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“What We Do in the Shadows” star Matt Berry is ready to say goodbye to Laszlo Cravensworth. Are we?
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“What We Do in the Shadows” star Matt Berry is ready to say goodbye to Laszlo Cravensworth. Are we?

Although the problems of our world never came to “What we do in the shadows”, the story never shied away from politics within its own rotten and moldy kingdom. In season 3, Nandor the Ruthless (Kayvan Novak) and Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetriou) took charge of the East Coast Vampire Council, dividing their duties until Nadja proved more worthy and committed to wielding power.

The latest episode of the comedy finds Nandor coping with being fired from his janitor job at the vampire venture capital firm where his former relative Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) works and disappearing. The gang finds him hiding in a New Hampshire factory of a company that Guillermo’s firm has just finished gutting, babbling incoherently like Colonel Kurtz in “Apocalypse now.

“Many of the humans left when the work was finished. Those who remained needed them, they craved – a leader. A warrior. A commander. And they became my army,” he tells his roommates. His war council and concubine pit are made up of a team of mannequins. When Guillermo appears, Nandor hisses: “You they are the enemy.”

As tempted as we are to view this episode as foreboding, keep in mind that these episodes were written and filmed many months ago. Nandor is just doing what any thin-skinned former conqueror would do in a world that discards him: throwing savage blows into the darkness.

What we do in the shadowsKayvan Novak in “What We Do in the Shadows” (FX)The energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) came closest to power in Season 5 when he campaigned for Staten Island Comptroller primarily for mass feeding opportunities, correctly assuming that there is nothing more boring than debating the political aspects of an elected office that few, if any, people that someone understands.

The only housemate who abstains from such contests is Laszlo Cravensworth, Matt Berry’s comically pompous aristocrat who prefers to focus all his lust on his “wife” Nadja and other nobler pastimes. Like, say, maintaining your X-rated bushes or reanimating dead meat into a tiresome errand boy.

“As a person, he’s no different than he was in the pilot because he doesn’t need to be,” Berry told Salon before season six began. “It’s like hundreds of years old. “You don’t have to adapt to the times or change your way of thinking.”

In temperament, Berry makes Laszlo sound like Archie Bunker. Nothing of the sort. Archie’s inclination is to look down on others; Laszlo’s first reaction is always curiosity. Sometimes he has moved to worry about them. Otherwise, he blatantly doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t trigger that or the devil in his pants, which has made his character’s development journey, in Berry’s opinion, relatively limited.

“The worst thing you can do with a comedy is outstay your welcome.”

“Laszlo is not particularly interested in the modern world and really doesn’t need to be, as long as he and his wife are not threatened in any way,” Berry observed. “He is happy to move at his own pace, so you have to ask yourself why he is interested in science; why this character, Laszlo, is interested in creating a monster.

“What do you want to use this monster for, other than to have sex with it? Do you know what I mean? So his reasons are completely dubious in the first place,” Berry continued. “I think the whole man and science thing is like bragging. “He thinks it looks good.”

It’s also part of what makes Berry’s work as Laszlo dominant in the public’s mind. Berry is a versatile actor whose first introduction to American audiences likely came through his series regular role on “The IT Crowd“and recurring appearances on”The Mighty Boosh.” He is also a musician and has recorded nine studio albums.

But Laszlo earned the actor his first Emmy nomination and increased his demand in the United States. So when we hear Berry’s voice, whether on Prime Video”radioactive dust” or as a charismatic Beaver in “The Wild Robot,” it can’t be helped if the image of his vampire on Staten Island provokes mild cognitive dissonance.

“The public wasn’t very familiar with other things he had done,” Berry said sympathetically. “So when they see something like Laszlo, which has a strong flavor, it’s hard to imagine that person doing anything else.”

As for those who only saw him in “What We Do in the Shadows” and may have a hard time shaking off the image of him in his dusty vampire coat, “I imagine there will be a little bit of that for them until they see something “. different.”

Despite his supposed devotion to equality, at the end of this season Laszlo pompously announced that he was forbidding Nadja from getting a job and having regular contact with the world. This seemed like a significant change from the third season, which closed with him sending her to London to Pursue a promotion within the Supreme Vampiric Council while essentially becoming the stay-at-home dad to a newly regenerated child version of Colin Robinson.

Could it be that Laszlo suddenly developed a resentment for his wife’s power? Hardly. “I don’t think that necessarily has to do with a woman’s place, so to speak. What’s more, the fact is that she will be around normal people for a dangerous period of time, which could then lead to her downfall. Because that’s the kind of cage of what this program has been,” he said. “The fact that she is in a situation every day with normal people increases the likelihood that they will be arrested. I think it has a lot to do with that.

“(Laszlo) is hundreds of years old. He doesn’t have to adapt to the times.”

“But, you know, he’s obviously an old-fashioned British aristocrat,” Berry added. “He will think that he should be the breadwinner, but he knows that she is a strong woman. That’s been one of the interesting things about their type of relationship: that she barks at him. When she’s not happy with something, he says she’s the first to tell him where to go and what it’s going to be like.”

Painting Laszlo as a kind of mascot of the self-absorbed petty bourgeoisie would be easy to achieve if Berry’s performance didn’t shatter all expectations. Laszlo is pompous, determined in his own way, and singularly focused on sex and drinking blood. But he has also become the most supportive figure of the quintet.

What we do in the shadowsMatt Berry, Natasia Demetriou and Mark Proksch in “What We Do in the Shadows” (FX)Laszlo can prioritize having a good time, as eternally demonstrated by his alter ego Jackie Daytona, a normal human bartender. But Jackie stayed in the small Pennsylvania town where she tried to hide from another fearsome vampire because she really liked the people who lived there. He might dismiss Guillermo, the house’s human companion, as useless, but when old Gizmo needed to trust someone with a potentially deadly secret, Laszlo kept it to himself.


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Since each season of “Shadows” finds a way to relate the real demons we deal with through its characters, the writers have chosen Laszlo to play our daddy issues. In the November 11 episode, “Laszlo’s Father,” he faces the ghost of the man he spent his life and future life rebelling against (played by Steve Coogan). That includes marrying a much older undead Greek peasant, rejected by his peers in this social caste.

Watching the actors play each other as father and son provides one of the highlights of the final season, reminding us how much Laszlo will be missed. Berry seems to appreciate that as she expresses her willingness to let “Shadows” and her vampire go as long as they are both still dear to us.

“The worst thing you can do with a comedy is outstay your welcome. “Things can get ruined if you hold on too long because then people can get tired of you and that can make them take a dim view of the work you’ve done up to that point,” he said. “Whereas if you release yourself at the right time, then it’s a decent legacy. You know that what you have left behind is of good quality.

“Six seasons is a long time,” Berry added. “And hopefully, when people review the show and all the different seasons, they won’t think, ‘Oh, God, this went downhill,’ or ‘This isn’t as good as it used to be.’ The hope is that everything is at a pretty good level of quality at all times.” That part, so far, remains unchanged.

New episodes of “What We Do in the Shadows” air Mondays at 10 p.m. on FX and stream the next day on Hulu.

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