When the asshole vampires of What We Do In The Shadows are holding out for a hero, he takes the form of a gay, Mexican, sweater-vest wearing nerd. Eliza Janssen salutes the underdog character Guillermo as the comedy’s secret weapon.
What We Do in the Shadows: Season 5
It’s no fun being the straight man. In sitcoms, the most well-tempered, relatable character is often the hero that seems dull when compared to their colourful buddies: Seinfeld’s titular comic, Arrested Development’s Michael Bluth, The Big Bang Theory’s Leonard. Nobody’s watching Mork & Mindy to see what wild antics Mindy gets up to this week.
In vaudeville, the straight man is better known as a ‘stooge’, a term we probably misuse now because of The Three Stooges’ zany ubiquity. The stooge never in on the joke: they’re the butt of it. They set up the gag so that the funny, vibrant characters can get a laugh, while they frown and mug from the sidelines, humiliated. In the craft of comedy, it’s a submissive, yet vital, position—so please don’t take it as criticism when I say that Guillermo de la Cruz is the greatest stooge in our modern TV landscape.
A hapless dogsbody to the flamboyant vampires of What We Do In The Shadows, Guillermo is our audience surrogate to an unpredictable supernatural world. Like all of us, he’s been seduced by decades of sexy vampire propaganda: the chiselled undead romantics of Interview with the Vampire, Twilight, Blade, and more. Still led on by the dream that his master Nandor the Relentless might one day gift him with that immortalising bite, he spends most of his time cleaning up the vampire coven’s bloody messes, and acting as translator to the mundanities of their Staten Island hood.
Actor Harvey Guillén was perhaps the least established talent in the perfectly-assembled cast of WWDITS. The series transports the premise of the loveable Taika Waititi film of the same name to an American setting, but actors Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, and Natasia Demetriou are each best known for creating and appearing in UK skit shows. US character actor Mark Proksch rounds out the ensemble as deadpan energy vampire Colin Robinson, sure, but the series still stands out from its contemporaries—even on its own network, FX—for its off-kilter transatlantic humour.
In his sweater vest and spectacles, Guillermo grounds the outlandish plots and CGI effects (“bat!”) of the series, even in his immediate visual distinction from the vampire archetype we’ve come to expect. He’s just so hilariously normal: raised Catholic by Mexican migrant parents, his last job before becoming Nandor’s tireless slave was working at Panera Bread. The character could’ve been a dull mouthpiece for us viewers, explaining the Staten Island gang’s next weird adventure directly to the in-world camera crew for mere expository efficiency. But with each new season of WWDITS, some fresh facet of Guillermo reveals itself to us: making him not only the heart of the show, but possibly its greatest secret weapon of comedy.
First there was the revelation that Guillermo is, ironically enough, a descendant of famed vamp slayer Van Helsing. This inopportune inheritance made Guillermo at first a threat to the vampires that had long bossed him around, before plateauing into a somewhat more equal power dynamic. These days, Laszlo (Berry) still can’t be bothered to get Guillermo’s name right, constantly calling him ‘Gizmo’ instead—but his whipping boy errands now include badass bodyguard duties, too.
More excitingly, the character has long struggled with his attraction to his goofy master Nandor (Novak), a teasing romance that only exploded fan hearts more with Guillermo’s decision to come out to his family in season four. Check out #nandermo on Twitter if you don’t believe me. As in producer Waititi’s other small-screen comedy, Our Flag Means Death, WWDITS has always relished in joyful hints at its characters’ queerness, but it isn’t content to pussyfoot around in the queer-baiting, shipping fangirl doldrums. No way.
Despite appearing as a hetero couple when we first meet them, Laszlo and Nadja (Demetriou) reveal through countless, ludicrous non-sequiturs that labels of gender and sexuality have become basically meaningless across the centuries-long suckfest that is their lives. Coming out is nonetheless treated as a special, important event for Guillermo: honing in on the reality that many viewers, and queer actor Guillén himself, have experienced. Also the simple gag of your show’s ‘straight’, ‘one sane man’ being an explicitly gay dude is pretty good in itself.
Berry, Demetriou, Novak and Proksch are all gut-bustlingly great, don’t get me wrong—and Kristen Schaal is a neat addition to the found family unit as The Guide, perhaps taking up Guillermo’s spot as the house’s under-appreciated second (sixth?) banana. But those characters have lived through eons of wackiness, suffering each gruesomely funny body horror moment and springing back into form by the end of each episode like Wile E. Coyote.
With Guillermo undergoing a bizarre transformation of his own in the ongoing fifth season (no spoilers), What We Do In The Shadows keeps proving just how essential and deeply, vulnerably humanising his part is in any of the laughs or pathos the series attempts. Guillén is so much more than just a familiar or a stooge in the series’ success. And for however many more series the vampires are on our screens, it’s what he’s doing in the shadows that we’ll be tuning in for.
