Mayfair Witches season three arrives this December, and fans got a first look at what’s in store, plus new glimpses of the first seasons of Kill Jackie and Yaga, as well as the fourth and final season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.

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AMC Global Media revealed that the latest season of the Anne Rice Universe series will premiere on Dec. 30 as part of a conversation tied to the season’s tease. In the panel’s last half hour, the cast of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon celebrated the legacy of The Walking Dead spinoff.

Stars and executive producers Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride took the stage with showrunner and executive producer David Zabel and executive producer Scott M. Gimple for a panel where the cast and creative team previewed the fourth and final season coming in February, including new footage and a teaser trailer.

During the rest of the two-hour panel, creatives and actors behind the new series Yaga, led by Carrie-Ann Moss, and Kill Jackie, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, shared what fans can expect. Read below for more.

Kill Jackie

Kill Jackie kicked off the two-hour panel, with executive producer and star Catherine Zeta-Jones joined by showrunner and EP Tom Butterworth and EP Peter Lawson. Based on Nick Harkaway’s novel The Price You Pay, the show follows Jackie Price, a former drug queenpin hunted by seven elite assassins. Her fierce survival instincts see her turn the tables on them, transforming their hunt into her own cat-and-mouse game.

Speaking to the adaptation process, Lawson noted that when he got his hands on it, “I just found the tone and this character unlike anything I [had] read or seen before. The book was actually written for a male protagonist, Jack Price. Obviously, we have made a few changes.”

On a project where everyone, including Zeta-Jones, agreed “no assholes” in terms of the cast and working environment, the most fun part of the process “was when I approached Catherine with the book. I said, ‘Look, you know, it’s written as a man, but there are many traits I don’t want to touch. I think you can embody all of these things. There’s so much more as a female to this. That was how we jumped off. She was very brave, and I think understood the voice and the unique tone of what we wanted to try and make it.”

According to Butterworth, the decision to gender bend the lead character “happened quite early on… and that’s when I got involved because that idea really intrigued and excited me,” he said. “What I found funniest about it was that although the [person]l in the book is nuts, he thinks everyone else in the world’s more nuts than him.”

For Zeta-Jones, the gender swap was also the most appealing part of the role for her. “At this point in my life, I want to surprise myself. I want to take myself out of my comfort zone. [It’s] a role that I’ve been desperate to play because you wouldn’t think this was a quintessential Catherine Zeta-Jones role. It’s not like Zorro’s mum,” she quipped. “It was a 360. It was a role that I could let my hair out, let it all hang out, basically, and get down and dirty.”

In terms of why she signed on as an EP, Zeta-Jones said her dual actor-producer role was based in her being “at the grassroots of the show” and the showrunner giving her “carte blanche to bring the female version through into this new reinvention of a great book.”

“When I go on to any set, I’ve never been afraid of coming to, for example, Tim Burton and saying, ‘Hey, Tim, what about this? Why don’t we try it like this in rehearsals?’ I think the more creative collaboration we can all get together in one creative space, it can only make the work better. It makes it much more fun. You’re creating as you go, and so for me, my executive producer credit — which was graciously given by our showrunner Tom and by Peter — was that I was so into it, that my contribution was beyond just coming to read what was off the page.”

The role required quite a bit of action and stunt work, which Butterworth noted “felt like that had to be really pushed and feel like it was really extreme” due to where Jackie starts the story, as an art dealer. “It was as shocking and as nuts as possible, and that after that, she would never be the same character for you. That’s why it’s pushed that far. I didn’t realize Catherine would be so good at spitting ears, though.” For Zeta-Jones, who called Jackie a rash, beautiful character who “doesn’t give a shit,” the action sequences were built from a foundation in dance. “I think without my dance background, I’d never be able to do this or have any desire to do them, because my body — I — would be physically scared.”

Yaga

As part of the panel, executive producer and star Carrie-Anne Moss, showrunner and executive producer Kat Sandler, and executive producer Mackenzie Donaldson appeared to tease what awaits fans in a series based on a spin of Baba Yaga. The series follows a private investigator who arrives in a small coastal town to investigate the disappearance of a young heir to a powerful fishery. There, he clashes with an apprehensive local detective, a charismatic university professor, and a labyrinth of enigmatic suspects, secret vibes, and ancient magic.

For showrunner Sandler, the opportunity to explore witches meant reclaiming powerful women’s narratives. “In researching witches and who were the witches who were burned, it’s often just educated women or women who could read or were living alone and were healers or midwives or doing something that was outside the norm at the time,” she said. “What we’ve really been trying to posit is a witch is just someone that society has decided they’re afraid of, and what could be scarier than an older, sexually powerful woman living alone in the woods and doing whatever the fuck she wants?”

“I think women are really reclaiming our power and reclaiming the way that stories are told about us historically by men, and I think witches are just such an epic symbol of female power and danger,” she continued before discussing the show more broadly later in the panel. ”It’s extremely fucked up, but in the best way. We’ve had people saying this whole time, ‘God, your brain is so wild. It’s so fucked up. What a fucked up thing.’ I actually don’t think a world where women are powerful and punish the invisible monsters in society is fucked up at all.”

Speaking about the show’s pitching process, Donaldson revealed that “about three years ago, a network called me — Crave — in Canada and said, ‘Do you have any half-hour dramas? Yeah, let’s shout out Crave and AMC,” Sandler said to crowd cheers. “I said, ‘What if it’s a half-hour drama?’ Except I kept that to myself, and I hung up the phone and called my best friend Kat, who I’ve been trying to get to the dark side from theater for 10 years.”

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Crave didn’t say yes right away. “A few months later, Kat had a show called Wild Woman at a festival… in Toronto, and we sent them tickets. The next day, I got the call, and they wanted to put it into development. So luckily, we never had to pitch that impossible pitch.”

In terms of why Moss came on, she shared that “I know who Baba Yaga is as a story. I’m intrigued by that story, and I have been for a long time. But it was talking to [Kat], that I have a passion for being a part of someone else’s purpose and someone else’s dream. It means a lot to me to be able to do that,” she told the NYCC crowd. “And of course, I wanted to play the character. It was a juicy, amazing character. I could hear myself in the scenes.”

In terms of the show’s challenges, including budget limitations, Moss said it provided a meaningful experience as compared to bigger franchises. “It was really unique in that we did it in a very short period of time, and it really asked all of us involved in all departments to really bring everything every day,” she said. “Sometimes you do these bigger projects that have a lot more budget, which are really fun to do too, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something very creative about everyone knowing that they’re coming here and doing everything they can to serve her vision again.”

While discussing the characterizations present in the series, Sandler noted that star Noah Reid’s Rapp may be an honest representation of men, if not the most likable. “Everyone in the show is always performing. There’s always two sides to everything, and there’s the side that you present to the public and decide that you know to be true,” she shared. “I think one of the things that was fun about making the show was that idea that characters don’t have to be likable for us to enjoy them, and none of these characters are entirely good, or entirely evil, or entirely likable, or entirely charming and wonderful. They all contain multitudes.”

As for working with the cast, Moss pointed to Clark Backo’s work and her character Carson as being one of the show’s most dynamic. “She’s a beautiful person, and she did a wonderful job playing this very complex character,” the actress said of her co-star. She also noted she has one major scene with co-star Hudson Williams. Bringing the Heated Rivalry actor into the series was a suggestion to the show’s creative team, with his casting around the time he was serving as an Olympic torchbearer after he and his team read all of the series’ scripts.

“I remember texting him, and he was like, ‘Sorry, it’s really bumpy in Italy. I was like, ‘Are you on the way to carry the torch for the Olympics?’” Sadlar recalled. “I think it was in February that we cast him, and it had been suggested that we offer him one of these parts. The parts had always been split into two, and they were always meant to be lookalikes. I said, why not offer him both? It’s a bit more of a fun challenge for him to get to play. I wrote him another letter, just like I’d written Carrie-Anne. We had a meeting, and he signed on.”

Mayfair Witches: Salem Coven

During the third portion of the panel, the creative team teased how Salem and the books, among other things, will weave together in the Anne Rise Universe entry’s third season. The panel, which featured cast members Alexandra Daddario, Harry Hamlin, Tongayi Chirisa, Betsy Brandt and Eliza Scanlen, as well as co-showrunners and executive producers Esta Spalding and Tom Schnauz, and EP Mark Johnson, kicked off by teasing how the books will take viewers to another location and evolve audiences’ relationship to what’s on the page.

For the team, it’s “really inspired by the books. There’s still all of our beloved characters, and we meet some new Mayfairers this season who are very much inspired by the books, but we’re not working off of exact story from the books anymore,” said Spalding. Added Schnauz: “I think there was just an urge to shake it up and do something different, and that’s why getting out of New Orleans and going to Salem felt like the right move to do under these circumstances.”

Spalding notes that while Anne Rice’s novels don’t quite relocate the family of witches to Salem as the show does, “I think there’s a bunch of mentions of Salem.”

“The interesting thing about Salem is that you know the people were innocent; they weren’t witches. So what we find interesting about Salem is that we keep imagining that there were a bunch of witches there who were not caught, but who were very unhappy about what was happening in 1693, and that Salem and our Salem and our characters come into that story of those witches and their lineage,” she added about the upcoming season.

For Johnson, “We sort of embrace the irony that Salem basically lives on the commercialization of witches. Of course, they don’t exist. It’s all make-believe, and then we presuppose — maybe not so fast. Maybe they actually are there, embedded.”

In terms of where Rowan will be coming out of the events of season two, “We felt like we wanted to see her much more badass than she’d ever been before. One of the ways that she could be her great witchy self and powerful, and as you said, be funnier and looser, was to have more people she could play off of. So I think bringing in the character of Jessica, who is a witch who doesn’t know that she’s trapped in Salem — she’s grown up there, she just thinks that’s where she lives, and she hasn’t ever left — and having somebody who Alex could play off of who’s really comedic and full of heart, let Rowan be much, much more commanding and sometimes make the wrong decision.”

For Daddario, Rowan’s shifts in season three reflect how the character changes as she ages. “I just know from my own life, having a kid and turning 40, I’m like, let’s just see what happens now. ‘What is this shit? What’s going on?” she said. “So I got to put a little bit of that into the character, and I think that’s where she is. She’s been dealing with this for a long time, and now she’s like, ‘What is this now? You’re telling me I’m trapped here. I’m getting out of here, and then you hit all these roadblocks and go down this amazing adventure.’”

The panel also discussed how Hamlin’s Cortland, now possessed by Julian, will change going into season two. “The operative phrase is batshit crazy. As Julian Mayfair, I get to make out with my mother,” Hamlin said to laughs. “Thank you Tom and Esther for writing this beautiful character that I get to play. The thing about Anne Rice is that people can come back to life, and then they can have it off with their mother.”

As for how Hamlin specifically played the role differently, “What these guys brought to this new season, to season three, we didn’t really have the same vibe in season two. But whatever you brought, I went with that. I didn’t want to keep too much from season two. I wanted to embrace batshit crazy.”

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