AMC spent 15 years making adaptations of The Walking Dead comic book series by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore. Now, the network is working to build a similar franchise around the works of gothic horror legend Anne Rice. With third seasons of both Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches in the works, AMC’s Immortal Universe will continue to grow in October with the premiere of Talamasca: The Secret Order.
The Talamasca, a secret society that has spent more than 1,000 years monitoring immortals, has played a major role in both Mayfair Witches and season 2 of Interview with the Vampire. Talamasca: The Secret Order was created by John Lee Hancock, director of the 2002 sports drama The Rookie and writer and director of the 2021 thriller The Little Things. Mark Johnson, who serves as an executive producer across the Immortal Universe, worked with Hancock on both of those films and asked him to helm AMC’s latest series.
“Anybody else, I probably would have said, ‘No it doesn’t sound like me,’ but because it was coming from Mark and knowing the success he and AMC had with the other shows, I said, ‘Send me what you have on Talamasca,’” Hancock tells Polygon.
While the Immortal Universe shows are all based on Rice’s world, the different showrunners, plots and settings give them very distinct vibes. Interview with the Vampire is a moody, toxic love story set in New Orleans, Paris, and Dubai. Mayfair Witches is mostly set in New Orleans, though it will move to Salem for season 3, and is focused on the titular family’s occult secrets. Talamasca, which is primarily set in London, is structured more like a spy show. Plots and characters crossover between them, but never so much to make it feel like you have to watch everything to track what’s going on in your favorite series. Ahead of Talamasca’s premiere, Polygon checked in with the Immortal Universe team to get a preview of what’s coming next and how it all ties together.
Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches are adaptations of Rice’s books, but the Talamasca doesn’t have its own series of novels. Its operations and members instead weave their way throughout her novels, like 1988’s The Queen of the Damned and 1990’s The Witching Hour. Executive producer Tom Williams extracted all the references to the Talamasca and shared them with Hancock, who had a lot of follow-up questions.
“What’s their salary?” he recalls asking “How do they recruit? Does everybody have a gift? Are they in buildings that are clearly marked? Do they have a 401(k)? Do they have an HR department?”
Hancock centered the show on a new agent who would want to know the same things, which provides an audience surrogate for viewers who haven’t read many of Rice’s books. That surrogate is Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton), a young lawyer with the ability to read minds who is recruited by the Talamasca to root out corruption in its London motherhouse.
“He’s Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,” Hancock says. “He didn’t think this world existed, and then here comes a tornado and he’s along the Yellow Brick Road.”
Hancock chose to set the series in London to evoke the tense, morally ambiguous works of John le Carré, like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. His Talamasca is reminiscent of the CIA or MI5: always watching and staffed with people with their own shady agendas. Hancock reinforces the connection by populating the world with informants and double agents. The first supernatural creature Guy meets is Burton (Jason Schwartzman), a vampire living in a luxurious London apartment who sold out his coven to work with the Talamasca.
“I love the idea that you can’t trust anyone,” Hancock says.
The most honest answers Guy gets come from Jasper (William Fichtner), a vampire who has seen firsthand how dangerous the knowledge the Talamasca collects can be when it falls into the wrong hands. Jasper, who spent his formative years in Texas, dresses in boot cut jeans and a T-shirt, and is constantly listening to rock music from Stevie Ray Vaughan, ZZ Top, and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. He’s designed to contrast with the gothic style embodied by Interview with the Vampire’s elegant, opera-loving Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), who will become a rock star in Interview with the Vampire season 3.
“Vampires as we describe them don’t have many pleasures in this world,” executive producer Mark Johnson tells Polygon. “They can’t eat, they can’t drink, they don’t really smoke. There’s very little they enjoy, but they do enjoy good music.”
The writing teams for the three shows work closely together to coordinate plots and potential crossovers. Talamasca features cameos by Raglan James (Justin Kirk), a Talamasca agent who appeared in Interview with the Vampire season 2, and the journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), who wrote a biography of the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson).
“We’ve been very careful and deliberate about that,” Johnson says. “These characters who visit different shows, there has to be a legitimate reason for them being there.”
AMC is working on expanding the Immortal Universe, developing a series called Night Island based on a resort for vampires introduced in The Queen of the Damned and working on an adaptation of Rice’s cosmic 1995 novel Memnoch the Devil.
“[We’re] being very careful, I’d like to think judicious, about what we do next and don’t want to saturate the Anne Rice world,” Johnson says.
Talamasca: The Secret Order premieres on AMC and AMC Plus on Oct. 26. Further episodes will be released weekly on Sundays.
