‘Wolf Like Me’ Inspired by Creator’s ‘Full Moon Night’ and Season 2 Homage to ‘An American Werewolf in London’ [Exclusive]
Wolf Like Me creator Abe Forsythe’s date didn’t transform into a werewolf on that fateful “full moon” night they spent together.
But what if she had?
Forsythe said the inspiration behind his hit Peacock series Wolf Like Me came from a real-life dating experience and his deep respect for the 1981 groundbreaking horror-comedy, An American Werewolf in London.
Set in Australia, widower and single dad Gary (Josh Gad) meets Mary (Isla Fisher) by chance. Not only is Gary taken with Mary, but his daughter, Emma, is as well.
After a few somewhat bizarre dates, Gary learns the truth about Mary – she transforms into a vicious werewolf on full moon nights. He’s already fallen hard, but Mary could kill him on the wrong night. The series explores the rollercoaster of romance with honesty, humor, and a dash of horror.
‘Wolf Like Me’ came to Abe after a date
“Well, I think it had been an idea that had been building for a while. I mean, what led to season 1 was, I guess, a lot of the difficulties of navigating relationships when you’re a single parent,” Forsythe told Showbiz Cheat Sheet.
“I have a son, and I don’t have a daughter like in the show. But it becomes a really tricky thing. Or my experience was, it was tricky,” he recounted. “I was looking for someone who was right for me, but also, as much as they need to be right for me, they need to be right for the child as well.”
“This led to me meeting someone who – I just want to preface this whole story by saying I’m not with them. But it led to me meeting someone who I thought might have been the perfect person for my child as well as for me,” he said.
“And when I met them, it just happened to be a full moon on that night. So the night we spent together was a full moon,” he shared. “And then it was literally something that just dropped into my head the next day, which is, what would you do if this person was a werewolf? And my thought process was, well, I think you should just make it work. You’d have to find a way of making it work. And then that led to just the story and the characters that were all there and ready to go.”
The series pays homage to ‘An American Werewolf in London’
Forsythe carried his appreciation and respect for An American Werewolf in London to his own take on the old “wolf meets human and they fall in love” genre.
“I mean, American Werewolf is a very seminal movie to me. We tried, particularly in season two, to pay homage to American Werewolf with what happens in later episodes when we actually get to see some of the prosthetic transformations in season 2,” he said.
“Just the mixing of comedy and horror as well, which is obviously a big inspiration. But with my show, I really wanted it to be, as much as there is comedy and horror, more than anything, a relationship drama. It’s about navigating relationships and forming a family. So the most important thing to me was to get the balance of all those three things right.”
Wolf Like Me Season 1 is currently streaming on Peacock. Wolf Like Me Season 2, which stars Isla Fisher, Josh Gad, and Edgar Ramirez, will premiere on October 19th.
