten Island before the show began? Did you have any preconceived notions of what Staten Island was?
Novak: Honestly, I’d never been there. The name has probably been mentioned in movie after movie that I’d seen during the course of my life. It made me giggle, just any mention of Staten Island. Saying Staten Island as Nandor always felt good. [proceeds to say “Staten Island” in Nandor’s accent.] So it kind of just did the job.
Guillén: I'd never been until The New York Times did a story on the show, and they do a piece where they take actors or comedians to do something they haven’t done before. They jump out of the plane, go hiking, something that you know is adventurous and exciting! And they’re like, we’re going to go to Staten Island! We took the Staten Island Ferry and took some photos, and then we went to [Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden], which is really nice actually. I think we had a screening there for season three or four. It was a really nice place.
Filming in Toronto, how do you make it feel a little bit New York?
Simms: We’re all New Yorkers. So much of the show was written in New York and edited remotely in New York.
Since the show is set in Staten Island, we can get away with a little more, because even a lot of people in New York aren’t that familiar with Staten Island. So, they so they could buy that. What happens is, you go to Toronto, and they go, “Oh, we got everything that New York has.” And we go, “OK, we want to shoot a scene in Times Square.” And they’re like, “Oh, we have our own Times Square.” And you go, “Now, this ain’t no Times Square.” A lot of it was backing off on our ambitions, although when we did an episode where they were supposed to go to Times Square, we ended up making it look more like 42nd street and we put up some theater stuff.
Look, if any of the three of us were watching it, we’d go like, “That’s not New York.” The other thing is, Toronto has electric trams that have electric tram lines overhead. So when we’re scouting for locations, we’re always like, there’s no place in New York that has tram wires, and sometimes we have to digitally remove them.
Johnson: We pitched a lot of stories where people are taking the subway, and we always have to remind ourselves there’s no subway in Staten Island.
Simms: What doesn’t exist in Staten Island that exists in Toronto is an actual subway train that’s built on the footprint of a bus for use in in production. So, we’ve had good luck shooting stuff inside subway cars that looks very real. We’ve had less good luck trying to shoot things that look like subway stations because in Toronto they’re little too nice. Yeah, they all seem to have like little drug stores down in them. It’s nice but it’s not New York.
Simms: One of the most exciting things for me, just personally, was the first time I saw Shadows ads on the subway entrances and on tops of cabs. I took so many pictures of those. When you live here, it really makes it feel exciting. And the other thing that I think was really fun was after setting the show in Staten Island, but shooting it in Toronto, we did an outdoor screening in Staten Island. It was really fun to actually go there and go say “Thank you for letting us pretend to be Staten Island.” The other thing was, they waited till it got dark for the screen and showed it on an outdoor screen, and when they started showing it actual bats started flying.
If you’re trying to shoot Staten Island, it’s impossible anywhere but Staten Island to find a ferry that looks like the Staten Island Ferry. They’ll tell you up in Toronto, “Oh, we got a ferry you could shoot here.” We should have just used Pete Davidson and Colin Jost’s extra ferry.
I understand that Guillermo moves out and begins work at Panera, which feels very New York. Can you talk about that major plot point?
Guillén: Well, I mean, he moves out the house in a really funny, dark way, but he’s very much at arm’s reach. He sets the boundaries, but they’re not following them. It’s just hilarious that they don’t and they forget that he’s no longer the familiar, right? He’s a self-made employee and he’s trying to make his own way. He’s matured into this adult man who wants to have a career in finance, and it’s just funny that out of fear of me not having a good experience in the real world and coming back and killing them all, which was rumored to happen to another person, they will do anything to help me succeed. But I think in a weird way, it’s a way that people show love, and I think that’s the way that they show love to him.
Naftalis: Well, I think at the end of season five, he’s decided he doesn’t want to be a vampire. But we were like, so what would make him stay, basically. And so I think we were just excited—what is something someone who’s only dreamed of one thing for 15 years do when that didn’t pan out? And I think it was kind of fun to watch him grapple with a plan B and see if it was actually better than what he had originally thought he wanted. So, I wish him joy, peace.
Johnson: But the other thing that makes him stay is New York rents.
I’ve enjoyed seeing your arc together and seeing like your relationship go different ways. How are you feeling now at the end of it, about how it went?
Guillén: Well, I think the perception of the narrative that the audience wants to see is what they’re going to see. For so long, the audience has always wanted them to be together or they have their own idea what their relationship should be. So you’re gonna want to see what you’re gonna want to see, and whether we say it’s not true or it is true, it won’t matter. You’re gonna be content, because you, in your heart of hearts, want whatever relationship you want for them.
Novak: It is your fan art.
Guillén: We’ve done a great job in the last six seasons of building the relationship between these characters, where we’re like, Are they? Aren’t they? That’s a nice tight rope to walk as an actor. That’s a really challenging thing to do for me. It was that I needed to have admiration for my, you know, employer, my ambassador, but also have love for them as almost Stockholm Syndrome. Are you in love with your captor or are you in love with your friend? Are you in love with this person? And it’s really nice to like see how it connects it all together. I think at the end of the day, they do love each other. And whether we as a society normalize that love can be between two men without making it sexual—which we don’t do that—I like to think that we can walk away saying that we normalized having love between them.
What do you think, Kayvan?
Novak: I think they’ve done a great job of basically keeping it going for six season. The writers have established a relationship between these two people, and now they’ve got to keep it interesting and also what can they get out of the fact that Guillermo finally got what he always wanted—to be a vampire—and where does he go from there, right? So, yeah, more credit to the writers. We always felt excited and inspired by the new Nandor-Guillermo dysfunctional chapter of their relationship; it always felt fresh and real.
How did it feel to wrap the season and the show?
Novak: I thought I’d be consumed with that feeling that, “Oh, this is the last season” through the filming of the last season. I had that kind of anxiety at the beginning, but then once we started filming, you just start back into it and it just feels like any other season. Usually the feeling when coming to the end of the season is, “I’m excited to go home. I’ve had my fill, I’ve had a great time, but I’m ready to go home.” This was kind of mixed as I was ready to go home. It’s been a long, fantastic season, but I’ve got to say “goodbye.” So, yeah, that was sad. That was emotional for sure.
Guillén: In the finale, there’s a very good scene that’s emotional, and so for me, it was like a double whammy. It was the last day of shooting. We were saying “goodbye” to everyone that day. People were trying to just keep it all together. Then the scene—was sad, and tragic and suffocating. It gave me just anxiety thinking about shooting that scene … by the second take, it wasn’t even acting. It was just like, let’s get the shot, because the emotions were real because they happen to be intertwined in my real emotion and what was happening with my character. It was the first time that the emotions were completely intertwined. I was like what I’m feeling right now as myself (as Harvey) and what Guillermo is feeling right now. It was really sad for me because it just happened to be the last shot. But looking back at it all, it’s such a great finale and such a great season that I’m really proud of all of our work and what we have done.
How did the writers go about wrapping it all up?
Simms: Well, that was a question that was on all three our minds. You know, every season, we write the whole season before we start shooting except the last episode, and we leave the last episode, and then, adrenaline and panic sets in and we finally write that. This time, it was that times 10 because we knew it was the last thing. And it took a lot of time of us just trying to figure out what it was going to be and what would satisfy us and satisfy the fans.
Do you have anything else to say to your viewers?
Novak: I thank all the fans for being fantastic. Meeting the fans is always a trip—all ages, races, colors and creeds, sexualities, genders—they all they all turn up. It’s amazing. It really has universal appeal. It’s what makes it special.
Guillén: I feel really grateful and lucky to have the fans that we have, because they do show up. We’re just making a comedy that we’re really happy to make and we’re proud of it. By doing a comedy, you don’t understand that you might be touching someone’s life. People come up and they say, “My dad couldn’t be here, but you mind FaceTiming really quickly?” And the sons are holding their phone up and they share with you that they’re not doing well, but they wanted to meet you say “hi” to the people who make them laugh. It’s always really like a touching thing to hear, and that’s why we love coming to Comic Con, because we don’t get to hear those stories otherwise unless people share them.
FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, the sixth and final season, is available to watch on Mondays at 10pm EST on FX and on Hulu the next day.