[This interview was conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike authorization.]
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for What We Do in the Shadows Season 5 Episode 3, “Pride Parade.”]
The vampires of FX‘s What We Do in the Shadows embraced the rainbow for Season 5’s hilarious installment, “Pride Parade,” helping their neighbor Sean (Anthony Atamanuik) in his attempt to win the borough’s LGBTQ+ vote for comptroller.
What follows is a series of hijinks only achievable on a show as supremely zany as Shadows. While the installment culminates in the titular pride parade, the shenanigans leading up to it include a body swap for Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and a wild one-man trip to space for Nandor (Kayvan Novak).
When it came to achieving these stunts onscreen, the processes were fairly practical, particularly for Nadja whose body was inhabited by the spirit normally animating her lookalike doll. Instead, Nadja moved into the doll and struggled to get back to her own body when the spirit wouldn’t vacate.
(Credit: FX)
As an attempt to push her out, Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) volunteered to join the spirit in Nadja’s body, creating a monstrosity of a being featuring Nadja’s face on one side of the body and Colin Robinson on the other. “When we read it, I was like, well, there’s CGI, they’ll scan my face and then sort of map it onto [the body],” Demetriou tells TV insider of her initial thoughts on approaching the body swap. Ultimately, she says, “What is so amazing about this show and our directors is they really like to try and do things as literally as possible, you know, when there’s blood they try their best to have actual fake blood everywhere.”
In this case, Demetriou says, “We had full-on rubber lifelike masks of each other’s faces pinned [on the back of our heads]. I mean they were absolutely outrageous. I was taking photos left and right because I couldn’t believe it.”
(Credit: FX)
It was just the start of what Demetriou describes as an “absolutely wild night.” Ranging from Laszlo’s (Matt Berry) experimental trip to the beach and resulting sunburn to Nandor’s trip to space which is intended to impress his human familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen). While Demetriou details the fun of the evening, Novak points out his less comfortable stunt, teasing that the landing was “a very cold and nude night for me.”
After traveling into space from the backyard, Nandor makes a less graceful nude landing in the same spot, crashing the pride parade festivities with his unexpected arrival. For the ascension, Novak says, “I was up on a crane and then they took me up with my GoPro, and that was at about five or six in the morning, actually. That was a very cold and dark morning, and everyone was very tired by that point, but I still had to bring the [laughs].”
There was some green screen involved as well, “the final bit where I’m actually floating in space involved a 75-foot green screen,” Novak recalls. “I’m happy to discover that it was all worth it,” the actor notes. And it certainly did pay off as “Pride Parade” is one of Season 5’s best so far. Stay tuned to see what else is in store for the ongoing season and let us know what your favorite moment of this episode was in the comments section, below.
What We Do in the Shadows, Season 5, Thursdays, 10/9c, FX (next day on Hulu)
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