After serving up two acclaimed seasons of bloodsuckers and spellcasters with Anne Rice‘s Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches, AMC is expanding their Immortal Universe with a third entry, Talamasca: The Secret Order, that binds the pair together even more.
Unlike Interview (which is being retitled The Vampire Lestat for its third season) and Mayfair, this one — about the titular covert organization dedicated to monitoring the not-entirely-human beings who walk among us — isn’t based on any specific Rice novels. The supernatural CIA already established by Vampire‘s Talamasca agent Raglan James (Justin Kirk) and Mayfair‘s Ciprien Grieves (Tongayi Chirisa) is “kind of an unexplored element of Anne Rice’s [literary] universe,” says executive producer Mark Lafferty (Halt and Catch Fire), a former Mayfair writer who has created an entirely original story with co-showrunner John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side). The show is also unlike its predecessors in that it’s a spy thriller. One that just so happens to traffic in those things that go bump in the night.
“The first meetings we had, honestly, were talking about our favorite spy movies,” Lafferty recalls of his and Hancock’s touchstones. “Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, those sorts of worlds, and seeing if we brought that approach to a genre television show, could we just turn it a little bit this way and do it that way, so that the world of Helen and Guy still fits in the world of Mayfair Witches and Vampire, but that nobody would mistake the goings-on in our world for being one of those shows.”
David Gennard/AMC
Agreeing that “you can’t just mash two genres together and hope for the best,” Lafferty points out the similarities between espionage and the otherworldly. “In the spy world, you have loners who come from broken families, and there’s so many parallels when you read Interview [with the Vampire]. A lot of those people are individuals who are cast out, who are looking for a new home.”
Fittingly, Talamasca kicks off with directionless NYU law-school grad Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton) facing eviction. He soon crosses paths with the enigmatic Helen (Elizabeth McGovern, rocking a spot-on English accent), who invites him to join the shadowy group’s New York “motherhouse” and their quest to keep tabs on vamps, witches, ghosts, and ghouls. Once Guy signs on, Talamasca wastes no time establishing its distinctive John LeCarre vibe. There are dead drops, aliases, stolen files, confidential intel, high-tech surveillance equipment, low-rent hideaways. There’s even a creepy, Cold War energy to the Talamasca motto of “We watch and we’re always there.” Whereas Vampire and Mayfair are sexy and gothic, this is scrappy, gritty, and far scarier. Especially once Helen deploys the still-reluctant Guy to the U.K. to investigate the nefarious activities of Jasper (William Fichtner), a particularly brutal breed of night dweller.
Last November, we visited the production in Manchester, England, where Denton and McGovern were filming a pivotal scene on the second floor of a local pub regarding a numeric clue connected to Jasper. To reveal what is divulged during the confab would fall squarely into spoiler territory, but it’s clear that, despite being given irrefutable evidence of vampires existing in the form of a Manhattan dandy vamp played by Jason Schwartzman, Guy does not trust Helen. And for good reason: Turns out, this so-called secret order has been manipulating him and what he thinks is his family for decades.
“He’s actually had a lot of his life sort of mapped out for him by this woman and the Talamasca,” Denton explains. “It’s really quite horrible… She’s made this complete fictitious world for him, and it’s quite a heartbreaking [reveal] for Guy, and for Helen in a way, because she has to admit that she’s done these things to him.”
David Gennard/AMC
Why Guy? “He’s got a gift [that] he thinks is more of a curse,” Denton confirms. “And she comes in and validates that it is actually something of benefit to him and to the Talamasca… So they start to use him in a way as their puppet.” Part of that involves assigning Guy a handler named Olive (Legends of Tomorrow‘s Maisie Richardson-Sellers) who has her own agenda and endeavors to keep him from getting too close to a witch (Celine Buckens) who knows more about the Talamasca than any of the powers-that-be would like.
Still, there does seem to be a slight level of genuine maternal concern on Helen’s part. That could also be part of the spy game, too. “The thing I find so fascinating about her is from one scene to the next, you flip back and forth into feeling that you really love and believe her and her motives, then mistrust her and her motives,” offers McGovern in between set-ups. “You can’t tell from one scene to another if she’s 100 percent good or not. But I think, like everybody, she does intend to be.”
“And I do think that she does care for Guy,” continues the Downton Abbey Emmy nominee. “Whether or not she’s willing to sacrifice him for her idea of the greater good? I think we’ll keep changing our mind about that as we watch the story.”
Oh, we’ll watch. And we’ll always be there.
Talamasca: The Secret Order, Series Premiere, Sunday, October 26, AMC and AMC+
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