AMC committed to building a universe of Anne Rice shows. After Interview with the Vampire last fall, the cable network is introducing viewers to Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches. Alexandra Daddario, Harry Hamlin, Jack Huston, Annabeth Gish and more star. Season 1 of Interview didn’t even complete the first book, so which Mayfair Witches books will Season 1 tackle?
Showrunner Esta Spalding was on a Television Critics Association panel for Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches on Aug. 10 with cast members Daddario and Hamlin. They discussed the first season’s adaptation of the Rice books. The Mayfair Witches premieres Jan. 8 on AMC, AMC+, BBC America, IFC, SundanceTV and WeTV.
‘Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches’ Season 1 focuses on ‘The Witching Hour’ book
Daddario plays Rowan Fielding, the neurosurgeon who discovers her family’s witchy secret. Spalding said Rice’s original novel gave them plenty of material for the first season, filmed in New Orleans.
“The series was deeply, deeply inspired by the first book, The Witching Hour, the first season,” Spalding said. “It starts where the book starts in that mood of New Orleans and the sort of ghost story of this house. We meet really quickly Rowan Fielding who’s the main character of the first book and through the series. And we based the whole first season on that book, so we felt we should end the first season with the end of the book.”
Not all of ‘The Witching Hour’ book will make it into ‘Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches’
Even eight hour-long episodes aren’t enough to adapt the entirety of The Witching Hour. Likewise, Interview with the Vampire stretched out its adaptation, and pulled from subsequent novels. Spalding is saving some of The Witching Hour for The Mayfair Witches Season 2.
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“The book is kind of an embarrassment of riches,” Spalding said. “It’s very, very long and full of lots of amazing stuff. The middle section is about 300 or 400 pages of 13 generations of witches going all the way back to Scotland. So we used a piece of that and then, we feel like we’re gonna save some of that great story and saga of all the different generations for later seasons, should we be so lucky. And yeah, we just took everything that we could and sort of hoarded it and used it as best we could because it’s full of such delicious, delicious ghostly and just exciting witch stuff.”
Alexandra Daddario and Harry Hamlin only read part of ‘The Witching Hour’
The Witching Hour was too much for even the cast to absorb in its entirety. Daddario and Hamlin both started the book as part of their research for Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches.
“I was not familiar with the source material prior to doing the show but I’m almost done with the book now as we’re finishing the series,” Daddario said. “And I’ve started Interview with the Vampire. So I’m really getting into Anne Rice, reading a lot of her interviews and learning more about her and the metaphors and the material and where these characters came from, where these crazy ideas came from, and it’s been amazing. Anne Rice is a fascinating woman. Very, very interesting person.”
Hamlin plays Cortland Mayfair on The Mayfair Witches.
“I was also not familiar with the source material,” Hamlin said. “Of course, I’d seen Interview with the Vampire, the film, but I was not a voracious reader of Anne Rice. I did get the book on audiobooks on Audible. It’s, like, 55 hours of listening. I got through about ten hours of it before I started work on the show.”
