a completed, efficient work. With a television series, it's almost like starting a conversation with the audience in a way, you see what is best for the story and what they are most responding to. So, I also think that we leaned into that element, we were touching a chord that had never been touched before. And it was going nuts on things like social media, and we were like, "Okay. We are really onto something with that. Let's go all-in!"
Rob: And you have actors who have done other things, especially cult actors that you chose, and it is just a perfect casting, I mean, it's absolutely perfect,
Adam: Well, it was a good casting, and things really changed when we got Lucy Lawless, and we'll talk about her in a second. On the one hand, you want to make the show work and you want audiences to appeal to an unknown. But at the same time, we wanted known actors but not too well. Our model was
something like "The Sopranos" where you didn't know most of these actors, even someone like Gandolfini who was sort of known, but not as a leading man. The point being, you couldn't base the show on who was in it. You see a certain actor, especially if they're a star, you know that they're going to be okay, you know they're going to be good or bad, and we wanted to avoid that. But at the same time, we did get very lucky. We got Janet Montgomery who had done one American show and had kind of a fake Jersey accent. But she was an accomplished actress, and she has just flowered in that role, she's incredible as Mary Sibley. Someone like Shane, Shane West had been an actor since he was a kid, but never played anyone as dark as John Alden. Someone like Seth who plays Cotton Mather, is really one of the best actors of our generation. I keep thinking he is going to get stolen from us at any moment to have an entire show wrapped around him because he's so good. But he also brought with him an interesting genre audience who loved him in "Fringe", so we really captured a cult audience, people who knew Shane from La Femme Nikita", and of course, Lucy does that for thousands.
Rob: Let's talk about some of the mystical items on the show. Where did the inspiration for the Mallum come from? My fiance and I have a theory, and hear me out. I was thinking that it represented fruit from the "Tree Of Life".
Adam: There is no doubt that you tapped into something there! When I was doing my reading, it hadn't really been mentioned until sometime in the
answer is yes, it was definitely at the forefront the intention, but you can't hang on something like witchcraft which had been used in a funny way, a sort of war on women in our culture. But, we certainly weren't going for the "politically correct" point of view where there were women who were wrongly accused, and were slaughtered for it. I kind of wanted to use that as more of a metaphor for witchcraft. But at the heart of it, we men grew up, I'm a father with a son and a daughter who are still young, but they loved this kind of stuff. I don't allow them to watch "Salem", it's a little too hardcore, but i'm sure they will someday. But, they love movies, they love comics, they love all kinds of stories with male anti-heroes, superheroes and villains with weird neuroses, like gangsters, guys like in "The Godfather", of course, later in "The Sopranos", the men that you would see in a Scorsese film. Gunfighters in the old western movies that I grew up with. Basically our culture has always had male heroes like that, both the villains and the good guys being complicated and neurotic in some ways, and yes, being filled with these gifts that are also curses. But very rarely do
you see a woman like that. So it was something that hadn't really been done, and especially not with all of the characters being shown that way, so it was certainly an intention, and at the same time it was also clear that it would really be one of the few fun things of working on television. When you make a movie, by the time everyone has seen it, you're done! It's a one-off. You may make sequels years later, but a film isn't received as