The Lesser Dead - The Lesser Dead - Bonus Episode - Minnie Driver as Margaret and Exploring the Loops

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Lesser Dead, featuring the team of directors, producers, and writers who helped create the series. In this episode, we hear from Minnie Driver about her role as Margaret McMannis. We’ll also explore one of the most prominent locations in the series, “The Loops” of NYC. 

And now for a behind the scenes look at the making of the lesser dead, featuring the team of directors, producers, and writers who helped create the series. Welcome to the loops, the underground community of New York City's vampires, and every town needs its own leader. I'd never played a character like this before, you know, an ancient matriarchal vampire, you know, sort of the queen of a community of vampires, just trying to exist. Beneath the subway system in New York in the middle of the night. Mini-driver plays Margaret, the matriarch of the loops.

You take the Lord's name and vein at your paramist aboutu-chi. Great are his instruments and we are tokens of his loops. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we've all had this talk, aren't you? Parap, fan out, and find out. And if you can't handle it, pack up and get out. I'm in the mood to cut turf this week, and if I can cut off a dangerous head, faith, and I'll take a useless one. I'm personally enamored with Margaret just because she is so strong and yet so vulnerable at the same time as such so many issues that she's grappling

with but also is such a force of nature. Margaret's band in the loops is composed of basically people who have been rejected. That's Christopher Bueman, author of The Lessor Dead. They're not very wealthy individuals. I wanted to explore, you know, sort of low rent vampires. Her band of vampires, they're just trying to get along in the world and not kill people, not do too much damage, but when they're vampires who are even worse than they are. Like that's really funny and interesting and cool. He was such an important tool for the lesser dead and the storytelling of the lesser dead.

It cuts through and the live-ins a certain amount of the inherent darkness, both literal and figurative darkness of the story. You are really finding some humanity and some humorous moments within elements that are otherwise pretty hard to bear. You know, Joseph, there's nights I think you might be salvageable. And there's nights I'm convinced you're an Egypt right down to your bones. Can you guess which kind of item I have in now? I have one, I'll tell you something.

The 70s in New York, it was a time of great change and de-crepitude and a little bit of lawlessness. For Mark Stern, the executive producer, establishing the world of the lesser dead was paramount. What do those environments sound like? What does the 1970s subway sound like versus a 2023 Subway. Things like a phone booth and that you don't really have a New York anymore. The sliding door of a phone booth. All those elements that I think were very important, a police siren in the 70s versus

today. So the street, New York Street stuff took a long time to dial, because there are so many different elements of that that are really important to get right. And then we had a New York Street sound from 1935 for the flashbacks, which was a whole other thing of cobblestones and different kinds of car engines and horns and you know so it was really it was fun and also really challenging to kind of get all that right. It wasn't just the background sound effects the team needed to get right to bring the lesser dead to life so it kind of makes you want to ask how can a vampire be moral or ethical?

That's Josh Mauer, executive producer of The Lessor Dead. His characters are monsters, and yet in many ways, they have a higher moral standard than a human being would. You have this character of this teenage vampire who's half Jewish, who is torn in a very shi- experience way. He is a youthful, handsome, disco-loving, vampire god. At the same time, he's riddled with guilt that in order to achieve what he got is the loss of his family. And so his entire story, really the undercurrent, the bedrock, the foundation of Joy Peacock's story, is looking for that family that he lost.

His irresponsible urges can get him into trouble and characters like Margaret and Spekgo and never all hope that someday Joey will finally grow up and be able to keep some of his cravings at bay. I know, bros.