Mayfair Witches showrunners on saving Rowan's father reveal for the finale — and what could be coming in season 2

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Mayfair Witches season 1, episode 8.

In the season finale of Mayfair Witches, Dr. Rowan Fielding (Alexandra Daddario) gives birth to her child and opens a portal, discovers that Cortland Mayfair (Harry Hamlin) is her real father, and embraces her demon lover, Lasher (Jack Huston). Showrunners and executive producers Esta Spalding and Michelle Ashford say she's just getting started.

With her newborn baby in hand, Rowan's final words of the season cut deep. "You can't control me," she proclaims as a bolt of lightning strikes down, almost hitting Ciprien (Tongayi Chirisa). She walks away as thunder roars, a storm of her anger and newfound freedom foreshadowing what's to come in season 2.

Spalding and Ashford spoke with EW about what fans can expect from season 2, the 'power' triangle between Rowan, Ciprien, and Lasher, and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you have a moment from the finale that stands out to you most, whether it was filming it or something you're most excited for fans to see?

ESTA SPALDING: I was so thrilled to be able to nod to all of those generations of Mayfair women, to see some of those rooms and have a sense of Deborah's room in Amsterdam or the room in Haiti, just Julian's attic. All of these different spaces and the generations that came in. And of course we cut away from it. So we're hopefully implying there are others, we couldn't see them all. But to me it was thrilling that we got to send Rowan on an adventure to really understand her ancestral line and the place where all her knowledge came from. That was a real thrill.

MICHELLE ASHFORD: I think it was absolutely thrilling to see where she landed with that. It's very powerful when she's standing there with her newborn who's already growing and just owning her power, it's very electrifying. It felt like a real culmination of eight episodes of her dancing around this thing. "What is it? Who am I?" And then all of a sudden she seems to really land in a very powerful way. I love that.

Which scene from the finale was the hardest to film?

SPALDING: It's all a kind of fever dream, which you can probably tell from the finale. We were filming in New Orleans in August. It was incredibly hot. There were weather warnings, lightning, and rain most days. And so strangely some of the scenes that seem the calmest, like the very final scene outside of the mausoleum, were incredibly hard to shoot just because of the heat, because of the remoteness of the location and so on. So it's not actually the things that look more terrifying, it was just some of the days that we had to take a break because of the weather.

It's revealed in the finale that Cortland is Rowan's biological father. Why was it important to you to save that reveal for the finale?

SPALDING: The beginning of this story is not just Rowan discovering her powers, but also we see Rowan's birth in the pilot. And to really save and bookend that origin story at the end of the season and to have the story of Rowan's birth be a part of the fulfillment of this prophecy, which is what the finale is about, it just felt like a great shape for the end. We [wanted to] land all those things at once, to understand who that masked man was with Deirdre in the pilot and why that was all about something Cortland was doing to make this prophecy come to fruition.

ASHFORD: It's also really fun to take a character... When it's played by an actor like Harry [Hamlin] who you immediately love, right? And he's played as this kind of guy who's into seduction and all the material wealth that that family has to offer. It's really interesting to take a character like that and realize, "Oh, wow, he is bad news."

SPALDING: You think Carlotta's horrible and he's fun and then you realize what Carlotta was protecting her from a little bit.

What do you have to say about the debate over Ciprien vs. Lasher?

SPALDING: I mean, as much as we debated it, we want everyone else to debate it, too. There were a lot of people who thought about it in the writer's room as a romantic triangle. I always thought about it as a power triangle. Lasher is saying to her: Fulfill your power, take it, own it. You're this destructive, creative, incredible being and Cip is saying you have this amazing power, control it, control it, control it. And she's torn between those two versions of her power. And ultimately she reaches for the version that Lasher offers. But we know there's gonna be a cost to it because Lasher is not all good. So, to me, it was always about Rowan and who she was much more than it was about either of the two men.

ASHFORD: And to break free from defining her by her romantic relationships, which is what happens by the end. She's not gonna be with one guy or the other, she's gonna go her own path. So that seemed an important story to tell rather than just what dude is she gonna end up with?

SPALDING: Although it's really fun to watch people go back and forth.

ASHFORD: Yes, yes, they do. They get very invested.

The show is renewed for season 2. What can fans look forward to seeing in the upcoming season?

SPALDING: This is the moment where we should pick up the very heavy Lasher [the second book in Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches series] and say this is the teaser. We've gone to the second book and again, we have only so many episodes, [so] we're gonna mine it for the wonders, riches, and strangeness that is there. That's kind of really the tease more than anything. There's a whole section in the book where Rowan is in Europe and there's some stuff in Scotland and there's a bunch of generations in Scotland. Of course, we touched on Scotland in this season, but that has been really exciting to think about for the second season.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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