Tongayi Chirisa and Harry Hamlin Discuss Their Roles on ‘Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches’ [Interview]

Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches is the next AMC adaptation of Anne Rice’s works, following the first season of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

The much-anticipated series is based on Rice’s best-selling trilogy, Lives of the Mayfair Witches, and will center on a young neurosurgeon, Rowan, played by Alexandra Daddario, who discovers that she is the unlikely heir to a family of witches.

As Rowan grapples with her newfound powers, she must contend with a sinister presence that has haunted her family for generations.

Among the series’ other stars are Tongayi Chirisa, who portrays Ciprien Grieve, and Harry Hamlin, who plays Cortland Mayfair. Both actors recently spoke with reporters about their characters on Mayfair Witches, what viewers can look forward to from the series, and auditioning some pretty interesting scene partners. 

The character of Ciprian Grieve:

Chirisa began by describing his character, Ciprian Grieve, and why he was excited to be a part of the project. 

“He works for the Talamasca, and he has this ability. He’s an empath, and he has this ability to touch people or objects, and he can see into their past,” Chirisa said.

“I think the biggest thing that drew me to this was just the world, Anne Rice, and the genre that we’re in,” Chirisa continued. He added that in terms of the character he plays, he was interested in the challenges that Ciprian goes through.

“Just the ability to be able to feel the emotions of everything and everyone was too alluring for me not to try and take a stab at it. So, I was drawn by the character and just the world, and just to work with Esta [Spalding] and Alex [Daddario] was just, like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is an opportunity that I will not let slip.'”

Chirisa also said his character’s motivation is, at least at the beginning, “allegiance and obligation.”

“But when he meets Rowan, there’s a sudden shift,” Chirisa explained. “He keeps the world out, and he doesn’t want anybody into his personal space, because that might be too overbearing for him. But interacting with Rowan, you start to see him becoming very vulnerable and allowing somebody into his space that’s never been tapped into.”

“And, obviously, that leads to situationships and circumstances, because he compromises his integrity, compromises the work that he’s supposed to do just to observe and to watch, and chooses to get involved. As a result, you see things beginning to unfold with him and Rowan’s character to the culmination of what we see at the end of the season,” Chirisa said.

The character of Cortland Mayfair:

Meanwhile, Hamlin’s character, Cortland Mayfair, is the patriarch of the family of witches. “I don’t have any powers, because the powers are mainly passed down through the women in the family. It’s a family of, sort of a matriarchal society in the family. And my job, as in my character, is to hold the family together. I’m kind of the fun uncle in the family,” Hamlin said.

“I was drawn to play the character, which is, by the way, the most delicious character I’ve played since the very first movie I did in 1977,” Hamlin added. “They’ve let me create a character that may not be the character that Esta [Spalding] had in mind when she first wrote the script, but the good news is that they were writing the scripts as we were filming.”

“So they were able to see what each of us brought to the characters that they had written, and then they were able to expand on that in writing. So, in a way, they adapted their characters to us, to what we brought to it. And I love it when a show goes like that,” Hamlin said.

As for Cortland Mayfair’s motivations, the first is pretty simple. 

“My motivation is to, number one, stay alive, because I’m surrounded by people in this family who have powers,” Hamlin said. “[There is] also a character, Lasher, that could at any moment do serious damage to me. Because I don’t have any powers, other than the power of manipulation and charm.”

“So, I’m constantly trying to hold the family together and get them to do the right thing, and get these witches to behave in the right way so that they can have the best life possible and I can become as wealthy as possible,” Hamlin continued. “Because my motivation is really — I’m a narcissistic sort of avuncular character in this.”

How the series differs from the source material:

Both actors also spoke to the similarities and differences we’ll see between this adaptation and the original novels.

“For fans of the books, they’ve taken the characters who — in the case of Cyprien they’ve amalgamated two characters. But in my case, the character of Cortland is not alive during the present day, but I’m very glad that they’ve resurrected him and I get to play him in this, because I love playing this guy,” Hamlin said.

“Esta did a great job of really capturing the essence of Anne Rice and some of the richer themes that convey who she was, and just the world that she created,” Chirisa added.

“This was her home, and just incorporating the finer – I mean, if you read the first book, you know, it was so rich in detail — 1000 plus pages. There’s no way we could have incorporated all the themes, but I think she did a great job in just really bunching them together to give us the essence of the story. And the season itself, it starts the way the book starts and how it ends. They’ve managed to keep that within the framework of Season 1. So, it doesn’t veer too much off from what we see in the narrative of the book. So, it still keeps the authentic essence of what Anne was conveying in the story.”

Some of the most fun parts of working on the series, including a unique scene partner for Hamlin:

For Chirisa, he said the most fun part of working on the series was that it didn’t feel like work. “I think everybody just understood the assignment,” he said. “We came to explore. We came to learn. And the grace that was given to us as actors to really figure it out and discuss. If it didn’t work, we’d just pivot and try something else. So, I think that, for me, was the best. And the freedom to do so without any backlash, so to speak, was really nice.”

“Yeah, the environment that we were shooting in was very conducive to improvisation, to coming up with new ideas,” Hamlin added. “The most fun thing, for me, is that after we filmed most of the season, they saw that the character that I had built throughout the season was different from the character that was presented in the very first scene where I was introduced in the piece, so they rewrote that scene.”

“They came to me and said, ‘So, listen, we want to rewrite the scene because we want to have Cortland introduced in a sort of bigger way. We’re gonna have you audition an alligator and a 10-foot-long python, and you’re gonna get to pick whether you want to work with this alligator or this python. So, ultimately, I chose the python, because the alligator was a terrible actor,” Hamlin laughed.

“I mean, kind of very wooden, but the snake, on the other hand, was really vibrant and great to work with. Just one of my favorite partners in the whole piece was a 10-foot-long python.”

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Mayfair Witches premieres Sunday, January 8th on AMC. The series premiere is currently streaming early on AMC+.

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