Biting back

THE RETURN OF WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS IS A BLOODY BIG DEAL.

S2 IS ITS OWN BEAST

TV horror-com What We Do In The Shadows owes its existence, of course, to Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s brilliant 2014 mockumentary about modern-day vampires. But with S2, the show is set to stride out of the source material’s, um, shadow. “The first time you do something, the anxiety is definitely real,” says Kayvan Novak, who plays Nandor The Relentless, a 767-year-old bloodsucker. “It’s safe to say the reaction was super-positive, and we’ve built on that and just moved things in the right direction for the second season.”

FAMILIAR BUT DIFFERENT

As with the movie, the series centres on house-sharing nightwalkers: Nandor shares with Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and her husband Laszlo (Matt Berry). There’s also energy vampire Colin (Mark Proksch) - who sucks people’s life force by boring them half to death - and Nandor’s familiar (read: slave) Guillermo (Harvey Guillén). At the end of the first season, we learn Guillermo has a big hereditary secret, something the servant reckons with in the upcoming episodes. “On one hand, he plays a needy, desperate familiar,” Novak says. “On the other, he has the upper hand on the vampires without being able to show it.

That creates an extra layer of deception that Guillermo has to deal with.”

SKYWALKER RISES

Wesley Snipes, Tilda Swinton, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Trejo all cameoed in S1 – and you can expect more big names in S2. “We’ve got wicked talent,” says Novak. “We’ve had Benedict Wong, who seems to have been in every Ridley Scott film [actually just two: The Martian and Prometheus]; Haley Joel Osment, and Mark Hamill. That was just a dream come true. He was such a lovely man, telling us stories. We were all fanboying out.”

MAJOR SETS APPEAL

The encore series also takes things up a notch. The laughs are bigger, promises Novak, and so are the stunts. “What I’ve