Steven Prusakowski
When you watch an episode of What We Do In the Shadows it is hard to overlook the attention to detail in every inch of the series. It starts with the well orchestrated wall to wall comedy and extends to the elaborate floor to ceiling sets. The series tells the story of four fish-out-of-water vampires living on Staten Island – Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Colin (Mark Proksch) and their familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén). It is up to Production Designer Shayne Fox and her team to bring their undead world to life in all its off-beat fashion.
Awards Radar sat down with Fox to discuss her Emmy-nominated work on the series, reflecting on bidding farewell, her favorite easter egg, her challenges, how she fills each set, and much more. Below are some excerpts from our conversation or you can listen to our conversation in its entirety where she shares some amazing insights into her work on the series.
What are your feelings about saying goodbye to What We Do In the Shadows?
Shayne Fox: I’ve gone through the gamut of emotions. It’s almost like a big breakup or like something leaving you, like grief. We’re grieving this beautiful thing that we’ve done.
At first, it was denial. Then there was sadness and then it’s kind of like, why are they canceling the show? That’s ridiculous. Everyone loves the show. All the things I think, what I’ve come around to really feeling lately, and I, I came to this after talking to some of the other department heads. It’s just a real sense of fulfillment. You know, we started something, it was a little show. And we started and we put our hearts into it.
How much time and effort goes into every single piece because, well, you’ve worked both as the set decorator and as production. So you’ve kind of more of the granular level and also this massive level, you know, what goes into that?
Shayne Fox: A lot of time, a lot of energy. We have a basic palette for the show of types of fabrics or types of lamps or things that we are always gravitating towards and nothing makes it to set without going through the paint department first to get aged. And sometimes it’s, you know, it’s a beautiful old chair, but it doesn’t look old enough. So we’ll tear it up a bit.
We’ll paint it. A lot of the times, like early on, when I started decorating the show, we didn’t have a bigger budget like we do now. We didn’t have the budget to upholster everything or have curtains made. So we got creative about how to mess things up. I would buy a velvet couch and instead of upholstering it, we would paint it. And on camera, you can’t tell it’s painted velvet.
Sometimes we bring in antiques and I’m like, ‘We can’t paint that. That’s like a rare, beautiful item.’ There’s a fine line between ruining beautiful objects for our show and then making objects that maybe aren’t as beautiful, making them more beautiful. So the work, like we can get stuff from a garage sale and I can turn it into something great.
This last season you got to explore Staten Island a bit more. You’re no longer telling a vampire story. You’re telling a human story with vampires in it. What was it like working on those types of sets?
Shayne Fox: It’s fun. It’s super fun. I think something happened when we were sort of finished with the COVID of it all. We could go out into the real world a little more. So like season three and parts of season four were very sort of studio bound with, you know, new set builds and stuff.
And then in season five, we kind of broke out of it and went into the real world a bit more because we could. But having said that, we did, we build that new station. That was something that we came up with.
We’re always looking for that sort of fish out of water thing. So that are, you know, you have Nandor sitting on a new set, like what could be the most opposite of him? You know, and we don’t want it to be a great new set. We want it to be like a sort of like a cable channel news, because that’s just like funnier, you know, if it was this big swashbuckling CNN type set.
I mean, maybe that would have been funny too, but there’s something about the sort of down market new station that we kind of lean into. So I designed this set that was kind of awful, but in the best possible way, I think, I think we, I hope we achieve something there.
Are there any Easter Eggs you can share?
Shayne Fox: Basically, everything in there has a story like that. I mean, one thing I’ll say that maybe I shouldn’t say, but every year, I’ll buy my team a bottle of Dom Perignon and we’ll enjoy it in the fancy room at the end of the season. And then every year, we just put the champagne bottle somewhere on a shelf. And so there’s a few of them that lived in there. To me, that’s a funny story because that’s just the crew enjoying the space as well.
But like everything has a story in that set. Every detail is from the request of a producer or from the mind of a hilarious set dresser or a cast note that was taken to heart because they wanted something a certain way. It’s kind of lived in.
Watch all of Shayne Fox’s meticulous work on What We Do In the Shadows, streaming on Hulu with the sixth and final season coming soon to FX.
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