In the same universe where the lustful and deadly adventures of the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt and his victim and lover Louis de Pointe du Lac take place, the women of the Mayfair family learn to control powers that are passed down from generation to generation and to live with a spirit with dubious intentions. The literary worlds of Interview with the vampire and The Witches of Mayfair They are linked by their author, Anne Rice, by the New Orleans in which their plots take place and by some common stories and characters. Both are part of the project of the American channel AMC to bring Rice’s creative universe to the screen. After the vampires, now comes the series based on the trilogy of The Witches of Mayfairthe first episode of which is now available on AMC+.
The story follows Rowan Mayfair, a young neurosurgeon who delves into her past to try to understand the origin of powers that, left unchecked, have proven to have fatal consequences. Screenwriter and producer Esta Spalding is the person in charge of a fiction that in its first season has eight episodes, a challenge of condensation for a story that exceeds 1,000 pages in its first volume. “It is a very dense volume, with a lot of information about family history. There is a section of about 300 pages about the other 12 generations of Mayfair witches. The most complicated thing about the adaptation was finding a way for our protagonist there and how to compress all that history,” said Spalding in a video call interview at the beginning of February.
To do this, Esta Spalding and screenwriter Michelle Ashford (Masters of Sex) focused on the character of Rowan and made her the driving force of the story. But they also wanted to tell the story of at least one more generation of Mayfair witches, for which they traveled to the first of them, Suzanne, and thus narrate at the same time how a spirit called Lasher relates generation after generation with these women until reaching the present day. For Spalding, telling a story of witches is, in some way, telling the story of women in general “and how, throughout history, women who tried to embrace their power were persecuted.”
The combination of fragility and strength that Alexandra Daddario transmits (True Detective, The White Lotus) made her the early choice to star in this story on screen. “We needed someone who could be believable, at the same time, as a brilliant neurosurgeon and as a completely vulnerable and emotional woman who suffers from the death of her mother and is unhinged by the idea that she might be killing people. Plus, it helps that she has this extraordinary, rather witchy look,” explains the actress. showrunnerThe role of the mysterious Lasher was more complicated and it took more time to find Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire) for him. “We were wondering who could be scary and seductive at the same time. He had to have a rock star presence, dynamism and charisma, like a Mick Jagger or David Bowie. When I met Jack over Zoom, I felt those things, that magic and that charisma. When a screenwriter imagines an actor in a character and suddenly it’s easier for them to write that character, you’ve got it right. And suddenly it was easier to write Lasher when we knew Jack was doing it,” Spalding recalls.
One aspect of the series that the showrunner highlights is its treatment of sex. “We looked very carefully and in-depth at issues of consent. Not all sex scenes are consensual sex, but we wanted people to understand why. So we talked a lot about it in the writers’ room, what consent is and how we were going to define and describe those scenes in a way that made women the ones who had as much control as possible in the story,” says the screenwriter. “When Anne Rice wrote those sex scenes, she was writing things that people had never written before in the 1990s. We wanted to honor those moments.”
As Interview with the Vampire, The Witches of Mayfair The series is set in New Orleans and its culture is very present in the series. That is why its creators did not consider any other place than the Louisiana city for the filming of this fiction. “Being able to bring out the magic of this place, its history, its architecture, its music, its artists… It is almost symbiotic, because I feel that Anne Rice has helped define what the city is and now the city is giving back to Anne Rice’s world everything that she gave it,” argues Spalding. Even local artists and groups such as The Skull and Bones Gangregulars of the popular Mardi Gras, participate in the series, specifically, in the third chapter.
Although both series belong to the same literary and television universe, each of them has its own visual identity on screen and its own narrative concept. This distinct personality is marked in this production through different elements, as Spalding explains: from the color palette to the lenses with which it was recorded, through the vignette of some of the images or even the ratio used to record, slightly different from the usual so that it could cover the high ceilings of its buildings. Also the decoration of the houses and even the wallpaper on the walls is inspired by the mansions of the Garden District, which gives it a very defined aesthetic.
But above all, this is a story about witches. That’s why the series had a witchcraft consultant who guided the team through this practice. “The actors did their own research on the subject, but we also brought in an expert in the tradition of Western witchcraft, which would be the tradition that Suzanne and the other Mayfair witches would follow. He told us things like what the spells would be like or what kind of herbs or oils would be used at each moment,” Spalding adds.
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