Spoilers for American Horror Story: Hotel are below, so keep your eyes walled up inside an empty wing of the hotel if you’re not caught up.
With only three episodes left, American Horror Story: Hotel is in the process of winding down the many different plotlines that have been introduced over the past ten weeks. (Watching Housekeeper Hazel go nuts over her new washer/dryer combo was priceless.) And while there were obviously some people out there curious about who the Ten Commandments Killer was, and what the Addiction Demon will get into next, one of this season’s biggest mysteries started up before it even started: why were so many similar looking actors cast? Thankfully, that question was (mostly) answered in Wednesday night’s episode.
Just before that crazy, bullet-heavy cliffhanger, and just after Matt Bomer got down with his bad self to “Hotline Bling,” Countess and Donovan were having a pretty heavy conversation that revolved around Donovan having murdered her former-and-sorta-present lover Rudolph Valentino (as played by Finn Wittrock). And it’s here she revealed that because Valentino is the one who changed her, she spent the years after his disappearance trying to create other undead lovers in his image. Aha!
When American Horror Story: Hotel was in the casting stages, people were quite curious about why so many handsome white dudes were being cast; enough so that it turned into a meme. It was implied that viewers would find out why this intentional decision was made, and now we know that it was all because Countess was trying to eke happiness out of resemblances, rather than the men themselves. Just like a weird immortal vampire-ish thing would do.
Now, this explanation technically only explains why Bomer, Wittrock and Cheyenne Jackson were cast, since Countess didn’t get freaky with Wes Bentley and Max Greenfield. But it also answers why Wittrock was tasked with playing both Valentino and the pretentious male model Tristan Duffy. One would think that her finding someone that looks EXACTLY like her former lover, down to his fingerprints, would have meant she’d stop looking elsewhere. But he was a serious douche, so it’s understandable that she brushed him off. Well, she actually slit his throat after he and Liz fell for each other, but you get what I mean.
This also doesn’t quite explain why Countess started up a relationship with Angela Bassett’s Ramona Royale, since Bassett looks literally nothing like a white guy. But no one really needs an excuse for being wooed by Bassett.
American Horror Story: Hotel will return to FX for its final episodes on Wednesday, January 6.
