Glitch and Dangerous Liaisons alum Nicholas Denton says his new show Talamasca: The Secret Order grounds in reality the supernatural world that horror icon Anne Rice created.

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Premiering Sunday on AMC and AMC+, the contemporary drama follows the shadowy organization that monitors the actions of immortal creatures such as those found in Rice's Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches novels, which have inspired TV series of their own.

Denton plays Talamasca investigator Guy, Elizabeth McGovern plays his supervisor Helen and William Fichtner plays the vampire Jasper. John Lee Hancock and Mark Lafferty are co-showrunners, while Mark Johnson serves as executive producer.

"I did want to come at it from a kind of a newer place, a different place. And I think that because Guy's an original character, I wanted him to have his own kind of voice," Denton said at a recent New York Comic Con press conference.

"I'd seen the series, I've seen the films, I hadn't necessarily read all of it, but I did realize that I was kind of barking up the wrong tree, if I was going to take THAT perspective. I wanted to go the spy route with Guy," Denton said. "We are grounding this in a reality that is spy with vampiric and immortal qualities to it."

Denton also enjoyed exploring a world filled with characters who weren't clear-cut heroes or villains.

"What I liked and wanted to honor about Anne Rice, as well, was essentially having these morally ambiguous characters and playing into that with Guy and his sort of skepticism, his journey and making sure that he wasn't kind of one-note. He made his own decisions and had his own intentions at the forefront of his mission," he said.

"You see this side to all of the characters," he added. "They have their own kind of needs and their own wants in this world. ... The characters felt so fleshed out."

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Johnson noted that, although there is no book that focuses directly on the Talamasca, Rice referenced this clandestine, "extremely well funded" group in many of her works.

"Its functionaries are meant to keep tabs on the other-worldly goings-on in our universe, but not interfere," he said. "That's the basis of it, but OK, so what's the story? I realized that it fit very well into the spy genre."

Johnson said he then enlisted the help of Hancock to crack the story.

"So, I called him up and as soon as I said, 'Anne Rice,' I think he thought I made a mis-dial and then we talked about it and we, through my partner, Tom Williams, found a way to seduce him," Johnson said.

Hancock described working on a project that comes with an enthusiastic built-in fan-base both a blessing and a curse.

"There wasn't great, great, great detail given to the organization or institution, whatever you want to call it," he said.

"I looked at that as an opportunity to, hopefully, fill that out with the questions that I had about the Talamasca when I had read everything that Anne had written about it," he added.

"I had a lot of basic questions: Do they hide in plain sight? What do their offices look like? These mother houses, do they have a sign? Can you ring the bell and go in? How do they recruit? What do they pay? How are they funded? Do they have vacation? Do they have an HR department? I had a million questions."