What We Do in the Shadows: Matt Berry on Creating Laszlos Hilarious Inflections and W

Matt Berry has been a staple of British comedy for two decades, thanks to his memorable roles in shows like “The IT Crowd,” “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace,” “Snuff Box” and “Toast of London.”

And although he has been a part of other American productions before, it’s his role as Laszlo Cravensworth in the FX comedy “What We Do in the Shadows” that has brought him acclaim across the pond, including his first Emmy nomination for actor in a comedy series.

Berry is more than just an actor, though. He is also an incredibly accomplished musician, with nearly a dozen albums under his belt. So perhaps it is only fitting he learned about his Emmy nomination while he was in the studio working on his latest.

The call was coming from Berry’s agent, who was in tears when she told him that he was up for the award alongside Larry David (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”), Martin Short (“Only Murders in the Building”), Steve Martin (“Only Murders in the Building”), Jeremy Allen White (“The Bear”) and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (“Reservation Dogs”). His celebration upon hearing the news?

“I just sort of continued to play the drums,” he says.

“What We Do in the Shadows,” which is based on the 2014 New Zealand mockumentary film of the same name, follows four vampires and their human familiar living together in a house on Staten Island. The show aired its fifth season in 2023 with the sixth and final season set to begin airing in October. It was a hit with critics from the beginning but took time to find and build its audience.

Berry credits FX boss John Landgraf and his team at the network for having “great taste” and “the guts” to believe in the series, giving it the time it needed to grow.

“[Landgraf] is going to look back at the shows he said ‘yes’ to, and every one is a winner,” Berry says. “For his job, that’s all that you could want.”

He also says that he knew “right from the first shot” that he was going to enjoy his time working on “What We Do in the Shadows.”

“It feels like home, being with the other cast and being on that set,” Berry says. “It just all felt totally natural.”

From the beginning of the series, one of the defining running gags has been Laszlo’s tendency to take routine words and pronounce them in some outlandish way. (Looking at you, “New York Cittttayyyyy”).

Berry says that no one ever suggests which words he should do that to, and it’s never written into the scripts. “It’s just done just to amuse myself,” he says. “That’s why I did it in the first place, and that’s why I continue to do it.

“I don’t know when it’s going to happen; I never know which word is going to get attacked,” he continues. “It’ll just kind of come out. It’ll come out completely naturally. But the thing is, it will sound completely unnatural.”

Speaking of natural, typically when a show reaches its fifth season, the characters have grown and evolved beyond where audiences first met them in the first season. But Berry says “What We Do in the Shadows” is unique in that the vampire characters, having all been alive for hundreds of years, are past the point of changing. Yet, it continues to be fresh.

“It’s one of the rare shows, other than ‘The Munsters’ or something, where you join these characters fully formed, and they don’t need to develop other than, say, Gizmo’s character,” he says, referring to Harvey Guillén’s human familiar Guillermo. “The actual vampires are completely stuck in their ways.”

For Laszlo in Season 5, that means he often boasts about his abilities as a scientist, despite having a very outdated understanding of science. Berry says that Laszlo’s pomposity thrives because no one in the house is willing to call him out on his nonsense.

“There isn’t anyone there to kind of tell him to shut up, which is fantastic for him,” he says.

And now with the filming of the final season of “What We Do in the Shadows” behind him, Berry can look ahead to life beyond the show. When it comes to continuing to work in the U.S. or perhaps returning to England, he says that his desire is to “just go where the best work is.”

“It’s about doing things that I find funny and find fun,” he says. “I love working abroad. I love working in the U.S., and there’s still a whole load of U.S. comics that I haven’t worked with yet that I sort of need to work with.”

One person that Berry is keen to work with onscreen? Bill Hader. Hader previously appeared in a cameo in Berry’s series “Toast of Tinseltown,” but since Hader’s character appears only on a Zoom call, he and Berry did not work in the same room while shooting the scene.

“I like those kinds of performers that make smart comedy, but at the same time, make ridiculous comedy. That’s what I’ve always been interested in,” Berry says.

When asked whom he would like to see win in his Emmy category aside from himself, Berry would love to see Larry David get the statuette on awards night. Berry got to work with David on the final season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” while David also made a cameo appearance on “Toast of Tinseltown.”

He admits, though, that hearing his name listed along with his fellow nominees “makes me sort of dizzy and sick almost, because, I don’t know, there’s a slight impostor sort of thing going on.”

Berry continues, “But they’re fantastic, fantastic performers and legendary performers. So being even in the same long list as them is too much. So to get whittled down into this final list really is too much.”

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Valentine Belue

Update: 2024-09-12

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