Magic grows precociously on Mayfair Witches as season 2 is set to adapt Lasher. The second book in Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series follows Dr. Rowan Mayfair (Alexandra Daddario), who recently gave birth to once-and-future family demon, Lasher (Jack Huston). To celebrate the unholy occasion, Den of Geek summoned the cast and creatives assembled for San Diego Comic-Con. Actors Daddario, Harry Hamlin, Tongayi Chirisa, Ben Feldman, and Alyssa Jirrels, as well as Mark Johnson, who oversees AMC’s Anne Rice Immortal Universe, and showrunner Esta Spalding, openly attest to past misdeeds, transgressions to come, and abominations still awaiting forensic excavation.
Mayfair Witches’ season 1 finale, “What Rough Beast,” revealed Hamlin’s Cortland Mayfair as Rowan’s biological father, conceived under heinous circumstances. The predatory family patriarch’s world is rocked forever. The conclusion sees Cortland transformed into a statue in retribution for the sanity-shredding assault on Deirdre Mayfair (Annabeth Gish). Cortland’s interminable monolithic repose encapsulates a final farewell. Misfortunes, however, favor the Anne Rice Immortal Universe. Nothing is ever truly carved in stone. Immortal threats never die. They wait for a perfect cue.
A Patriarch in a Matriarchal Society
“The arc for Cortland is extraordinary this year,” Hamlin assures Den of Geek, with masterfully cryptic enthusiasm. “I can’t go into why or how, but something happens during the course of the second season that is going to blow people’s minds who are Cortland fans.”
Cortland’s all-encompassing ambitions are as contagious as his appetites, and opportunities abound moving forward. “Esta gave me some lines to learn, things to do, some things to concentrate on,” Hamlin teases. “I can’t say what it is, but it’s a big, big, thing.”
Cortland’s series arc veers from the book, The Witching Hour, where the character dies the day Rowan is born, and is experienced through flashbacks. “In an adaptation, you never want to be literal,” Mark Johnson explains. “You want to be true to the spirit.”
AMC’s access to the entirety of Rice’s literary output allows the seditious series to borrow intuitively for a larger purpose. Hamlin projects quiet power with intimidating self-assurance, and lethal potential. The veteran actor’s disarming ambiguity flavors ongoing viewing experience with an aura of the unexpected. This is, after all, the Clash of the Titans (1981) actor who cut off Medusa’s head for looking at him the wrong way. If anyone can bypass mythological canon, it is Hamlin.
“Thank God they got me out of the statue,” Hamlin says. “Hopefully Cortland will live on to do more creepy things. Thank God I’m immortal, that gives me job security.”
Cortland’s historically devastating missteps could easily be blamed on Lasher’s demonic interference and body-hopping ways, but Hamlin steadfastly maintains his character takes full responsibility. “[Cortland is] very calculated,” Hamlin explained to Den of Geek following the season 1 finale. “He’s a possessor, not someone possessed. Self-preservation is not necessarily an evil motive.”
The Face of the Talamasca
The ancient order chronicling supernatural anomalies ensures their continued existence by maintaining a professional distance, bordering on invisibility. As Ciprien Grieve, Tongayi Chirisa enjoys the “great honor and privilege to be the first character seen that represents the Talamasca.” The first secret society operative exposed should be assigned to AMC’s upcoming series, Talamasca. “Obviously, with the new one coming up, it’ll expand just what we’re capable of doing.”
Adapting the Story of the 13th Witch
“It’s a massive book,” Spalding tells Den of Geek. “It’s like walking into Aladdin’s cave. There’s a whole chapter on Julian Mayfair’s [one of the 13 Mayfair witches] story. We have so many pieces, but put them together as a narrative following Rowan because the mission of our show is to make it Rowan’s story.”
The journey of the preordained 13th Mayfair Family Witch blindsides generational secrets, amassing unforeseeable collateral damage, and draws innocent bystanders. “I don’t mess with any of the witchcraft,” Ben Feldman says. His Sam “Lark” Larkin is “a charming ex who wanders back into Rowan’s life.”
These “romcom” scenes, as Daddario pegs them, offer breathing between more intense shots. “I’d come in for rehearsal, and they’d be wiping blood off [Alexandra’s] face,” Feldman recalls. “She’d say ‘’thank God you’re here, that means we get to make out.’”
Alexandra never received a breakdown of Rowan’s abilities, instead guided to “deal with the idea of power itself,” Daddario tells us. “What do you do if you’re given all this power and all this money and all these things. Do you think you’re going to do good things or use them for your own devices?”
Viewers will find out themselves when Mayfair Witches season 2 premiers on AMC in early 2025.
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