‘Talamasca: The Secret Order’ Showrunners on Finale’s 752 Twist, Lestat’s Song and Expanding Immortal Universe Lore

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In the world of Anne Rice’s Talamasca — a secret order of mostly humans tasked with maintaining the balance between the mortal and immortal worlds — information is not just key, but also a tool and a weapon. As the AMC series’ leading antagonist vampire Jasper (William Fichtner) craftily notes, information is power, and “it is all there is.”

“That is the coin of the realm for them,” he says Talamasca: The Secret Order co-showrunner and executive producer Mark Lafferty. “Without getting too highfalutin about it, that’s our world. What is the most valuable thing? In the last 50-60 years, it’s information. We all know and live that, and can understand it, and it’s more powerful than a lot of supernatural powers.”

The show’s commitment to that idea is never as clear as in the season one finale, which debuted Sunday on AMC and AMC+. The first five episodes of this twisty supernatural spy thriller see Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton), a young man with certain abilities, on a search to find the mother he thought was dead. It’s a journey guided in part by Helen (Elizabeth McGovern), a Talamasca agent with her own secrets and mission, and Jasper, a modern-age vampire seeking revenge through the acquisition of an ancient and influential text known as the 752.

In Sunday’s finale, the fruits of those missions by all three come to a head, as Helen and Guy discover a much larger scheme by the Talamasca that turned Helen’s twin, Doris (Celine Buckens), into an immortal (vampire) version of the 752, a powerful source of research about supernatural entities amassed by the order since its founding in 752 AD

Meanwhile, the vampire, who has spent the season puppeteering the Talamasca’s London Motherhouse and a group of revenants, is foiled by the secret order. Now, Jasper finds himself an unwilling tool in a much larger, shadowy scheme led by the Talamasca’s Houseman (David Elliot).

The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Talamasca: The Secret Order’s co-showrunners and executive producers Lafferty and John Lee Hancock about that Doris twist, The Vampire Lestat musical connection, how the season lays the groundwork for the lore of the Anne Rice immortal TV universe and how the finale sets up Talamasca’s season two.

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The finale had a few great reveals. Audiences discovered that Doris isn’t just Helen’s sister, but both a vampire and the 752. And Jasper is forcibly tasked with turning a bunch of people the way Doris was for the Talamasca. How did you reveal that Doris twist to your cast, and what is Jasper feeling at that moment?

MARK LAFFERTY It was very hard during the casting process to keep it all under wraps because obviously that’s a critical part, not just of Doris’ story, but of Helen’s story too. We had to be a little bit coy. Until we cast Celine, we didn’t want the word out to every single actress we were interacting with. So it was a lot of generalities: “You have a big secret, and there is more to you than meets the eye.”

JOHN LEE HANCOCK I think you had conversations with [Celine] once we revealed it to her, and then she had to keep it quiet. The crew didn’t know. Doris had a huge secret and so did Celine, and Celine was just bursting. When the script finally came out, then everybody knew and looked at Celine a little differently.

LAFFERTY What’s interesting about that, which we never really talked about, is that it served the purpose in filming the same way that it does in the story. Having nobody in the story know but her, they were all genuinely surprised, and everything changed in their performance. It was nice to keep the cast in the dark. It’s hard to do those things because everybody’s brimming with questions. Ultimately, Celine had a lot of fun with it.

It was a great twist. All season, the talk of the book raised questions about whether a centuries-old organization would actually keep all that information in a printed and potentially destructible place, or transfer it to something like a USB. There was also that moment with the body on the slab. I felt like I’d seen that neck before, which raised a bunch of questions while watching about what was actually possible.

LAFFERTY That was another thing where we were like, “How much hair do we show? Are people gonna know?” (Laughs.) The bodies at the end with Jasper was something we had talked about and gone back and forth on. Jasper said several times he wants there to be more vampires in the world, and this is like, well, here’s your wish. Do you want this? And should we continue the story if we’re given the chance? That’s something we’ve been thinking a lot about.

When I saw all those bodies I thought, “Oh, they collect children like weapons, but are they all the same? Just vessels for the 752?” Then I remembered that at the end of Mayfair Witches season twoa bunch of Taltos children were being swept away under the guise of saving them. Can we expect the Talamasca to only be dealing in certain abilities, with the children of the larger supernatural creature community? Whose bodies are those?

LAFFERTY Here’s what I will say without spoiling anything. And all the questions you are asking are things we are talking about in the writers room every day. The Talamasca has, let’s call it an R&D [research and development] side. They are interested, as a mostly mortal organization, in trying to find ways in which to dig out latent abilities within people. That is what you see in season one with the institution. They found Doris and made Doris, but when we visit the other twin sisters, the ones Helen goes to see, they also have certain small-bore abilities. What we’re trying to suggest is that, with the Talamasca, there is an effort they have had underway for some time to find these special people, grow them in-house and develop them. Who knows if in the future there might be other beings, people or abilities we see on the screen.

We learned from Houseman there was a point in time when vampires had a key role in running Talamasca. I’m curious about whether or not there were other species, mortal or immortal, that were running the order, and if it will be explained either in your show or in someone else’s why the vampires are no longer there?

LAFFERTY Part of the way we’ve imagined the Talamasca is that there are certain people like David Talbot, who is a vampire, and he is in the Talamasca. There is a little bit of a porousness there. One of the things we love is to think about is the Talamasca as an institution that has gotten away from its roots, and that if we are traveling down this road of when the Talamasca was created there was more of a balance in the supernatural world, it was created with the aiding and abetting of vampires; that somehow, over time, the thing that was supposed to keep this balance got unbalanced. The mandate is still there to keep the balance in the supernatural world. But suddenly, a bunch of mortals are running this thing, and they have an outsized amount of power and influence in this organization.

The fun of it for us is to say Talamasca is largely good. And yet, it has traveled far away from where it started and its roots. Interview mostly focuses on vampires and Mayfair on witches — and now we’re finding ourselves in the heart of this organization that has a problem at its core and has to maybe think about what it believes and what it’s supposed to be doing.

Let’s talk about Room 901. We see Guy exhibit the full thrust of his powers. We also stumble into an underground blood trade with a very old vampire, which we see Jasper decapitate. We know that it is not always necessarily enough to kill a vampire. We also have this lore about bloodlines that can give you certain powers. Can you talk about the extent of Guy’s power? Do we know fully what he can do? Does he know yet? And what is this blood trade? Who is the man who was lying on the bed, and can we expect to see him again?

HANCOCK Lafferty wrote the episode. This was an opportunity to see Guy’s gift/curse from childhood as something he pushed away; that he thought made him different in a bad way. This is very much a journey to embrace who he is and also to quit taking pills to help suppress that gift, which has curse functions as well. This is an opportunity for him to expand and to see, from an athletic standpoint, what he can do. You don’t know how far you can go until you’re pushed, until someone’s chasing you, and you go, “Wow, I can run faster than I thought.”

This episode was an opportunity to put a gun literally to Guy’s head and say, “Show us what you got,” and then for him to draw on his gifts and to concentrate so hard that we, as an audience — and probably Guy as well, for the first time — see that it’s not just thoughts. There are emotion bubbles and things that are attached to this. There are visual images that come into his brain, which separate him from mere mind readers. It’s the emotional context he gives those thoughts that really separates him, and he does it beautifully. So much so that the vampire with whom he’s doing it is pretty happy with the results. So this was one way to push Guy, and there may or may not be a little bit more that he has in his bag of tricks.

LAFFERTY In terms of Jasper, the blood trade and the other vampire, we obviously know that Akasha exists, and if she’s the apex among other ancient vampires, this guy you’re seeing in the bedroom is not nearly at that level. The reason we didn’t want to go quite to that level is that the blood is now floating around. If everybody who drank it suddenly had Akasha’s powers, then we’d be in trouble as storytellers. The point we were trying to make is that this vampire is somebody who was in a place of prominence and is exalted and was very powerful, and somehow came to a state in which they’re literally like a cow at a dairy farm being sucked dry. It should suggest a certain state of affairs within the vampire community, that Jasper is seeing and saying, “There was a time and a place where, if vampires like us were in the Talamasca and we had a role to play in keeping order and keeping everybody happy, my fellow vampires would never do something like this.”

But the way the Talamasca has exactly their rule is that they cherry-pick what kind of information to share and not share. It’s made all the vampires into these little siloed islands and people who, like a group of gangsters, will do this kind of thing to an old vampire. They’ve lost their own morals and principles, just as the Talamasca has lost its way. So Jasper is, in a way, saying, “We’ve got to go back to who we were and think about what we believe.” This is a real mercy killing he delivers. There’s sadness on his face. He regrets that this is the state of affairs for his brothers. As to whether or not we’ll see some of that blood again, we see Jasper drink a little taste of it to heal and get back into good shape. And look, there’s a suitcase full of it, so maybe Raglan James (Justin Kirk) shows up in some other shows. But it’s out there.

Helen is compromised within the Talamasca, but we learn for the good of something, and that makes her genuine and trustworthy, even if she can’t always be fully honest. So she takes the fall for Doris, helping her twin and Guy escape, and that leads to an officer revealing she knows Helen couldn’t have committed any murder she’s accused of. So, where does Helen go now? Does she continue to work towards uncovering more about the nature of what was happening to her and her sister ter, especially after that deadly confrontation, where she somehow avoided being shot?

HANCOCK Thanks for pointing that out about Helen. I think it’s both the character and also the humanity that Elizabeth McGovern brings that imbues that character with not only likable traits, but a degree of trustworthiness, which is ironic given the fact that she works within the Talamasca and deals in lies and half-truths. And we know where we left Helen. I do think that she likes to think of herself as a good person trying to do the right thing, and holds the Talamasca in her mind as an organization that should be trying to do the right thing and protect the equilibrium between the natural and supernatural world. I also think that she has, from childhood, if you were to call it a cult, been in it forever. So there’s a part of that that’s difficult to dismiss and cut away from. That said, at the end of episode six, she is definitely on the outs with the Talamasca, and there’s a whole lot to deal with, both on her personal front, with Guy, and the larger story.

LAFFERTY And while Ridge (Bryony Hannah), the detective, strongly suspects that Helen could not have committed this murder, I don’t know that Ridge is in a place where she can just let Helen out of her squad car, right? She’s got to go to jail. So Helen is not scot-free when we leave the season at all. She’s in a pickle, and she’ll have to get out of that pickle.

We discover Olive (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) has been a mole all along for Jasper. Just a mole within a mole. (Laughs) But Jasper is now otherwise engaged. Helen also knows Olive’s secret. Olive’s obviously very good at embedding herself in institutions and staying under the radar. But does she stay within the Talamasca? Is her job now to find Helen or Jasper?

HANCOCK You should be in the writers room with us. (Laughs) We bandy about all these things. You’re right, she’s obviously a survivor who is going to survive, no matter which affiliation she makes. No matter what she does, she is looking out for number one. But she has options. Does she go at it alone? Is she still in the Talamasca? We don’t really explore at the end of season one, where she sits in terms of her affiliation with Talamasca. Is it only Helen who knows? How much do they know about her being turned by Jasper? There are lots of opportunities for Olive. She’s an amazing character, and Maisie is fantastic.

LAFFERTY Maisie is absolutely wonderful. Helen knows she’s been betrayed, and that’s something Helen can put in her back pocket. We also know — and it’s not in the dialogue, it’s just in two looks from two actors — that Olive is intrigued by Jasper’s surviving pet. Olive has, with one little click, learned this can be like my little doggy, and I can do whatever I want with this killing machine. I love the look that Maisie gives. She twirls the little clicker at the end, and you can see the gears turning in her head. How do I deploy this little Christmas present I’ve just been given?

Jasper was creating these Revenants, which viewers have seen before Interview with a Vampire. Their lore is interesting in how they expand the diversity of the vampire community. We also discover that Jasper was part of a mixed-species family or community, but Interview with a Vampire has mostly shown vampires as having an almost disdain for humans. Jasper’s backstory implies something else. What did you want to say about the vampire community that viewers might not have already known? And can the existence of Jasper’s interspecies family apply to other beings — mortal, immortal — that we see in the larger universe?

LAFFERTY It was vital to us that Jasper came from a blended family like his old coven. Instead of making him into a hard mustache-twisting villain, we wanted him to come from some interesting diversity and to have a story that had depth and humanity. Humanity is a strange way to put it, since he’s a vampire, but he was a human for a lot longer than many people are humans before they became a vampire. So he has a facility with both worlds. I love is that the more you hear about Jasper, the more you go, “I don’t know if I agree with what you’re doing, but I kind of understand you.” He is crafty and has an emotional way not just with vampires, but with humans. He understands both sides, and that makes him smart. It also makes him dangerous, and as we think about where the story might go in the future, that’s something we would want to extrapolate, to see where somebody like that with that skill set and that emotional intelligence can wind up.

HANCOCK He’s pretty fun to think about in terms of stories, and very fun to write. Bill Fichtner is just amazing. Bill jumped in and grabbed Jasper, and ran away with him. He’s not some fancy, ancient. He is a vampire of the people, and that’s what we love about him. He has a better grip on the realities of the world than a lot of vampires cloistered away in their little sanitized places, wherever they are. Including our show, with Burton (Jason Schwartzman) in his penthouse in The Dakota. Jasper’s a man on the street, and this goes back to what we talked about last time.

My way into writing vampires started with realizing, through what Anne Rice had written, that sometimes some of the vampires killed themselves, just in the pain of living forever, when others around you are constantly dying. How many funerals do you want to attend? The loneliness, sadness and all those things are very human things you can write about. In Jasper, we created a character you can write to and give human attributes to, mostly because he’s spent a whole lot of time as a mortal before he became immortal.

LAFFERTY Jasper looks at the vampire world, and if a vampire says, “You don’t understand, this is how we’ve always done things,” he says, “I don’t care. Why?” When he looks at the human world of the Talamasca, they say, “This is how we’ve always done things.” He goes, “I don’t care. Why? He doesn’t want to do all the old ways everyone is talking about. He’s gonna wear a t-shirt and walk around barefoot. He’s just willing to buck the trends. He’s willing to ask questions about everything in his path, because he has the courage of his convictions and he’s not willing to take anything as a given.

You featured a song from Lestat’s band in the season. Why did you want to include it and situate it where you did?

HANCOCK We’re on a timeline with Interviewand we constantly try to be aware of that. If this is happening there, what time period is it for us? I will give Mark Lafferty the credit for thinking, “What if…”

LAFFERTY Rolin[Jones[JonesInterview‘s creator and showrunner]came into our writers room. He had an office 10 feet from our room for much of our season one. He came in at some point and said, “Can I play you guys these songs? These are what we’re thinking about doing for season three.” So he played us a lot of them, and he said off the cuff, “If you guys want to think about digging one of these in at some point, do it.” We put it in our brains, and then went away to shoot season one. We came back and were in post, and Tom Williams, who is an executive producer on all three shows, reminded us of these songs.

At first, we thought there was nowhere to really put it; we don’t have a lot of cars or interior scenes where people are just playing music. Then it hit us: the bar. When Helen comes in to get the gun, of course, there’s always music playing in a bar, and it would be fun for those who have keen hearing to get a little bit of a lick of that. The broader idea is, while all the shows don’t constantly intersect, and while we’re not constantly crashing into characters and storylines from the other two shows, we definitely want to make sure that people are aware that these shows exist in the same universe. And of course, there are things that you’re going to get echoes of from the other shows in our show.

HANCOCK And it’s not just crossover characters. It’s more, like Mark just said, about something as consequential as that song being played, or the hotel in episode four is given a name that Interview is now taking, and it may appear in an ad on a TV in the background of their show. It will be these six vampire-owned hotels, and they’re being advertised. It’s just the ingraining back and forth.

We know some things are happening on these shows in parallel, and audiences know what books Interview is leaning into for season three. What book material are we expecting for season two of Talamasca? And without implying too heavily that these shows are fully feeding each other, maybe Talamasca: The Secret Order season one does any setup for both Interview and Mayfair’s next seasons? Can we expect any of their locations to house Guy’s mother? Where is the crew going?

LAFFERTY We hope we can continue the story. We don’t know if we will be continuing into season two yet, but we have strong aspirations and desires to. I would say all the questions you’re asking that we cannot answer — because we will trip over our shoelaces and give too much away — are the right questions. There has to be an answer to Guy’s search for his mom. We will get ourselves into trouble if we say much more.

HANCOCK Abbey, get on the phone, and say, “I want season two.”

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Talamasca: The Secret Order season one is now streaming on AMC+.