The opening scene of the final season of What We Do in the Shadows is a relatively simple one: Vampires Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) muse on what to do with the now-unoccupied space under the stairs where Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) used to live.
During a visit to the show’s set in Toronto earlier this year, Consequence watched this scene be filmed, and what proved striking was how across multiple takes, it never stopped changing. FX’s hit comedy, streaming on Hulu, has always leaned heavily on improv, but in this case the freedom each actor had in exploring new line deliveries or physical business meant literally no take was the same.
Novak riffed different versions of the word “calisthenicals.” Berry kept trying different ways to give the camera a look at his “precious volumes” (magazines of an adult nature). Only the Doll With The Spirit of Deceased Human Nadja Inhabiting It (sitting on the couch between Nadja and Laszlo, while being operated and voiced by people off-screen) seemed to keep to the script.
And for the cast, it was nothing unusual. “That was a really good example of the first scene of the day,” Natasia Demetriou told us afterwards. “Everyone’s just getting into it.”
“Yeah,” added Matt Berry. “All you had to do was set up. It was quite functional, so it didn’t really need to be that funny.” And yet, it was hilarious.
Natasia Demetriou and Matt Berry on the set of What We Do in the Shadows, courtesy of FX
Improv has been a constant on the Shadows set from the beginning — in fact, Mark Proksch told Consequence that during the first season, creator/executive producer Jemaine Clement would occasionally throw out the script entirely, and have the cast improvise entirely through a scene.
This isn’t to imply there’s a lack of respect for the show’s writers — as Proksch said, “It’s definitely the writing that makes the show what it is. The best stuff is usually on the page. And the reason it’s the best stuff is because they’ve worked on it for months and it’s gone through a bunch of really funny people before it gets to you. And it’s the last season, so I’m not stroking their egos.”
For Proksch, “The improvising is just really a cherry on the cake, because you get bored very easily doing the same scene over and over and over again. So it’s fun to switch it up and try to find a new vein to mine. You have this wonderful springboard that you can jump off from, and they’ve already given you a bunch of the jokes. They’ve already shown you where the scene needs to go. I think [showrunner Paul Simms] has said that it’s about 60/40 — 60% script and then 40% improvised, as far as what makes it into the final edit.”
According to Paul Simms, the improv on set only got “better and better” over the years, “because the actors knew their characters so well. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s not like on some shows when people are improvising [as] a guy who works at a company or something. Kayvan has to remember that he is a vampire, that he’s an ancient warrior, that he doesn’t know a lot about the modern world, that he has a certain accent… And then within that, improvise everything. So it’s not just anything goes, you really have to know your character well.”
Key to the improv, as well, is the show’s signature mockumentary approach, which meant that actors always knew there was a possibility that they’d be on camera, “even if it seems to be about someone else or it’s not your line,” Simms said. “That helps them be in the scene the whole way through. And it ended up, I think, being a lot of fun for them.”
Plus, there were “little moments” from filming certain scenes that Simms said “We just stole for other things. I always feel like when I get to editing, I can’t remember what we wrote and what they improvised — that’s partially because I have a bad memory. But whatever ended up being funniest is what we would use.”
Mark Proksch on the set of What We Do in the Shadows, courtesy of FX
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