Everyone at /Film loves Guillermo in “What We Do in the Shadows.” Given where his story ends in season 4, what excites you about Guillermo’s arc going into season 5?
Well, it’s so funny to think of the trajectory of Guillermo in the last five seasons. I was talking to a good friend who’s a director and they pointed out, “I just realized that I haven’t seen any other character with such a trajectory on TV like Guillermo.” Where he’s not where he started, not even where he ended the first season, and … he went from being a servant/familiar/slave to Nandor, to realizing that his family runs with Van Helsing blood through their veins, to also going into keeping a secret, and also being discovered, and also carrying a secret on his shoulders for his whole life of his sexuality. And also finding out that he’s been lying about where he lives to his family, where he works, and also finding out that he’s become a bodyguard, but also has to find means to provide for his mom that he wants to take care of like a Latino son would, so he starts embezzling money. And also by default, he has been murdering vampires left and right.
And yet the audience forgives him, because he is us. Like, Guillermo is all of us. He’s going through the motions every season that every human being could possibly go through. This character cries, this character loves, this character has secrets, desires, aspirations, goals. He feels defeated, he takes initiative. Then going to season 5, he takes matters into his own hands. He’s tired of waiting, and he takes initiative and goes to Derek with a bag full of money. That’s where we left off season 4, and that’s where we pick up with season 5. And it’s like he’s going to the next chapter, he’s taking initiative. Sometimes that’s the best we can do.
Things don’t ever always work out the way you planned them, because he had planned to be a vampire sooner. But he’d been given service to Nandor for over 10 years and he wasn’t going to make him a vampire anytime soon. Time was running out. What’s time to a vampire? They’re immortal. Time to a person who’s mortal, the clock is ticking. Your dreams are slipping through the seconds. Every tick tock that goes by, your dream is fading away into not a possibility. And that is the scariest thing for any human, right? When we stop and realize how fragile life is and how our time on Earth is so limited. You start realizing, “What am I going to do? What am I doing with my life?” So that’s where Guillermo has been an incredible character to play, is that he’s not where he started, he’s not who he was yesterday, and he is not going to be tomorrow who he was today.