On a recent evening, 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.) On-screen, he plays blandness with such intensity that he makes apparent normalcy seem very, very weird.
Proksch — who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, TV writer Amelie Gillette — was in town to promote the comedy’s sixth and final season — now airing Mondays on FX and streaming on Hulu — at New York’s Comic Con.
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.
In college, at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, he majored in media ethics. After graduation, he spent years in graduate school — first for architecture, then teaching, then American studies. He never completed any program.
In his late 20s, he found himself back in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, working temp gigs and wondering what to do with himself. He couldn’t imagine an office job.
“The idea of that being the mark I leave out in the world, it always caused anxiety in me,” he said. But he couldn’t imagine anything else.
Proksch had never studied acting, never taken an improv class or done even a minute of stand-up. Still, he had always loved comedy. As a child with his older brothers and later as a teenager with his friends, he’d enjoyed gently pranking ordinary people, asking them weird questions, getting hired for a job and then almost immediately fired, recording the whole thing.
In his early 30s, suddenly unemployed, he and some friends had an idea. Proksch would invent a character, Kenny Strasser, or K-Strass, a yo-yo master, and get himself booked onto local morning shows. Proksch had studied these shows for his media ethics degree.
“They say it’s news, but it’s really not,” he said.
In 2010, he sent out 12 news releases and received 10 offers. Proksch couldn’t actually yo-yo. And so the appearances, in which Proksch never breaks character, are a study in absurdist comedy.
“I never thought I would be able to parlay it into a career,” Proksch said, as his ball fell into a water hazard. (An admitted germophobe, he took quite some time to fish it out.) “It was solely to make my friends laugh.”
But the videos, uploaded to YouTube, immediately caught the attention of several writers of the hit NBC sitcom “The Office.” Gillette, his future wife, was also a writer on the show and she tracked him down via a mutual friend at the satirical news site The Onion. Proksch was flown out to Los Angeles for a meeting and was soon hired onto the show in a recurring role as Nate, the office handyman.
Those early years in Los Angeles were financially precarious. (He lived paycheck to paycheck, sharing an apartment with two strangers; his car was often towed.) But he secured solid representation and made some extra money developing and selling a few comedy shows that never quite went to series. There was an arc on “Better Call Saul” and a semiregular gig on “On Cinema,” a comedy web series created by comedians Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington.
Those appearances delighted Paul Simms, the showrunner of “What We Do in the Shadows.” He thought Proksch would be ideal for Colin, a character who originally was intended only for the pilot. Proksch was perfect, and Colin stuck around.
Colin, Proksch said, is an amalgamation of every person who fascinated him during his years as a temp, the energy vampires in any office. Colin’s voice isn’t so different from Proksch’s, and neither is his posture, although on camera Proksch tends to round his shoulders and stick out his gut. If Proksch is more animated in real life, more self- effacing, he also has his own arguably banal set of interests: wine, jazz, old movies. (“When he starts talking to me about wine, I do feel like I’m in the presence of Colin Robinson,” Simms told me.)
Colin is by definition the most boring character on the show, and Proksch has sometimes struggled with playing someone so unlikable.
“You do worry about it,” he said. “I didn’t want him to become Screech or Urkel.”
He has cheered some of the more outré plotlines, like Colin’s gory death and subsequent resurrection as an infant. (In Season 4, Proksch played the role via green screen, with his head digitally grafted onto the body of a child actor.) In the final season, Colin, again an adult, searches for a friend, someone he loves too much to drain.
If Proksch is grateful for his time on “Shadows” — “How insanely lucky to be on a show that’s considered good,” he said — he is also ready to seal it into its coffin. He won’t miss filming in the cold Toronto winters or the night shoots that would often end as the sun was rising. He isn’t sure what he’ll do next. He is developing a few projects, and he’s open to more roles, which will probably resemble ones he has played before.
“I am a huge fan of people that kind of do just one thing but with very slight variations,” he said, mentioning Don Knotts and W.C. Fields.
He was at the 18th hole, which was designed to look like a subway car. If his game had started strong, it ended weak, with a score of 5 on a par 2. It felt very Colin Robinson, as did his review of the haunted mini-golf experience.
“Very fun yet scary,” Proksch said, his voice perfectly flat. “It’s definitely living up to the hype.”