“Logo text [This story contains major spoilers from the What We Do in the Shadows series finale, “The Finale.”] Nothing ever really changes at the “Vampire Residence” in Staten Island, New York. The creaky, dusty floorboards and musty tapestries of the Victorian dwelling never get a makeover. Vampire familiar-turned-bodyguard-turned-private equity bro, Guillermo de la Cruz”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
[This story contains major spoilers from the What We Do in the Shadows series finale, “The Finale.”]
Nothing ever really changes at the “Vampire Residence” in Staten Island, New York.
The creaky, dusty floorboards and musty tapestries of the Victorian dwelling never get a makeover. Vampire familiar-turned-bodyguard-turned-private equity bro, Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén), never fully realizes what it is to live as a blood-sucking creature of the night. The many goodbyes and gut-hollowing deaths endured over the six-season run of FX’s What We Do in the Shadows always end with the roommates of that shabby old house reuniting time and again for hijinks, petty arguments and farcical life-threatening quandaries.
Season six of the Emmy-winning show ended Monday wrestling with that idea, the cyclical nature of living — especially when you’ve been doing it for hundreds of years — as it tied the bow on a much-beloved 61-episode series run.
“For the vampires, I think that’s exactly the case,” Mark Proksch, who plays energy vampire Colin Robinson, tells 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 in some way.”
Proksch adds, “It’s just a hard, silly, stupid comedy. It’s not trying to teach you anything, it’s not pushing any sort of agenda, and it doesn’t make you reflect too much on your own life and the troubles that you may be having.”
What We Do in the Shadows, based on what creator Taika Waititi recently called a five-minute idea that’s given fans six seasons and a movie by the same name, follows four vampire roommates played by Proksch, Kayvan Novak, Natasia Demetriou and Matt Berry, along with their human familiar, Guillén, as they address the drudgery of human norms with the quirk and absurdity that comes with being immortally ill-equipped for the modern world. Kristen Schaal also stars as a vampire, simply referred to as The Guide, who’s always just on the outside of the roommates’ found family.
The show, over its six seasons, has bagged 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 mockumentary-style series — and serves dutifully as an avatar for the audience, often dishing side glances and knowing looks to the camera when something goes awry. In the series finale, Guillermo’s mortality makes him the only roommate struggling with the idea that the in-show documentary conceit must come to an end and thus, so must the show.
Harvey Guillén as Guillermo in the series finale. Russ Martin/FX
Much like for audiences of the critically acclaimed comedy, the film crew packing up and going home means Guillermo’s time with these four quirky, terrible and lovable vampires also comes to an end. While the vampire coven of Nandor the Relentless (Novak), Nadja of Antipaxos (Demetriou), Laszlo Cravensworth (Berry) and Colin Robinson simply fall seamlessly back into the cycle of whatever regular vampiric roommate business vampires deal in, Guillermo is consumed with worry that what has been the greatest time of his life is over; that he’ll drift into obscurity and find himself back dealing the mundanity of whatever life was before he knew vampires existed.
Gullién, while maybe not existentially unable to move on, agrees it will be difficult to say goodbye to a show, and people who have helped create it, a show that has become somewhat 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 besides the pandemic, it’s something that’s resonated with people,” Guillén says.
What We Do in the Shadows has been for some fans the reason they began talking to their dad again, Guillén says, or the thing that helped an uncle get through chemotherapy. Even though its protagonists are ancient, often violent, vampires who kill people and are most of the time only concerned with themselves, What We Do in the Shadows has dealt in a Waititi brand of wholesome, pure comedy.
“The show has made people feel good, and that’s our job. We created an escape, and we did that for six seasons,” Guillén continues. “It’s been a tough decade. We need to escape for a little bit once in a while and just be in this silly world of a documentary with vampires, and their human familiar. Those 30 minutes are enough a week that it makes you 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 grab 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 shut nearly everyone in their homes. No matter what someone and their roommate were arguing about a month-plus into lockdown, you could be sure the vampires and Gizmo, née Guillermo, had bigger, more hilarious problems to deal with.
Still, despite the comedy series’ critical and audience acclaim over its six-year run, the show won just one Emmy for outstanding costumes in a fantasy or sci-fi series in 2022, while garnering 29 nominations.
Then last December, FX announced the show would end after wrapping up the latter half of its two-season renewal. While the show’s end may have caused some consternation for some fans, showrunner Paul Simms told an audience at New York Comic Con in October he felt “it’s better to go out on top, and better too soon than too late.”
Knowing it was the last season meant they took nothing for granted and were able to give season six everything they had, says Schaal.
“What was a good gift in knowing it was over is that everybody got to not take any second of being on that set and being with those people and stepping into those incredible costumes for granted,” Schaal tells 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 saying goodbye for the cast who are now, rather than back on set at the Victorian manor that serves as their characters’ Vampire Residence, answering questions and talking about what it means to see the last of their six-year journey enter the world.
“Around this time, we’d be in Canada now filming another season,” Novak says. “There’s definitely a strong kind of sense memory that you experience on 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 just for the viewers, but we’re really living it a lot of the time as they’re capturing it.”
Novak might not have been quite ready to hang up Nandor’s cape, 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 lucky to spend as much time as they got to live with these characters and make such a “silly, stupid” show.
“Six seasons, man. I mean I’m from the U.K., British people make eight episodes and they feel like ‘that’s it, it’s over,’” Novak says. “We did 61 episodes. I’s 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 to start. But then they shot the entire first season, and now, six seasons in, the What We Do in the Shadows cast and crew are saying goodbye on their terms, with a little message that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“It’s easy to get jaded after working on shows for a long time,” Guillén says. “It’s about finding the perfect balance where you need to know when it’s a nice way to leave a nice gift for everyone to always look back at and and just has a perfect linear story, as opposed to looking back saying ‘well, that was the season where they [fell off],’ you know? We didn’t do that, we had the perfect package.”
Of course, neatly wrapping up six seasons of a show that started as just a five-minute idea without it growing long in the tooth — a feat no doubt — doesn’t mean Guillén, and perhaps the rest of the roommates too, wouldn’t be willing to stop 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 revisit and say hello again? Maybe, you know, anything’s possible,” Guillén says. “We’re open to a quick visit with these characters and these people, because we love the time that we spent together and and look forward to any possibility of spending more time together in the future.”
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What We Do in the Shadows is now streaming all episodes on Hulu.