4 days ago
‘What We Do in the Shadows' cast on alternate series finale endings and the parody that didn't work
The cast of What We Do in the Shadows was visibly sad when they realized they may be all together for the last time, appearing on stage at Disney FYC Fest at the DGA Theater. But as the sixth and final season of the FX series demonstrated — as well as a slew of alternate endings they screened at the panel — they've gotten pretty good at handling goodbyes.
Showrunner Paul Simms, who parodied the famous finale moments in The Usual Suspects, Rosemary's Baby, and Newhart in the alternate endings, revealed the additional iconic last-moments reference they were really trying to make happen but couldn't make work.
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"The one we talked about most besides these was the ending of M*A*S*H, where he leaves in the helicopter and he spelled out 'Goodbye' in the rocks," Simms said. "We thought, budget-wise, how would we do that? Then for a while we thought the vampires fly away and they look back and Guillermo has spelled out 'Goodbye.' Then we thought it was all too complicated."
"But if we were going to do a TV ending, Newhart was the one," he added.
Mark Proksch, who played Colin on the series, agreed that the Newhart finale — often called the best series finale moment of all time, with its clever callback to Bob Newhart's prior series The Bob Newhart Show — was held in the highest regard. "Paul and I, our idol is Bob Newhart," Proksch told Gold Derby. "[Bob] had an interview in Parade magazine about a year before his passing where he talked about his favorite show that he and his wife would watch was Shadows, which blew our minds! … That Newhart ending was a special one."
After a screening of the series finale, including all three alternate endings, Simms moderated a panel with the main cast, including Proksch, Matt Berry (who received the show's first acting Emmy nomination last year), Kayvan Novak, Natasia Demetriou, Harvey Guillén, and Kristen Schaal.
FX
Demetriou also had a special personal connection to one of the endings: Having played Nadja as Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby while in her last trimester of pregnancy, she believed she was about to deliver her very own baby right there on set. "I was seven months pregnant and felt like the baby was crowning," she said. "It was really hot and I had sweat dripping down my legs and I thought it was the baby."
"But that final scene was surreal and so sad, but I loved the Rosemary's Baby stuff," she added, quipping, "It was very prophetic because my child is a demon."
When asked what was his favorite part of the finale, Berry recalled the scene where the vampires are gathered together singing: " sat at the piano because I also turned 50 that day," he remembered. "That's the craziest birthday I think I'll ever have."
Gold Derby asked Berry if he could see a reunion in the future, and fans may not like his answer. "I think the best thing to do with it — and this is crazy as an actor saying this, but I would just recast the whole thing," he offered, suggesting, "You can have a whole new load of people, like SNL or Doctor Who... another load of new comics to do it. You can't go back to these things. You were who you were when you did it. … Let someone else do it."
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