Mark Proksch, of ‘What We Do in the Shadows,’ Gets Into the Swing of It
As an “energy vampire,” the comic actor has been the most relatable menace in the FX comedy, which begins its final season.On a recent evening, the actor Mark Proksch watched as a pirate ghost cavorted on a video monitor. “I love their idea of what counts as haunted,” he said.Proksch, 46, a star of the FX supernatural comedy “What We Do in the Shadows,” knows a thing or two about haunting. He plays Colin Robinson, a vampire who shares a crumbling Staten Island mansion with three undead roommates and one human minion. Unlike his friends, Colin is a day walker, an energy vampire who feeds off others, mostly by droning on about zoning ordinances or car insurance. (Proksch, who has a gift for tedium, mostly improvises these speeches.) Onscreen, he plays blandness with such intensity that he makes apparent normalcy seem very, very weird.Proksch, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the TV writer Amelie Gillette, was in town to promote the comedy’s sixth and final season at New York’s Comic Con. (The first three episodes premiere Monday on FX and Tuesday on Hulu.)On a free night, he had come to the home of the pirate ghost, Shipwrecked, an ostensibly eerie mini-golf course in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. At the first hole, he hefted his club and swung at his bright green ball. A hole in one.“Well, that was thrilling,” he said dryly.Raised in a small city in Wisconsin, Proksch never planned on a career in performance. (As a child, he appeared in a community theater production of “The Music Man”; he had no lines.) Pale and unassuming, he has a way of blending into the background of any given room. “It’s that Midwestern charisma,” he joked.On the fourth hole, his ball veered around a tropical plant then was caught by a sand trap. “There’s a reason I haven’t done this in 20 years,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
