Farewell to Colin Robinson, the "What We Do in the Shadows" vampire that could very well be us

Energy vampires existed long before “What We Do in the Shadows” introduced Colin Robinson. Healthline posted a 2018 manual on how to spot and avoid them. Dr. Christiane Northrup wrote a book about them before tumbling down a conspiracy theory tunnel and becoming one. Dig into this site’s ancient scrolls and you’ll find casual references to the concept along with a feature defining the subtypes of these day-walkers dating back to the year 2000.

But it cannot be a coincidence that in the months after Mark Proksch first brought Colin to our screens in 2019, Oprah Winfrey and a slew of wellness magazines offered explanations and explorations of what it means to be one. 

They are the single strain of vampires in this world that actually exists. And here’s the truly scary part – anyone can become one, temporary or full-time, and not even know it. That gave Proksch a range of personality quirks to pull from over his six seasons of playing the vampire comedy’s breakout favorite. 

“The characters I play are always variations on the type of person in real life that I love, which is kind of the arrogant idiot, but you feel bad for them,” he told Salon in a recent interview, adding that his main influences aren’t real people, but performers like Don Knotts, “who I am a huge and endless admirer of,” and Bob Newhart. "Not that he played arrogant idiots — he didn't,” he was quick to add, “but his delivery. I've stolen from all those people.”

As “What We Do in the Shadows” kicks off its sixth and final season we’re reminded of how much we’ll miss Proksch’s deadpan antics, and how closely he captures one of the biggest perils of human interaction. The world’s Colin Robinsons are unavoidable because they are tolerable, enabling them to strike at any moment. 

But Proksch excelled at making his one of the world’s greatest by making him irresistibly enjoyable. He’s an energy vampire we’ll legitimately miss having around due to his delirious combination of basicness and oddity. 

Colin is the only “Shadows” character to die and begin another life cycle as the world’s strangest and supernaturally fast-growing child. He’s also maintained some of his humanity, which we see as the final season opens and introduces a long-forgotten sixth roommate: the Vampire Jerry. 

We talked to Proksch about his final flight with Colin and how the “What We Do in the Shadows” housemate would fare moving through our anxiety-stricken reality. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your character has gone through a lot of physical and developmental changes since the beginning of the show. How are you feeling now that won't be happening anymore and it's coming to an end?

I feel good. You know, it would be a different answer if I felt like we didn't deliver on the final season or in the finale. But I truly think this is the funniest season so far, and the finale is one of the more unique finales that people will have seen on TV. I think they stuck the landing.

I haven't seen it, so we won’t get into any spoilers with that. But let’s talk about where Colin Robinson started: I remember laughing out loud that the show included an energy vampire because before "Shadows," it was one of those concepts only mentioned in the self-help or talk therapy realm. Do you feel like after six seasons, it has become a little more publicly normalized because of Colin Robinson?

Yeah, I do. And you know, it's strange when you have nieces and nephews that get memes of your character sent to them without their friends knowing that they know me. That type of stuff will endlessly be strange to me.

But yeah, the development's been interesting. At first, the character was just supposed to be kind of a recurring character, not part of the main cast. And then after the pilot, they decided that the character does have some legs and can really function other than just being kind of a sight gag, and so we kind of just took it from there.

And you know, like on any show, the characters evolve throughout the series. If you go back and watch the first few episodes of “Seinfeld,” Kramer is completely different than where he ends up. So that's just the evolution of a show. I'm happy where we left it, I'm so happy I got to play the character. Hopefully people weren't too annoyed by it.

Oh no, I don’t think so. But I want to dig into something you just said because I think some of the best and most unforgettable sitcoms have a character nobody expects to be the breakout. This is a very balanced ensemble, where every actor and their character has their moment, has their arc. And like you said, Colin was not expected to become one of the main characters, but his charisma is so undeniable. What do you think it is about him that made him such a fan favorite?

He's a good balance to the other characters. I think he's much more subdued than, say, Laszlo, who's this bombastic character who’s gotten bigger throughout the series. And I feel like that juxtaposition, as those characters have gotten bigger in their reactions, I've tried to go the opposite direction with Colin, in order to kind of balance that a little bit.

I also try at least to make him endearing. I mean, he's very annoying, and my fear going into the show was actually annoying character fans and viewers. I didn't want to annoy people. So the way to counteract that is by giving him an endearing quality. So yeah, he's annoying, but you also feel bad for him.

That’s what I found endearing about these first few episodes. I've always liked Colin, but I don't think that I've seen a whole lot of evidence in a lot of other episodes of the way that he reacted to the idea that Jerry, this person Colin thought knew him better than anyone else, doesn't really know him at all. He seemed heartbroken, and that was a genuine surprise.

That is to Paul [Simms, the show’s executive producer and showrunner] and the writers’ credit in coming up with that scenario, and then for me to try to figure out. I'm very proud that our show isn't overly sentimental. There are moments, but it's often balanced then right away with a silly joke. And so, trying to find where Colin goes with that, and how I thought the character would deal with a situation like that.

When we come back to the show and see season six, all of a sudden, we're given this gift like, "Oh yeah, Jerry, our long lost friend who's in the basement, who we all forgot because we're selfish pricks!"  “But Jerry and I were actually friends” — at least, that's how he remembers it. I'm sure he has a revisionist history viewpoint there, but he thinks, “I'm going to have a friend now” and then when that's taken away from him, he's pretty crushed.

That's a very standard scenario for a lot of people, I think. Especially for the people who acknowledge, “I'm kind of an energy vampire.” That seems like something that happens.

Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Were there other aspects of this last season that maybe you hadn't been able to realize before? I’ve read that there were certain kinds of rants that you wanted to go on, or long monologues that in the beginning, Jemaine kind of nixed. If I recall, one that you suggested was about jazz.

Jazz is actually something I love, and so I always wanted to get jazz in, but I don't think they ever let any of that go in.

You know, Paul's pretty good about letting my obscure obsessions get in, except for wine. I actually do love wine, and I think I find wine very funny when people are pretentious about it. And so I always tried to get, like, very pretentious wine talk into the show, and that never made the cut.

But yeah, I have some really fun runs this year. And you know it's interesting because they'll write in the script, “Colin goes off on a subject,” and then I get to come up with what that is, and that's really fun for me. And I never study up on it before I go into it. Otherwise, it would seem fake. So it has to be at the top of my head with all the ahs and ums in there to make it sound real.

I’ve enjoyed the way that this show is consciously divorced from the world's troubles, yet manages to speak to things that are nagging at us at any given moment by helping us laugh at them. I have a specific follow-up to this question, but first I'm wondering if you think there's an element of this season that speaks to our common anxiety right now – which, in America, would be the election, I guess.

Yeah, there are a couple of jokes here and there that touch upon it. But again, with so many issues, hot-button issues, we don't harp on it. I think what the show has been very successful about is . . . on some shows in the past, they’ll have just one episode that deals with a character's homosexuality, or, you know, other hot-button issues. With us, we just throw it in the world as if it's commonplace because it is commonplace.

Our show has done a very good job of satirizing stuff that should be satirized without alienating, you know, half of the country. Which half? You could pick either, and it would work. And yes, we do have some very funny jokes this season that aren’t necessarily towards the election, but just the zeitgeist and what we're feeling.

How do you think Colin Robinson would navigate the world as it is now?

You know . . . there are a lot of energy vampires that are really getting off on making other people miserable these days. And that’s as political as I'll ever get.

I don’t see that as expressly political. They're just so much anxiety right now hanging over everything that I wonder if it would be a tasty, endless buffet for Colin.

It would be. But I wonder though. You can't just eat McDonald's every day. Sometimes you need to go to a nicer restaurant that has better produce, or go to the store and pick your own produce. When you're only eating junk food every day, it affects your body. So I think for him, I don't know if this type of energy would be good for him or not. Who knows? We'll leave that for Season 7. I'm joking.

The final season of "What We Do in the Shadows" premieres with three episodes at 10 p.m. Monday, October 21 on FX, streaming the next day on Hulu.