Which What We Do in the Shadows Character Are You?
Which What We Do in the Shadows Character Are You?
Learn More About What We Do in the Shadows
Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement-s 2014 film was a small, perfect New Zealand mockumentary about vampire flatmates. The FX series that grew out of it in 2019 had no business being better, and yet across six seasons it became one of the most consistently funny shows on television — an ensemble comedy about four ancient vampires and their human familiar sharing a decaying mansion on Staten Island, filing paperwork, and failing at almost everything they attempt.
The premise-s genius is the gap between mythology and reality. These are creatures who have lived for centuries and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Nandor the Relentless conquered territories in the Al-Quolanudar Empire and now cannot work out how to feel fulfilled. Laszlo and Nadja have been married for hundreds of years and still bicker like a couple who moved in last spring. The show mines almost everything from the fact that immortality does not make anyone wiser — it just gives them more time to be exactly who they already were.
Kayvan Novak-s Nandor is the household-s nominal leader and its most emotionally lost member. A former warrior grappling with loneliness, a string of dead wives, and a genuinely touching inability to understand his own feelings, he spends the series searching for meaning in increasingly ridiculous places. Matt Berry-s Laszlo is the show-s comic high-wire act — a preposterously confident Victorian gentleman with an enormous vocabulary, an endless supply of invented names, and, when it matters, more loyalty than anyone else in the house.
Natasia Demetriou-s Nadja is the sharpest of the four: ambitious, romantic, and deeply frustrated by the mediocrity of the men around her. Her attempts to build something of her own — a nightclub, a vampire council seat, a career — form some of the series-s best material precisely because she is competent enough that her failures are funny rather than sad. Her relationship with Laszlo, chaotic and genuinely loving, is the emotional spine of the show.
Mark Proksch-s Colin Robinson is the great original invention: an energy vampire who feeds by boring people, draining a room through workplace anecdotes and unsolicited trivia. It is a joke that should have run out in six episodes and instead sustained six seasons, largely because Proksch plays him with an eerie, affectless commitment. His arcs — including one where he dies and is reborn — are the show at its most willing to be genuinely strange.
And then there is Guillermo. Harvey Guillen-s familiar begins as a put-upon assistant desperate to be turned, discovers he is a descendant of Van Helsing, and spends the series in an escalating identity crisis about whether he wants to join these people or kill them. His arc gives the comedy real stakes, and the show-s decision to take his frustration seriously rather than treating it as a running gag is a large part of why the ending landed.
The series wrapped in December 2024 after six seasons, and its afterlife in clips and reaction images has only grown. If you like horror-comedy, the Chucky quiz is a natural next stop, and the It: Welcome to Derry quiz covers the straighter horror side. For ensemble comedy, try the Community quiz or our new quiz for The Paper.
So which resident of the Staten Island house are you? The warrior with an existential problem, the gentleman with a hundred aliases, the one who deserves better, the one draining the room, or the one who has been carrying everybody this whole time? Answer honestly — nobody here does.
