Jacob Batalon and the rest of the cast of SYFY’s new horror-comedy Reginald The Vampire took the stage at New York Comic Con today, showing off a teaser for the series—which premiered earlier this week—and talking about the twists and turns the audience can expect from the rest of its (surprisingly gory!) first season.
The most interesting stuff, not surprisingly, came from Batalon himself, with the Spider-Man co-star discussing the ways his title character’s nice guy image—a pretty obvious extension of the work that Batalon has been dong for years at this point in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—might change as the show goes on. (This is, after all, a series in which its main character has a compulsion to eat people.) Among other things, he joked about how audience feelings for the character might change after “Episode 9,” while also noting that the character “does do things in his own weird, conventional way. He’s definitely going to figure out how to hunt because hunting is not his gig.”
Meanwhile, actor Savannah Basley talked about her character Angela, an old accomplice of Mandela Van Peebles’ Maurice, the nice-guy vampire who serves as Reginald’s mentor. “I think Angela likes to think that she’s very intelligent and a really good manipulator,” Basley noted of the character, who was said to harken back to a darker past of the now-friendly Maurice. “So I think she believes that she’s going to be able to just go into the situation and just handle it and if not handle it, manipulate the situation.”
Series showrunner Harley Peyton also talked about trying to avoid the standard vampire clichés, a trait inherited from the original Fat Vampire books on which the show is based. “We don’t want that to be magical,” director Jeremiah Chechik said about the show’s treatment of the undead. “They walk and talk among us.”
Ultimately, though, Peyton made it clear why Reginald is a different sort of vampire show from the typical ilk: “I can say in two words, and that’s Jacob Batalon.”
Reginald The Vampire airs on Wednesdays on Syfy.