What We Do in the Shadows

Similarly, Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) must abide by their own laws of survival ( ...

“What We Do in the Shadows” is in that precious TV sweet spot: old enough to draw from its own experience, and young enough to be emboldened by its enduring potential. When the Supreme Vampiric Council made a surprise visit to check on the Vampiric Council of the Eastern Seaboard of the New World — led by Nandor and Nadja — and Nandor refused to participate, Nadja said she killed him and then let her guests play with his penis. All that matters is she’s intensely excited to do so, and you should be just as excited to see what that entails. The series follows its cinematic predecessor’s mockumentary structure, relying on a small group of documentarians to tell the story of four vampire roommates and their familiar-turned-bodyguard, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén). Similarly, Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) must abide by their own laws of survival (and vampire society) as they make the most of life in Staten Island. There’s also the classic sitcom structure that provides rules of its own — from runtimes to joke buttons, character arcs to inciting incidents, A-plots to C-plots — but let’s not get too far into these weeds. Nandor has reached a point where he’ll refer to Guillermo as a friend, but the bodyguard is starting to itch for a little more independence. While likely not “ What We Do in the Shadows'” guiding mantra, the above has proven to be a winning formula for the FX comedy.

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He will be stepping into the DC Universe in both the live-action, Blue Beetle, and animated world, Harley Quinn, as Dick Grayson, aka Nightwing. Guillén would like to clear the record about his role in the latter: he laughs as he recalls the teasing comments that say he’s been typecast due to the character’s “bubble butt.” “I’m not ashamed of my body, so when people try to say ‘That’s just typecasting,’ y’know what? This is most notable between Guillén and Novak, the character pairing fondly named Nandermo (a mix of Guillermo and Nandor) by fans of the show, many of whom are keen to see a romantic storyline between the human and vampire. After getting his foot in the door of acting, Guillén recalls growing frustrated with the discouraging advice that he needed to lose weight to be a leading man. Undeniably the heart of the show, based on Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s offbeat 2014 film of the same name, Guillermo has remained in service to Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) for over a decade in the hopes that one day his ancient master will turn him into a vampire. Nandor has a hook on him,” Guillén says of his character in the upcoming season, which includes a baby crawling around the house and an unexpected wedding on the horizon, noting Guillermo will no longer be putting himself second. In What We Do in the Shadows, Harvey Guillén is the odd one out.

I don't know if people understand how creepy it's going to look,” the actor says of young Colin Robinson.

And then on top of that, acting as a child—as child Colin Robinson would act, as teenage Colin Robinson would act—you have to kind of remember, What was I like at that age? Anytime you have a dummy of yourself, it is so eerie, and our practical effects guys are so good that it looks real. [Laughs] It was really fun, because how often do you get to have a death scene as a character and get to come back? And so it’s exciting because I get to think about, What would Colin have been like as a toddler, as a 10-year-old, as a tempestuous teen? I had relatives reaching out to my parents and my in-laws, and people were pretty concerned with what was going on. In fact, Paul, [writer-producer] Sam Johnson, and I ended up doing a round of interviews because people were so inquisitive about what they had just seen.

After almost a year off our screens, undead housemates Nandor, Nadja, Guillermo and Laszlo are back with more supernatural shenanigans in What We Do in the ...

Out of the country when season 4 of What We Do in the Shadow airs? Downloading a VPN will allow you to stream the latest season online no matter where you are. By downloading a VPN (opens in new tab) you’ll still be able to connect to an IPTV like Sling and stream the show online, no matter where you are. BBC iPlayer (opens in new tab) (UK) Hulu subscribers can also watch FX content: either live with a Hulu with Live TV (opens in new tab) plan (at $64.99 per month), or wait until a day after broadcast to watch it on Hulu’s $6.99 on-demand only plan. After almost a year off our screens, undead housemates Nandor, Nadja, Guillermo and Laszlo are back with more supernatural shenanigans in What We Do in the Shadows season 4.

The season four premiere is a perfect reminder of why WWDITS is one of the most joyful comedies on TV right now.

So I’d like you to come back to the basement of my mansion and examine my massive dowry.” (Verily, “Where is the blood sprinkler nightclub?” is the new “When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?”) The reveal that The Guide has an army of obedient wraiths at her disposal is fun, and the payoff—with Laszlo psychoanalyzing her in Matt Berry’s best “important psychiatrist” voice, and the confrontation with Guillermo—is great. Even if “The Lamp” doesn’t quite hit the highs of “Reunited,” it’s still a welcome return for our favorite Staten Island vamps. (Including the nice-in-his-mind promise of “a gold coin” to lure all the ones he rejects right on back to their deaths.) - “There’s a very strong smell of gas leak down here. It’s a shame because it’s the weaker half of the episode for sure. There’s a genuine joy that radiates from all four (non-babied) leads at being back in this very funny world, and the script, from Stefani Robison and Paul Simms, matches that sense of freedom. Guillermo’s attempt to get Colin’s PIN out of “The Boy” (naturally Colin would have seized control of the house’s finances at some point) suggests he might genuinely be a new person. Meanwhile, Nandor appears to have shaken off his third-season funk and retained some measure of his newfound respect and affection for Guillermo; there’s something genuinely sweet about the way he immediately tosses himself into the “gas-hole” in order to save his bodyguard/familiar when he falls through the house’s now flooded basement. I’m genuinely torn about which hit harder: The reveal that Nandor caused 2021's infamous Suez Canal blockage by eating the entire crew of a container ship, or the reveal of Kayvan Novak’s Wisconsin-as-delivered-by-a-vampire accent while recounting his time with a nice family Nandor met in Fresno. (Okay, it’s the latter; I’ve listened to Novak’s “Hey dere Nandor!” about 20 times now and it hasn’t stopped making me laugh.) Said cash is required because a year sans Gizmo has left the house in even worse shape than usual, not helped by Laszlo’s very literal “when all you have is a hammer” approach to house repair. To dispense with the obvious, there’s the fact that Colin Robinson is still very much dead.

With this character-driven focus, the vampire underworld's uneasy relationship with modernity can still reap great comedic and thematic rewards — as it does in ...

The focus in this episode is solidly on Nandor and The Guide, but an exasperated Guillermo — still the only one around this place with any sort of respect for human life — provides a few clues to where else the second season of Nandor’s self-produced The Bachelor spin-off might go. And based on the excuses he makes for turning the rest of his wives into piles of dust, he doesn’t like to be challenged in any way, whether by a male wife’s superior physical strength or by a female one’s lashing tongue. Through a selfish and superficial process of elimination, he narrows the field down to just one wife: The beautiful and hyper-intelligent Marwa, a mathematician and astronomer who says she’s thrilled to be eternally betrothed to a man with an intellect to match her own. As it turns out, The Guide is resistant to change because she’s burying long-repressed shame in obsessive-compulsive devotion to the Council chambers, and she unconsciously fears that the nightly debauchery of a vampire nightclub might reactivate her long-ago slutty phase. In its earliest episodes, much of the comedy on What We Do in the Shadows came from the contrast between ancient vampires and the mundanity of modern life. With this character-driven focus, the vampire underworld’s uneasy relationship with modernity can still reap great comedic and thematic rewards — as it does in the second part of this week’s two-part season premiere.

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Matt Berry holds the distinction of playing one of the horniest vampires ever to grace American television—True Blood and Buffy be damned. Berry caught up with Pitchfork from his home in London to discuss his love for golden soul and high-drama rock. “He has to look sort of amateur for it to be funnier.”

“The Lamp” opens in the aftermath of Nadja's (Natasia Demetriou) big decision to open a vampire nightclub. The International Vampiric Council shot it down when ...

Nandor’s (Kayvan Novak) relentless search for love is as frustrating as locating the perfect wedding dowry offering in his secret room of treasures smuggled back from to his homeland, Al Quolanudar. “We live in a time of miracles,” he bemoans reverently, while tossing back a rare bejeweled spoon, rendered obsolete in an era of plentiful utensils. He had 37 wives, woman-wives and man-wives, which should not be surprising, but is given a passing glance by Guillermo. Nandor’s attempt to recreate the lobster scene from Annie Hall is fraught with pithy peril. It is vaguely surprising how quick Laszlo (Matt Berry) is to help with the transformation of the Council headquarters. Like the black and white photographs of Laszlo and Dr. Freud, the artistic renderings of the Guide’s past as a wanton, reckless undead libertine are the essence of the graphic satirical artform. The sessions between Laszlo and the Guide have all the makings of classic TV bits, too. Nadja is the most ruthless of the characters now, but was the Twilight-esque teen vampire of her generation in the small Greek village she was born, died, and un-died. The Roadrunner would never have been able to outpace the Wraiths. The Guide (Kristen Schaal) is a complex tapestry of obsessive excesses, further animating the proceedings. Whatuuuup?!? The vampires of What We Do in the Shadows are back, and if it seems like they’ve never left, it is by lazy design. Nandor’s bodyguard and former familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), was supposed to accompany him on his trip around the world, but wound up carted off with Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), who was appointed to the International Vampiric Council. Nadja is the most competent vampire in the group, and the most prone to sudden violence. The decay of the mansion is an epic travesty of the original set. The human TV audience can identify with the inhuman stars of What We Do in the Shadows as something akin to the medium’s lovable losers, but only to a certain point. This encapsulates What We Do in the Shadows’ vampire worldview, which is egocentric, arrogant, vain, gleefully clueless, and recklessly endangering.

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"Some of the funniest stuff to do, I think, is when we get to do Nadja [and] Lazlo stuff together, because they're such a stupid couple," Demetriou said. Let's have a dance,' yeah [it's a] funny thing, funny to sort of do." "Nadja has a nightclub, Laszlo has that boy. "He seems wholly intent on [focusing on] his own pleasure, and other people come a very, sort of, fast second. But I just did it just to see what would happen. I did that not thinking it would even be noticed, let alone ending up in the show.

The Wolf Man and Dracula are played by their original actors (Lon Chaney, Jr. and Bela Lugoisi, respectively), while Frankenstein's monster is played by Glenn ...

If the ridiculousness of Twilight’s vampires hadn’t made it unintentionally funny, the pointed personalities of the What We Do in the Shadows’ vampires may never have graced our screens. The best send-ups are done with love and appeal to the fanbase of what’s being sent up. It literally was my two favorite things in the world put together — it was horror, and it was comedy. The key to making a great horror comedy is it’s gotta be 80% horror and 20% comedy. To properly understand, we need to travel way back to the first filmed vampire send-up: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Don’t let Frankenstein in the title fool you. After the rise in popularity of the Universal monster movies — in a 15-year period we received Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), The Wolf Man (1941), Son of Dracula (1943) — executives figured they’d capitalize on the intrigue and put together a monster comedy.

The fourth season of the critically acclaimed FX series is a must-see—thanks in large part to Mark Proksch's Colin Robinson. He opens up to us about going ...

I like hard comedy and I like that world, and I personally don’t feel the need to try to show that I’m anything but a comedian. Jerry Lewis going on to make a very serious movie about a clown and concentration camps—I have no interest in any of that stuff,. There’s an outline, and then we just jump in and start playing our characters and see where that takes us, as opposed to a scripted show like Shadows. I love being able to do On Cinema because there is absolutely no pressure on any of us. As the seasons have gone on, it’s obviously become more of my property, creatively-speaking, and so that pressure has lifted a little bit. All we have to do is make ourselves laugh, and if we make ourselves laugh, we know that fans will come to it because they’ve been doing it for years. I saw it relatively recently—just about a month ago, I was doing some more green screen for the episodes and I finally caught a glimpse of what it is going to look like—and I couldn’t get through a lot of my takes because I would have to match the movements to some of the shots, and whenever a glimpse of my face would come up on the baby or the toddler, I would just roar with laughter. Because in the On Cinema world, Mark Proksch is this out-of-work figure who wants to be an actor but clearly doesn’t have any talent or skill set to achieve that and has fallen in with these two other losers who are toxically co-dependent, so I can just show up and play a really dumbed-down version of myself. Sometimes I would be on set, sometimes I would be on Zoom or I would be told to record my voice for this or that so the cast could react against me, and then there were times where we just did it on green screen. Or they would leave a little extra space in the shot for me to be able to come in and do something there. On Cinema is a bit of a unicorn when it comes to TV in that we don’t have set scripts at all. He’s the absurdly undead, and as embodied by star Mark Proksch, he’s the highlight of FX’s hit comedy—a figure so clever and amusing that it’s difficult to believe no one thought him up before. An unexpected turn of events, to be sure, and one that pays immense dividends in Season 4, which partly focuses on Laszlo’s efforts to raise this monstrous tyke and, in the process, figure out if he’s destined to become as unbearably monotonous as Colin Robinson. For Proksch, it’s about as bizarre as comedic opportunities get, given that the show’s newest episodes feature his head CGI’d onto the body of a young singing-and-dancing child.

Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and an unwilling Guillermo were shipped off to London, Nandor (Kayvan Novak) set off on a solo trip to find himself, and Laszlo opted ...

Though the characters have still markedly changed, season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows doesn’t quite deliver on the dramatic premise that its season 3 finale suggested. We don’t get to see who it actually is over the first four episodes (which makes sense given that the fake documentary is mainly about the vampires), but that in itself gives a sense that Guillermo is starting to really carve out a life for himself independent of the vampire house. What We Do in the Shadows season 4 premiered on FX on July 12. Nandor’s season 3 existential crisis was a significant moment of character growth for him, as an ex-warlord who still fondly reminisces on all of the pillaged villages in his past. Nadja is also generally kept apart from the rest of the main cast, which leaves you missing her banter with the likes of Laszlo and Guillermo. Luckily, Demetriou — a performer so funny that she can literally play off herself — is still a delight to watch on her own. Still, it’s hard to stay disappointed with a What We Do in the Shadows that’s firing on all cylinders. It would have been interesting for the show to probe into how this codependent mass of vampires (and one human) would fare when out of their element and left to their own devices. Season 3 of What We Do in the Shadows ended with a tantalizing cliffhanger. Meanwhile, Nandor accidentally brings a Djinn (a hilariously put-upon Anoop Desai) back from his trip to his ancestral homeland, which proves both useful and detrimental in his quest to find a wife. It was an act that caused nearly every member of our main cast to be suddenly isolated from one another, right on the precipice of taking on a new challenge. Circumventing that undercuts the emotional weight of the season 3 finale; there’s little payoff to the turmoil that these new circumstances must have thrown the characters into. The finale left fans screaming and shaking in its wake, and there was speculation aplenty about how the following season might resolve all of these individual storylines.

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The FX comedy, based on the film by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, returned Tuesday for its fourth season, with Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasha ...

That was one of the fun things about the previous season is that we had Laszlo and Colin sort of being buddies, and it was perfect because we wanted people to go like, “This makes no sense! But we knew in our minds the whole time that there was a reason why Laszlo was being so nice to him and it is because Laszlo does have a soft spot. You’ll learn a lot more about Colin and baby Colin. Whether we’ll have the full answer finally of where they come from, I don’t think so, but look, we know they exist. I wouldn’t say if we had to do it again I wouldn’t try it, but the difficulty level was so high that we’re still even finishing and tweaking it. “And for him to have spent a year taking care of the young baby Colin, or the child that came out of the dead Colin’s stomach, whatever it actually is.” That’s sort of what we — I would say examined through the season, but it makes it sound like a college thesis or something.

No longer the boring, energy-sucking vampire of seasons prior, who he will grow up to become is as yet unknown. “I would say that baby Colin Robinson doesn't ...

You’ll his journey to London is eye-opening and you’ll see him going off into the world and finally really ask himself what he really wants out of life, who he wants to be, and who does he want to spend his time with? “The last time we saw him, Guillermo had been unceremoniously trapped in that truck and shipped to London with Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) by Lazlo. This season, fans will see a different side to Guillermo. It’s the recurring joke on the show that they treat him terribly but I feel like this time we do see more into his thought process. “We were really excited to explore the character of Laszlo who we’ve come to know as this man about town, above it all, and this journeyman type of character to then becoming this nurturing person in his own kind of way,” she said. “He isn’t the most nurturing person in the world but he has his own perspective on child-rearing. No longer the boring, energy-sucking vampire of seasons prior, who he will grow up to become is as yet unknown. We had to leave our homes and our families during lockdown to make the show.

This has been a very big week for the FX series “What We Do in the Shadows.” At the same time the fourth season of the cable series that is based on the ...

Looking at the vampire characters, in particular, Natasia Demetriou, Matt Berry, Kayvan Novak, and Mark Prosch have all played their characters to perfection.

Regardless of how you feel, it’s still a happy day as Season 4 of What We Do In the Shadows begins airing on July 12th on FX. For 2022, that has to be the What We Do in the Shadows cast as all of the main players have been consistent performers. Then again, hopefully, we’ll eventually see the cast of What Do In the Shadows ends up in the acting categories at some point. Be sure to share your thoughts and feelings in the comments. Frankly, it’s a bit baffling and that’s what we’re here to talk about. Honestly, there is truly nothing bad to say about the show aside from how they treat Guillermo.

The nominees for the 74th annual Emmy Awards were announced today, recognizing achievements in television from June 1, 2021 through May 31, 2022.

“What We Do in the Shadows” premiered back in 2019 and had scared up 10 Emmy nominations in the past, nominated this year in the “Outstanding Comedy Series” ...

And this time with just a touch of home renovation.” While Nandor’s eternal search for love finally yields results, Nadja finally realizes her dream of opening the hottest vampire nightclub in the Tri-State Area. Could that change here in 2022?

Your favorite vampire comedy series is now back on FX and Hulu for its fourth season.

“Reunion” sets what will clearly be two of season four’s big storylines in motion: Nandor’s quest for a bride, and Nadja’s ambition to open a vampire nightclub. The performance is perfect, and you have to admire the writers for carrying season three’s biggest plot twist in such a freaky new direction. By now, there’s no point in “reviewing” What We Do in the Shadows, a certified smash hit which returned this week to drop its first two season-four episodes on FX and Hulu, and has already been renewed for seasons five and six.