Even The Lead Of The ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ Series Is Starstruck By Taika Waititi

Kayvan Novak, the lead in Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s TV adaptation of their own 2014 comedy-horror flick What We Do In The Shadows, remembers vividly when he first saw the original. “I must have seen it on cable or iTunes,” Novak begins.

He recognised Clement from Flight Of The Conchords, but wasn’t yet versed in Waititi’s distinctly tongue-in-cheek oeuvre: 2007’s Eagle Vs Shark, 2010’s Boy, and by the time Novak saw What We Do In The Shadows, 2016’s Hunt For The Wilderpeople. 

“I just remember the first scene where he pops his hand out of his coffin and stops his alarm clock and it's 6 o'clock in the evening, I was like, 'What is this? I already love this, and I don't even know really what it is yet.' I just remember loving the characters so much off the bat: they're just all so loveable.”

From there, Novak found himself hunting out Waititi’s films – when he saw Waititi was directing Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, he thought to himself, “’I'd love to work with this Taika guy, he's so cool, and I feel like we'd get on.'

“And then lo and behold I got this audition through for What We Do In The Shadows, the TV series, and I just was like, 'Oh my God, I want this so badly, there's no way I'm gonna get it,' and then I got it. It was pretty awesome.” 

Novak speaks slowly, his answers peppered by long pauses, but that might be due to the late hour when we chat – it’s midnight in London where Novak is based. We apologise for the actually very vampire-y time difference: “That’s alright, I’ve just turned into a pumpkin,” Novak quips. 

Following its SXSW premiere earlier this month, the vampire mockumentary series landed on television in the United States just a day before our chat. Has Novak been paying attention to the reviews? 

“I've read everything there is to read really,” Novak says. “I'd be lying if I said that I didn't care what the reviewers thought. And y'know the response has been pretty mind-blowingly positive, so that's awesome to feel the love. I also woke up to seven new Instagram followers, which is pretty amazing. So yeah, my world's changed overnight – I now have 48 Instagram followers, whereas before I had 41 [laughs].”

Novak’s laugh is a kind of low chuckle: he knows what’s funny, the actor spending his career performing a slew of comic roles on British television – as have his co-stars, Toast Of London’s Matt Berry and stand-up Natasia Demetriou. He says the choice to have three Brits play vampires living in modern-day NYC was a deliberate one from Clement. 

“I think Jemaine's thinking was that they were European vampires, so they kind of have one foot — I'm going further east I guess, Ottoman, Turkish, on the border of Europe, while Natasia is quite Transylvanian, and then Matt Berry, very English dandy. I guess that geographically we felt closer to where we were supposed to be originating from, than say three American vampires.” 

While Novak says his character Nandor is “definitely his own vampire”, he notes that in a way he is “carrying the torch” of Clement and Waititi’s characters – Vladislav and Viago respectively – in the original film, and notes the pressure of trying to live up to its beloved cult status. 

“It's hard not to put the love you already have for the film out of your mind."

“It's hard not to put the love you already have for the film out of your mind and forget about the fact you're basically continuing something that already has a huge cult following, and that people who love the film may not love the TV show if you don't do a good enough job.

“I just felt like some of the character DNA had transferred into Nandor, because he was kind of neurotic and warrior-like,” Novak says. His character has “one foot stuck in the past, but [is] trying to change with the times, move forward, do the right thing, self-improvement. That’s quite a 21st century mindset”. 

“I got the audition scenes and I just put myself in the mindset of a goofy vampire and made some decisions early on about what the voice was like and how I would play him and what my hair would be like, and those things have remained consistent in the series. I guess I chose well, I got lucky,” he laughs.

Novak says he wasn’t a ‘vampire’ fan when he saw the flick – he wasn’t “into Dracula or anything like that”. Instead what drew Novak to the role and to the original film was its naturalistic style. 

“The thing that was so appealing about the movie was that they managed to depict all these supernatural things – turning into bats, flying, levitating – in such a naturalistic way, because it was all shot as a documentary. You get to enjoy all these incredible special effects but in a very kind of real way, not like a big movie blockbuster way in IMAX. It just seemed very accessible. That's what I liked about it anyway, and there's a lot of that in the show too. We do a lot of flying and swooping and levitating and biting [laughs].

“I'd never done any wire work previously. It felt really cool. It felt very much like flying, because you're kind of gliding through the air, and the only time I've glided through the air [before] was on a zip wire or something in the Dominican Republic, and that makes a big noise and you've got big leather gloves on and it's going 'zzzzz', y'know, and then you have to use your hands to break. 

“But this, you're just gliding through the air and the beauty of it is it's so silent that you really do feel like you're flying, apart from the fact that there's a very subtle sensation of your testicles being crushed at the same time, but you get used to that.”

The TV series maintains the naturalistic elements of the film, as well as its look and feel. Novak puts the credit for that with Clement, showrunner Paul Simms and the writing team. 

“I'd say it's even more lavish and more immersive and more atmospheric than the movie was… [Clement, Simms and the writers have] continued what was so wonderful about the movie. They've kind of expanded on it: they haven't tried to reinvent the wheel, it's very much the same feel and tone of the movie and I feel that's important, because they got it so right the first time that they decided to build on it as opposed to just do something new. I think that's important to the fans of the film as well. “

What We Do In The Shadows airs on Fox Showcase from 2 Apr.