Mayfair Witches Showrunners Discuss the “Hard Choices” They Made in Adapting Anne Rice’s Book

It’s never been a secret that AMC’s Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches would deviate a bit from the late author’s iconic novel, The Witching Hour. After all, the novel is nearly 1000 pages long and spans centuries while mapping the lives of the women of the Mayfair family. But now that the series is halfway through its first season — a second season of the series was announced last week — some of those changes are come into sharper view and series showrunners Esta Spalding and Michelle Ashford are explaining some of the more difficult changes they made and why.

“We were given eight episodes for a 1000-page book,” Spalding told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s an absolute cornucopia of deliciousness and we had to make hard choices.”

One of the major changes that fans of the book knew about heading into the series was the introduction of Ciprien Grieve, the character played by Tongayi Chirisa. The character is something of a combination of two of the novel’s characters, Talamasca agent Aaron Lightner and Rowan’s love interest Michael Curry. For the showrunners, the combination was about ensuring Rowan had agency as her own character.

“In a story that’s eight [episodes] where you have to streamline, we really wanted Rowan to have agency,” Spalding said. “And we debated long and hard whether or not to call the character Michael, because the character had so many attributes of Michael Curry.”

“And we didn’t want to call him Aaron, obviously,” Ashford added. “So, it seemed like, in a weird way, the most respectful way to proceed was to combine them and make him his own original character.”

The series also sees some other changes as well, including some the physical appearance of Rowan, played by Alexandra Daddario in the series, who is blonde in the book. But one of the bigger one is a shift in terms of the familial relationship between Cortland Mayfair (Harry Hamlin) and Carlotta Mayfair (Beth Grant). In the book, the two characters are a generation apart but, in the series, the pair are siblings — and for Ashford and Spalding, that sort of dynamic made the most sense.

“You say brother or sister and immediately the audience has a visceral reaction, like oh, I know what that’s like,” Ashford said. “The notion that Anne created this family that was so complicated and so far, reaching, twisted, and sort of incestuous in so many ways, it is our job to make sure that the thing has as much sort of dramatic heft as possible.”

“And the primal relationship that exists between siblings, the rivalry, jealousies, and so on. We are trying to find ways to make these connections between characters,” Spalding said.

What is Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches about?

The series is based on Anne Rice’s trilogy of novels, Lives of The Mayfair Witches. The series synopsis is as follows: “Based on Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches, Mayfair Witches is an exploration of female power and the mortal implications of our decisions.  Mayfair Witches focuses on an intuitive young neurosurgeon (Alexandra Daddario) who discovers that she is the unlikely heir to a family of witches. As she grapples with her newfound powers, she must contend with a sinister presence that has haunted her family for generations.”

Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC and AMC+.