[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Mayfair Witches Season 2 Episode 3, “Cover the Mirrors.”]
Jack Huston‘s Lasher interviewed a vampire in the newest episode of Mayfair Witches. Season 2 Episode 3 featured the first Interview With the Vampire and Mayfair Witches crossover through Felix (Gabriel Freilich), the “pale young vamp” who was catching rats for Lestat (Sam Reid) in Interview With the Vampire‘s Season 2 finale. TV Insider asked Mayfair Witches showrunner Esta Spalding how this crossover came to be and what it means for the future of AMC‘s Immortal Universe, and she says it came from a conversation with Interview With the Vampire showrunner Rolin Jones. Spalding also reveals that there will be another Immortal Universe crossover this season that will help lay more foundation for The Talamasca series coming out later this year.
The crossover opened the episode. Felix had followed Lasher to Jackson Square in New Orleans’ French Quarter because of his unfamiliar scent, and he could tell right away that Lasher wasn’t human even though Rowan (Alexandra Daddario) had birthed the spirit into human form (the blood on his hands was also intriguing, obviously). Lasher has no memory of his past life, and he sought answers from Felix upon realizing that he wasn’t human either.
“What the damn hell are you?” Felix asked Lasher in the opening scene. “I don’t know,” he replied. While sitting on a bench Louis (Jacob Anderson), Lestat, and Claudia (Bailey Bass and Delainey Hayles) frequented in New Orleans in Interview With the Vampire‘s first season, Lasher tried to make sense of the very little memories he has and why he’s being drawn to seduce and kill Mayfair women. This is where the scene wanders into the narrative territory of Interview With the Vampire Season 1 Episode 3’s opening scene, in which Louis suggests that he and Lestat only kill “the worst” of the humans and Lestat says that hunting should be all instinct and calls reason a “set of leg irons.”
“I remember praying, kneeling on the cold stone floor of a church asking for forgiveness. Maybe I was a priest, that’s why I feel like this,” Lasher wondered. Felix then imparted wisdom he learned from his mentor, Lestat.
“That feeling’s guilt,” Felix explained. “That’s a human thing. Makes them behave like sheep. Easy to kill.” The fearful Lasher said he doesn’t find killing to be easy. “Oh, it’ll get easier. Did for me. But I had a good teacher,” Felix assured.
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“Please, tell me what he said,” Lasher asked. Felix then shared a perspective that sounds like a combination of wisdom from both Lestat and Louis. “We’re meant to cull the herd,” Felix said. “It’s a natural thing, like Mr. Darwin taught.”
Louis struggled with killing humans in Season 1, and in Episode 3 he suggested they be more selective when hunting while reading a Charles Darwin book about natural selection in Jackson Square. “Culling the herd” means removing weak animals from a population based on certain criteria. Lestat thought that weeding the bad humans out from the good was pointless, because all humans are “capable of abomination, even the ones worthy of admiration.”
Lasher fears that there’s no one else like him in existence. Felix sees that as a good thing. “You’re a new thing,” he said, and that means he can make “new rules.” “Listen to your appetites, your instincts,” Felix advised. “It’s all you can do. You live by their rules, and you’ll go crazy.”
Lestat seems to have taught Felix that the vampire’s instinct to kill humans at random fits into Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But we also know that Lestat’s been living off of rats in present-day New Orleans, so the teacher isn’t practicing what he preaches right now. The crossover scene ends with Felix killing a human for dinner and Lasher still as confused as ever.
Spalding explains how Felix ended up in Mayfair Witches, saying that they were brewing up this idea around the time Interview With the Vampire was filming its Season 2 finale in New Orleans (TV Insider’s Damian Holbrook was on set for that IWTV episode — read about what he saw here).
“We wanted a vampire who was in New Orleans, and we wanted somebody who connected to Interview and carried some of the mythology of Interview,” Spalding tells TV Insider. “And it was just a conversation with Rolin [Jones] about how that would work. And then looking at the [Felix] scenes, I think they had just finished shooting them when we were working on this idea. I can’t remember the timing, but he was called Pale Young Vamp in their show. And so we gave him a name and so on. But the idea was that he was Lestat’s student and we could see the fun.”
“It’s not just a cameo, it is not just an Easter egg of a guy, but it’s actually somebody bringing Lestat’s worldview into our show and trying it out with Lasher,” Spalding continues. “And that felt interesting and significant. Of course, it doesn’t stick. That’s not what kind of being [Lasher] is, but it was really fun to try out.”
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Felix’s advice “doesn’t stick” with Lasher moving forward, but he definitely was more embracing of his violent instincts later on in the episode when he tried to attack another Mayfair woman, Evelynne (K Steele), and her son David in her bar. She survived, and she’ll be back.
As for future crossover this season, the Talamasca’s importance will continue to build through Sip’s (Tongayi Chirisa) work. He’s trying to complete his mission by apprehending Lasher, but Rowan is trying to do the same. She brought all of the Mayfairs to her house to try and draw Lasher home, both to place a protective spell on the family so Lasher couldn’t harm them but also to restore her powers that were weakening the further Lasher was from her presence. Lasher wandered back to the house and begged his “mother” not to hurt him, but then Sip jumped in to try and capture him. Rowan jumped in front of her “son” and was immobilized by a magical vapor Sip deployed, and then a car pulled up and Albrecht (Dennis Boutsikaris) had his henchmen took Lasher.
The Talamasca’s mission to control Lasher will continue throughout the season. Spalding says that Season 2 Episode 7 will be a major episode for the agency.
“Episode 207, which is by far our wildest, wackiest, and sort of funnest episode, was written by Mark Lafferty, who’s the showrunner on Talamasca,” Spalding says. “So he was with us breaking that story as he was entering in the world of thinking about Talamasca with [The Talamasca series creator] John Lee Hancock.”
Immortal Universe executive producer Mark Johnson said at New York Comic Con 2024 that there’s going to be “considerable crossover” between Interview With the Vampire and The Talamasca, so prepare to see these worlds continue to collide.
— Additional reporting by Damian Holbrook
Mayfair Witches, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming Sundays on AMC+
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