While the Mayfair family has been entangled with the dark and mysterious entity Lasher (Jack Huston), for Rowan (Alexandra Daddario), she’s only just coming to be acquainted not only with the idea of Lasher, but with the Mayfairs and their secrets more generally. Over the first three episodes of AMC’s Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, Rowan’s life has been turned upside down with significant discoveries about her biological family and her own unusual powers but the stunning murder of her biological mother as well. Now, in a new clip from this week’s episode of the series, “Curiouser and Curiouser”, Rowan finds out a bit more about the family and the mysterious Lasher — by way of her Aunt Carlotta (Beth Grant).
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In the new clip, shared by AMC+ on their YouTube channel, Carlotta reveals that Lasher came to her when she was young, but that she rejected him — and that she’s sure Rowan will be strong enough to reject Lasher as well, though she has some warning for her niece as well. You can check out the clip for yourself below.
For series executive producers Michelle Ashford, Esta Spalding, and Mark Johnson, making the Lasher character work on screen was a huge challenge considering that, in Anne Rice canon he’s a non-human character, but casting Jack Huston was a perfect choice.
“Lasher was huge,” Ashford told ComicBook.com. “First of all, you’re dealing with a non-human. And I had asked, ‘Have we ever written a non-human before?’ I don’t think we have. And then, of course, not only in the writing of it, but then you have to bring it into reality and filming. And that is very… It’s funny about a non-human, when it’s in your imagination, you can make it whatever you want. In a film, it has to become real in some form.”
“But it has to be scary and seductive, and it disappears, but it can’t be silly,” Spalding said. “But I have to say, Mark, you should talk to this too, because I feel like at the very beginning when we were sending you drafts of the pilot, you’d often start by saying, ‘Let’s talk about Lasher. What are we saying?’”
Johnson said that for him, the impulse was that less was more with Lasher and that Ashford and Spalding put it together perfectly.
“I think that Esta and Michelle worked out the perfect balance. We see enough of Lasher and are confused and dazzled and any number of things by Lasher the way he is,” Johnson said. “So, I think he scared me because I wasn’t quite sure how to render him. And the two of you really came up with a solution.”
That solution was Huston. Spalding said that they got lucky with the actor being able to do everything needed to bring Lasher to life.
“Then we got Jack Huston, and it was like, ‘He can do all of this,’” she said. “So that was very lucky.”
Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC and AMC+.