‘Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches’ Had to Hide 1 ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Leftover
AMC is making good on their promise to bring the Anne Rice universe to television. They’ve renewed Interview with the Vampire for a second season after its fall premiere, and now they’re launching Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches. Both shows filmed in New Orleans, and they had to share one thing which Mayfair hid, coming second.
Showrunner Esta Spalding and Executive Producer Mark Johnson were on a Television Critics Association panel for Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches on Jan. 10. They revealed how they hid one of Interview with the Vampire’s leftovers in the new show. Mayfair Witches premieres Aug. 8.
‘Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches’ and ‘Interview with the Vampire’ shared sets
Since both shows filmed in New Orleans, they could share the same sets. But, Interview with the Vampire took place in the early 1900s. Mayfair Witches is modern day so they couldn’t look exactly the same, plus the shows wanted to be distinct.
“We shot on the same stages,” Spalding said. “Even the other day, I said, ‘Okay, so the camera’s gonna come around…’ And then, somebody said, ‘That’s Interview with the Vampire wallpaper. Are we sure we can shoot that? That’s theirs.’ So the set painter came out very quickly and painted it and we changed it and put some pictures up on it.”
‘Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches’ will share some things with ‘Interview with the Vampire’
When AMC says Anne Rice Universe they mean it. The shows do take place in the same world, but The Mayfair Witches will be a little more subtle about how it refers to Interview with the Vampire.
“We’re really using each other’s spaces physically, but we’re trying to, in the first season of this show, have only these very, very selective Easter eggs for the audience to pick up on,” Spalding said. “And otherwise, to let them be defined unto themselves, at least for Season 1.”
Johnson elaborated on where the audience can look for Easter eggs in Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches.
“That’s gonna be up to the viewer,” Spalding said. “We have some connections. Some are fun, some are deliberate, some are almost as Easter eggs.”
Independent women and witches
As much as Rice connects her supernatural worlds, Johnson was sensitive to establishing The Mayfair Witches on their own before they have fun connecting with Lestat et. al.
“But Mayfair Witches is very much its own project, its own series,” Johnson said. “Obviously, it’s connected to Anne Rice, her thematic and stylistic concentration, so it’s very much a part of what she does. But I would say that there’s very little deliberately of Interview in Mayfair Witches.”
That became extra sensitive since Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches was the second show AMC produced.
“I think Esta and Michelle, the last thing they wanted to hear was those of us to say, ‘Well, with Interview, we did this or we did that,’” Johnson said. “”It’s sort of like, that’s fine. That’s got nothing to do with us.”
