Alexandra Daddario on Lasher, ‘Mayfair Witches’ Alluring Big Bad (VIDEO)
Viewers will quickly learn how bad Lasher is for all the players in Mayfair Witches, but Jack Huston‘s dangerously smoldering spectre will draw them in regardless. That’s the power and peril of the magical entity, whose connection to the Mayfair women is exhumed in the inaugural season of AMC‘s second Anne Rice adaptation.
Alexandra Daddario plays Dr. Rowan Fielding in the supernatural drama (premiering Sunday, January 8 on all AMC networks), and she tells TV Insider in the video interview above that Rowan is effectively a walking open wound with uncontrollable power — if Lasher makes her feel good (and he does), she’s going to lean in.
“It’s the guy you shouldn’t like who you can’t stop going back to,” she explains. “Jack did such an incredible job with the character and had such brilliant ideas and is so magnetic on screen. I think that’s a lot of the relationship: This is a woman who can’t resist this person she knows she shouldn’t be with. There’s this intense connection. She doesn’t really understand it, but she doesn’t really care. That’s certainly something I think a lot of us can relate to.”
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Not understanding the world around you is a simple way to describe the complicated upheaval of the young neurosurgeon’s life in the first episodes. While desperately fighting to get her cancer-ridden adoptive mother (Erica Gimpel) into an experimental medical trial, an unsettling anomaly from her past recurs. Rowan turns to her mother for help in deciphering these apparent magic abilities, but her mom lies, downplaying reality to protect her daughter.
What she, the New Orleans-dwelling Mayfairs, and supernatural protector Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa) are trying to keep Rowan away from is exactly what she (and her biological mother, Deirdre, played by Annabeth Gish) is pulled towards. But Rowan has powers no one else in her family line possesses, and Lasher knows that. This makes Rowan capable of handling Lasher differently than Uncle Cortland (Harry Hamlin) or Aunt Carlotta (Beth Grant) ever could.
“One of the things that [Mayfair Witches] deals with — and Anne Rice wrote about this beautifully — is, who are we when we get power? Are we good or evil?” The White Lotus alum explains. “Rowan is no different than that. I think that she is doing what feels good to her and trying to get by. She’s coming from that baseline as she goes into this new world, and Lasher makes her feel good.”
Carlotta certainly won’t like that, but Lasher certainly will. But then, there’s Ciprien, Rowan’s assigned guardian at a supernatural protection agency, who knows of the rare importance of Rowan’s place in the Mayfair lineage and believes she should know the truth. Learn about how Rowan and Ciprien’s relationship will affect everyone’s struggle for power in Mayfair Witches in the full video interview, above.
Mayfair Witches, Series Premiere, Sunday, January 8, 9/8c, AMC, also streaming on AMC+ (premiere simulcast on BBC America, IFC, SundanceTV, and WEtv)
