Breaking Down ‘Mayfair Witches’ Best Episode Yet: Ted Levine’s Julien, That Dollhouse & More

Rowan, this is what happens when you make, in the words of Julien Mayfair, “a rash decision based on fear and limited information”!

In this week’s utterly entrancing episode of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, our determined designee (Alexandra Daddario) got yet another reason to distrust every man in her bloodline. And honestly, she should have seen it coming. Same with psychic cousin Moira (Alyssa Jirrels)! But no, Rowan had to learn it the hard way, once again. After imbibing some magical elixir at the end of last week’s episode that allowed her to “enter” the victrola of the late Julien Mayfair (Ted Levine), she finally came face-to-face with the notorious Mayfair patriarch, whom she hoped would advise her on how to capture the missing Lasher (Jack Huston).

Skip Bolen / AMC

What she got, however, was hoodwinked! As soon as she realized that Julien was as much an S.O.B. as his son Cortland (Harry Hamlin), Rowan’s spidey senses kicked in and she promptly called for Moira to pull her back to the land of the living. However, only half of her spirit went home; the other half, Julien explains, was trapped in his ethereal realm and would likely die within the next 40 minutes.

Back in reality, semi-Rowan clued in the others — Moira, Cortland, and Dolly Jean (Charlayne Woodard) — that Julien’s whole vibe was giving “a pub in Scotland,” triggering Cortland’s recollections that the family first came from Donnelaith. What he didn’t remember was more unsettling: Moira reads his mind and picks up that he’d visited Scotland as a child despite him not having any memory of it. Convinced his father has messed with his head (as if that weren’t clear already!), Cortland runs off to find Julien’s spells to see what else dear old dead dad has done to him, leading to some of Hamlin’s most entertaining work of the season so far.

Skip Bolen / AMC

Admitting that the plan was to give Cortland “a kind of arc all season of looking at what he had done and trying to understand the root of his actions in the trauma of his past,” Spalding adds that “it becomes about his father… Julien’s an incredible character in the book.”

Skip Bolen / AMC

Thanks to Levine, he’s also an incredible addition to the show. “You got to find an actor who can be this character. And I’ve worked with Ted Levine on a couple other things and it was like, ‘Oh, who else could do this but him?’ He’s so extraordinary. We were so lucky to have him,” Spalding raves. “Those scenes — and Harry will tell you, maybe he’s already told you — they had such a good time.”

Adding to the hour’s allure is the way it all plays out. While semi-Rowan struggles to stay lucid in reality, her captive other half is engaging Julien in a quid-pro-quo befitting the Silence of the Lambs star Levine, who devours the scenery explaining how her great-grandmother Marguerite was the one who taught him all about astrology, runes, how to absorb power from the cycles of the planets and to “honor the original deities,” the Taltos. He also explains that her own possible escape depends on whether she can be pulled back home by her weakening split self, whom they are able to observe via a dollhouse replica of Dolly Jean’s home in New Orleans.

Skip Bolen / AMC

“The way it was shot, we had the little house, it was so complicated,” recalls Daddario, who thankfully had a magic trick to keeping it all straight. “We have a script supervisor named Nick [DiRosa], and he’s honestly the most unique script supervisor I had ever worked with in my entire career,” she says. “I’m not sure that the show could float without him, he is so Type-A about keeping track of this complicated, to say the least, storyline. He has charts and notes and all this stuff, and every two seconds, there’d be someone, a director, me, a producer, yelling ‘Nick! Nick! Nick!,’ and he’d come over and be like, ‘This [bit] is Julien with Cortland,’ and he’d explain everything that was going on because we would get confused!”

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On Set of 'Mayfair Witches' With 'Buddy Cop' Duo, Alexandra Daddario and Alyssa Jirrels

Visually, the dollhouse is a knockout, witch-worthy effect — like being stuck in a snow globe from Hell — but clearly no easy ask on the production side. “I think when we pitched it in the writer’s room and talked about it there, nobody had any idea what we were asking of our VFX team,” Spalding notes. “That dollhouse took months and months and months to design. Every single room had a green screen in it, we had to shoot every single scene with the dollhouse POV, so not only shoot it as a scene, but also then shoot it with the walls pulled, as if two people were looking in.”

“We wanted to explore the different parts of Rowan,” she continues of dividing her leading lady among the real world and the real weird. “We wanted to bring her together with [Ben Feldman] romantically but we also needed this jeopardy with Julien as the villain. It felt like, somehow, she needed to be in two stories. And that became this idea of Julien playing a game with her and we could see the chess moves between them and so on.”

“Our VFX team had never done anything like it; this was just a real leap of faith to do it,” Spalding offers. “It was every department pulling together, having multiple conversations while we were also planning to go to Scotland and to Ireland after that. So what was asked of this crew and these department heads is just incredible. And our director, Sarah O’Gorman, pulled it off with aplomb. She was just absolutely fantastic.”

Mayfair Witches, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming Sundays on AMC+

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