The latest chapter of AMC’s Anne Rice Immortal Universe has concluded. Talmasca: The Secret Order has officially released its season one finale. As we wait to hear if we’ll see a season two of the show (fingers crossed), it was Nerdist‘s pleasure to sit down with showrunner John Lee Hancock and executive producer Mark Lafferty to look back on the first season of Talamasca as a whole. Among other things, Mark Lafferty and John Lee Hancock dove into Talmasca‘s mysterious villain, Houseman; the series’ connection to Anne Rice lore; the power of twins in the Immortal Universe; and their mysterious Talamasca artifact, the 752. Of course, we had to ask them about the possibility of Gasper, a romance between Guy and Jasper. You can check out our full interview with Talmasca: The Secret Order‘s creators below.
The finale of Talamasca‘s first season seems to introduce us to the Amsterdam office’s Houseman as the series’ big bad. Can you tease a little more about the mysterious character and what he’s after?
Mark Lafferty: Yeah, so Houseman is somebody we meet twice in our final episode, and he’s a guy that we understand has been there for quite some time. We see him in a flashback to the eighties and then in our present day. And I think the thing you see him doing both times, and the thing that probably says a lot about who he is, and who he will be going forward, is that he’s somebody who seems to figure out what the leverage is that he can exact over whoever he’s dealing with. He’s a man who deals in quid pro quos and quickly determines how he can get an edge over somebody. So this is the guy who’s a really canny operator, and he’s somebody who is dangerous because of his intelligence and his ability to sort of see around corners.
Earlier in the season, Helen shared that the Amsterdam office was actually responsible for publishing Daniel Molloy’s Interview with the Vampire book. Does that tie into what Houseman is plotting at all on Talamasca?
John Lee Hancock: Hrmm… I think everything in this show has little fingerlings of attachment, and so there may be pieces of that are involved, but Houseman has his own agenda that is perhaps somewhat separate from the book.
So it’s just all gone wrong in Amsterdam.
Mark Lafferty: Yeah, I think we’ve been talking about Amsterdam as sort of this part of this sprawling bureaucracy in this very large sort of labyrinthine institution. There are a lot of players and a lot of angles that people within it play, like in any places of politics or business. And so it just might be that in the future, if we do have a future, there would be many different ramifications for different people coming from a lot of different hallways in Amsterdam.
John Lee Hancock: Yeah, the Motherhouse in Amsterdam, being the main headquarters, is you could look at it almost like the Pentagon or something. There’s a whole lot going on in there.
Speaking of Daniel, I loved his cameo in Talamasca. When we last saw him in Interview with the Vampire. He had a lot of swagger and bravado, but in this series, he seemed a lot more scared about his new vampire state. What did you want to convey about the character in this quick bite?
John Lee Hancock: I think talking to Eric Bogosian and talking to Rolin Jones, the showrunner for Interview with the Vampire, and saying, “Where is Daniel now?” Because we’re picking it up right after where that season left off, and his new vampirism, and how he’s dealing with that? And Eric Bogosian had a lot of ideas about, like “I’m still kind of hanging on an edge here.” So when he sees Guy in the alley, it’s kind of very much not only friend or foe, but is he dinner? So playing with all that and leaving it on an edge was kind of enticing. And so yeah, we wanted to let him flow right into the line that had been drawn by Interview with the Vampire.
The line from Daniel’s Talamasca scene that really caught me was when Daniel said, “I have a thing with people messing around in my head without asking first.” What do you think he was really talking about there?
John Lee Hancock: I think anyone who watches Interview with the Vampire knows that people fish around in other people’s heads a lot in that show; and I think he had obviously experienced some of that and is quick to understand when it happens, especially now that he’s a vampire. And so it’s just a nod to the world. I think, a nod to what was created through Interview with the Vampire.
Anne Rice’s world already contains an important set of supernatural twins, and now Talamasca has added another one. Do Doris and Helen have any connection to Mekare and Maharet?
Mark Lafferty: I would say not necessarily. And I think that one of the things we wanted to get at is that twins… Twins might be very special in this world. And anybody who has known twins, even in our terrestrial world, knows that there are sometimes some spooky things that twins do that seem almost supernatural.
And part of what we’ve seen in the first season of Talamasca is that there was certainly, at least in the past, an effort too for the Talamasca to try to discover whether there are certain special qualities in twins, not just Doris and Helen, but other twins too. We meet another pair of sisters that Helen tracks down in episode four, who maybe have some special qualities or maybe do have ties to older lines, older genealogical lines. But for now, no, I don’t think we’re trying to say these two exactly have that connection.
One of the biggest mysteries of season one of Talamasca revolved around the 752, who turned out to be Doris, which is a really neat reveal. Where did the idea to make the codex into a living Immortal come from?
Mark Lafferty: That comes right out of our very brilliant writers’ room. We had an incredibly gifted group of writers, and it was something that evolved as we were getting into the process of crafting the show. We had three amazing other writers that worked with John and myself, Anna Fisher, Donald Joh, and Vinny Wilhelm. And the process of creating a show like this, oftentimes you start out in one direction and you say, this is exactly where we’re going. Then somebody says something in a writers’ room, and you take a whole big large left turn. And so that was one of those happy, wonderful things that just came out of the first few weeks of our brain trust working together. It just seemed like the exact right fit.
Jasper stresses that the most valuable currency that being can have is information. What do you think is the most dangerous piece of information that Doris holds on Talamasca?
John Lee Hancock: I think when you’ve got a vast warehouse of information between your ears, a lot of times you don’t know exactly what the most interesting or the most dangerous piece is. And it’s somebody digging in there and finding it. And that’s been an enticing thing for us to talk about.
Mark Lafferty: And I think too, what’s the most dangerous thing to one person might not be the most dangerous thing to another person. That’s the power of information is that what might be a real tender spot in a vulnerability to me is maybe just nothing to you. Yeah. And that has been the fun of thinking about exactly what Doris possesses in her, and hopefully, we continue to explore that.
Well, I have it on some good authority that a not insignificant portion of the fan base would be very interested in the relationship between Guy and Jasper (Gasper) turning romantic in future seasons of Talamasca. Is that something you might be open to exploring?
John Lee Hancock: Let’s see if we get future seasons!
As I was watching Talamasca, I found myself curious to know who Jasper’s maker was. Is that something? Does it matter?
John Lee Hancock: We’ve talked in general and sometimes in specifics about it, and we have an idea that’s being bandied about in the room, and when it happened, where it happened, et cetera. We try to stay cognizant and are aware of different characters from Anne Rice books, lore, canon, et cetera, not being tied to them, but just being aware of ’em. And, yeah, so we have a general idea. We haven’t thrown that out yet.
Mark Lafferty: And I will say one thing we do know that we’ve talked about, and this comes out in just a few little clauses or lines in 1.04, is that Jasper had kind of this long journey on foot from South America through Central America and then into Texas. And so it very well may be that he was made into a vampire in Texas. And the idea, and I think that Jasper is sort of a real Texan, came out of John’s head, but for me, it feels like the excitement of at some point, being able to show that story is really tantalizing.
Season one of Talamasca is now streaming in full on AMC+.