Colin Robinson is that guy, coffee cup in hand, lurking on the periphery of your office cubicle, waiting patiently to trap you in a morass of time-sucking, aimless conversation.
But Colin is slightly different . . . in a deadly kind of way. He’s the bespectacled, sweater-wearing, balding Energy Vampire on “What We Do in the Shadows,” a nondescript “day walker” who feeds off other people’s energy — literally boring them into a coma.
“I worked in offices until I was in my early 30s in various temp jobs and I completely relate to this type of character — people you’re trying to avoid all day,” says Mark Proksch, who plays Colin on the FX vampire mockumentary set in Staten Island. “There were two people I kind of stole a little bit from [for Colin] when I was living in Oakland and temping in the marketing department of a bank. You would work really hard, and I almost perfected it, at looking busy just to avoid them. Otherwise you would get stuck in either a political discussion or hear about their health issues over the weekend. And at all costs you wanted to avoid that — otherwise you were done for the day.”
‘You would work really hard, and I almost perfected it, at looking busy just to avoid them.’
Proksch, 40, has carved a unique niche with offbeat TV roles including Nate Nickerson, Dwight’s (Rainn Wilson) personal assistant on “The Office” and Daniel Wormald, the arrogant baseball-card collector with the tricked-out car on “Better Call Saul” who got into trouble with drug dealers.
“I’m a character actor. I don’t fool myself into thinking I should be the lead, not with my doughy frame and bald head,” he says. “The arrogant idiot is my favorite type of character, like Daniel on ‘Better Call Saul’ and, to some extent, Nate on ‘The Office,’ people who think they have the capacity for higher thinking and deep thought but really don’t, so they have this bravado — and when it comes down to it they’re really just idiots. With Colin it’s a little bit of the opposite. He’s still playing that character but he actually has a lot of power.”
The centuries-old Colin shares a house in Staten Island with blood-sucking vampires Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Nandor (Kayvan Novak), as well as Guillermo (Harvey Guillen), Nandor’s hapless vampire-in-training. Their intention to conquer all of New York has been confined to a block-and-a-half (give or take) of Staten Island and waylaid by the roommates’ bickering, snarky werewolves and the city’s soul-crushing bureaucracy.
“I think the arc for Colin is how he interacts with his roommates — what’s that relationship and does it build?” says Proksch. “I feel like he wants to be friends with people but he can’t, because he literally kills them as he’s talking to them. Being an Energy Vampire is a curse because he can’t even have friends. Colin can drain the bloodsucking vampires’ energy as well. It’s an interesting take on the roommate comedy.”
Thus far, viewers have yet to see where Colin works, or what his job entails. “I feel like they want to keep that vague because they want everyone to feel like it’s their office when they’re watching the show,” Proksch says. “I don’t know if they’ll expand on what Colin’s exact job is, but I think that could be fun. We haven’t seen him kill anyone, but I would hate to be the first one he does kill with boredom.
“That would be an awful way to go,” he says, “though we’ve all pretty much been there at times.”
