How What We Do In The Shadows Pulled Off Season 3's Most 'Implausible' Plotline
"What We Do In The Shadows" may follow four variably inept vampires that live together in Staten Island, but one of the fab vamp four is quite unlike the others. While Nandor (Kayvan Novak) and lovers Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) are the standard bloodthirsty variety, Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) is a rare energy vampire. Energy vampires drain the life force of their prey through eliciting various emotions, such as boredom or sadness, but are little understood even among their fellow vampires.
Season 3 makes great strides in changing all that as Colin goes to great pains to understand more about energy vampires and their roots, digging through the archives of the Vampiric Council. Also unique to the season is the normally narcissistic hedonist Laszlo actually goes a long way to befriend Colin, an abnormal development that extends throughout the season. In a new interview, Mark Proksch reveals the origins of this surprising turn of events.
The antagonism between the ever-intentionally-boring Colin and the amorous narcissist Laszlo is part of the show's comedic charm. As Proksch explains to Newsweek, "Matt has just this voice that anything he says is funny and having my character who is pretty squirrely and dorky playing off against such a blow-hard is really fun. It's classic odd-couple pairing that really works as a duo."
How to create a vampire odd couple
When Laszlo joins Colin's research efforts and discovers that energy vampires supposedly live 100 years (a fact we don't discover until the season's end) — and Colin's nearing his 100th birthday — Laszlo makes a concerted effort to overcome barriers and befriend the chap before his supposed demise.
Co-showrunner Paul Simms reveals the inspiration for their choice to force a friendship on the unlikely pair. "In the earlier seasons," Simms explains, "the few interactions that Colin and Laszlo had had together we enjoyed and we really wanted to see them become friends." That makes sense in light of the pair's chemistry, but while their obvious differences made for great comedy it makes friendship a little hard to work out. Simms elaborates how they accomplished the feat:
... it just seemed absolutely implausible that the most annoyed character and the most annoyable character would become friends, and that's how we sort of built this Laszlo having secret information and wanting to be very much unlike himself and become a friend to Colin because he knows there's a tragic ending ahead.
It's about the only way those characters could become friends: An inevitable supposed tragedy propels Laszlo to give Colin Robinson a chance while he still can. When we discover that the 100-year mark is more a hard reset and rebirth than a regular death, it sets the gears in motion for a lot more Laszlo and now-younger Colin interactions for season 4.