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This story contains spoilers for “What Rough Beast,” the Season 1 finale of “Mayfair Witches,” now streaming on AMC+. In the season premiere of AMC’s “Mayfair Witches,” Rowan Fielding (Alexandra Daddario) was a San Francisco-dwelling neurosurgeon too preoccupied with her own self-destructive tendencies to care about a world of magic.[ By Sunday’s season finale, she is a powerful witch, an ascending family matriarch and –– in the biggest turn of events –– a new mother to a baby she conceived days prior that is now possessed by her demonic lover.
“Mayfair Witches” is the second series in AMC’s Immortal Universe, an interconnected world of stories conjured from the acquired works of Anne Rice. It follows last fall’s “Interview With the Vampire,” which executive producer Mark Johnson tells Variety will begin shooting its second season in April in Europe. The two series won’t be alone in the universe for long.“Anne Rice has given us this plethora of characters and situations and worlds, so I don’t see any end to what we can explore right now,” Johnson says. “Mayfair Witches” spent its first season giving Rowan a crash-course in her family lineage, a birthright she learns comes with its own seductive leech of a demon named Lasher (Jack Huston). As the world’s worst family heirloom, Lasher is part of a centuries-old prophecy that foretells how, as the 13th Mayfair designee, Rowan will serve as the gateway for Lasher to cross over into the real world.
In the finale, that gateway is the baby she conceived with Cip (Tongayi Chirisa), a pregnancy put into hyperdrive when Lasher seduces Rowan into embracing her powers and consummating their dark bond. Soon, Rowan is stranded in a liminal space, and left to wander through the generations of trauma on her family tree until she reaches the modern day where the first Mayfair witch helps her give birth about eight and a half months early.Rowan initially rejects her offspring/lover, but ultimately protects him from Cortland (Harry Hamlin), who was revealed to be her father through rape; and Cip, who planned to take the baby to his bosses at the nefarious Talamasca agency –– at least that’s what he told them. (Yes, this is all as bonkers and campy as it sounds.)
With the prophecy fulfilled, Rowan will step defiantly into a new realm of power in Season 2, which has already been ordered by AMC. As the Immortal Universe begins to take shape, Johnson, along with “Mayfair Witches” co-creators Esta Spalding and Michelle Ashford, spoke with Variety about Rowan’s grasp on motherhood, whether the now-fulfilled prophecy will require recasting Lasher and what it all means for the Immortal Universe.
