UNDEAD AGAIN
Twenty years after first setting foot in Sunnydale, the cast and creator of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ head back to the Hellmouth
Twenty years later, the cast and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer head back to the Hellmouth.
You know it has been a good party when Joss Whedon dances. As the sun begins to set on this warm March day in Los Angeles, the Avengers director pops some champagne and can’t help but groove a bit around Milk Studios. He has reason to be happy: his most beloved creation, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and WHO has gathered the cast for their first joint interview and photo shoot in more than a decade. “This is surreal,” says Whedon. “For the most part, this is like a high-school reunion, but much worse because they all still look really great. I was hoping some of them would puff out a bit. But that did not take place.”
In between shots, the actors share photos of their kids with castmates and catch up on life post-sunnydale. “I make an excellent macaroni casserole if anyone’s interested in doing a potluck,” jokes Seth Green, who played dry-humoured musician (and werewolf) Oz. And like most high-school reunions, amid all the fun, a sense of reflection washes over the participants. “It was the role of a lifetime,” says Alyson Hannigan, who played Willow. “I met the love of my life [co-star Alexis Denisof, who played timid Watcher Wesley]. And just to get to go to work every day and have Joss sort of train me—i’ll never have a better experience than that.” But it’s the show’s star Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played the title role from 1997 to 2003, who encapsulates the moment they’re all experiencing: “I’m so incredibly proud of what we all created. Sometimes you need distance to really understand the gravitas of that. I appreciate everything about that job. As an actor, all you ever want to do is leave your mark—you want to do something that affects people.”
Into every generation a Slayer is born and with her, a TV series that pierces pop culture like a stake through the heart. Over the course of its seven-season run, Buffy garnered one of the most loyal fandoms in television
history, thanks to its unlikely but oddly seamless blend of genres—horror! Comedy! Teen soap! Tragedy! Musical!—and one of the most unique heroines ever seen onscreen. The series followed bloodsucker-hunter Buffy Summers as she navigated the horrors of Sunnydale High, both real (being the new kid, finding a date to the prom) and supernatural (snake monsters, hyena people). “It’s the ultimate metaphor: horrors of adolescence manifesting through these actual monsters,” says Gellar. Adds David Boreanaz, who played Buffy’s vampire paramour Angel, “When you’re going through a really horrible part of your life, like your teenage years, you feel alone. And Buffy was a way to tell the audience you’re not alone.” Emma Caulfield, who played bunny-phobic former demon Anya, echoes Boreanaz: “It just touched on really basic human emotions, like a life blueprint. ‘I don’t have any friends. I feel isolated.’ Those sort of core human emotions.”
In honour of Buffy the Vampire Slayer turning 20 years old (and still looking damn good), WHO reminisced with the cast and Whedon about making TV history, whether Buffy could ever return, and the biggest question of all: Angel or Spike?
BUFFY IS BORN … THEN REBORN FOR TV
Buffy Summers was super unpopular in the beginning. Like, a big loser. Whedon’s initial script became a campy 1992 movie starring Kristy Swanson, which bombed at the box office, grossing only $US16.6 million. “It was the first screenplay I ever wrote, and it came from my love of horror movies. I felt very upset about the horror movies killing all the girls, particularly the blonde party girls,” explains Whedon. “I imagined more of a horror movie. The ambition of it was not huge. It wasn’t until
some years later when it was proposed as a TV show [by future Fox exec Gail Berman] that I started thinking that there’s something to do here beyond just punching a genre in the face.”
The rebooted small-screen version of the Buffy script had more, well, bite. “It was just something that was more interesting than the generic scripts for women,” remembers Gellar, who had just finished two years on All My Children and was initially cast as bitchy Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter landed the role). “The words, the writing—you could just tell it was different. Who doesn’t want to play a character named Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
To lure networks, Whedon shot a 25-minute presentation pilot, which he readily concedes was a catastrophe: “It was a terrible, terrible experience. It was my first time directing and everybody was really pissy and defensive and annoying. We were falling behind and Fox production was freaking out. I just kept getting footage that didn’t look like what was in my head at all. There was a moment where we had to finish a giant stunt night in the theatre and I stood outside the auditorium and I was like, ‘I just want to go home. I want to go home and I want my mommy.’ ” Adds Gellar: “The pilot presentation was a disaster of epic proportions. That was certainly not indicative of what the show was going to become. But you just knew—there was something there.”
Fledgling network The WB agreed and ordered Buffy to series. Whedon says the network initially had concerns about how to sell it. “They actually were trying to sell it to the affiliates as Slayer behind my back,” he remembers. “[Then WB CEO] Jamie Kellner kept saying, ‘People will not come to the party with that [other] title.’ I just said, ‘You have to accept the idea that this is the party you’re throwing. The title is the show: it’s action, comedy and horror all in one sentence.’ ”
Debuting on March 10, 1997, Buffy found its titular heroine and her single mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), arriving in small-town Sunnydale after Buffy was thrown out of her last school. She immediately bonds with sarcastic Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and ever-optimistic Willow (Hannigan, who took over from the actress who played the role in the pilot), and soon finds her Watcher in school librarian Giles (Anthony Stewart Head). The friend group quickly turns into a slaying society (known as the Scooby Gang, as of Season 2) once it’s revealed that the seemingly ideal Sunnydale is at the base of a Hellmouth, a gateway for vampires and other foul creatures to roam free.
The series gave The WB its highest Monday-night ratings yet, ushered in the network’s evolution into teen programming ( Dawson’s Creek and Felicity would come later), and turned the mostly unknown cast into bona fide stars. “I was in Seattle and I was walking through a mall and I started getting chased by about 20 girls,” says Brendon. “I had to do a headfirst slide into the Abercrombie & Fitch dressing room.”
BUFFY GETS NEXT-LEVEL
While many shows suffer a sophomore slump, Buffy found its creative groove in Season 2. Buffy’s romance with vampire Angel (Boreanaz) was a hit with fans, but Whedon felt that in order to grow the series and the characters, the honeymoon needed to end. Buffy sleeping with Angel for the first time signalled the former’s loss of virginity and transformed the latter into a malicious Angelus. “We had Buffy and Angel get together and people were very excited by it, but they are not writers on the show,” explains Whedon. “We sort of were like, ‘How do we do this? How do we keep it interesting?’ We realised, ‘Oh, yeah, they’ve got to sleep together so that he can become the worst person in the universe.’ The episode where he turned is probably the most important episode in the history of the show. Even writing it, I was like, I had no idea that I could be such a dick. It was powerful and beautiful.”
Says Gellar: “There’s something so beautiful about that story about first love and then they spend that first time together and it literally pushes him to the dark side. It
was the ultimate metaphor for the guy who didn’t call.” One of the most defining moments in Buffy’s run, the two-part Season 2 finale, “Becoming”, found Angel finally regaining his soul before Buffy was forced to kill him to save Sunnydale. It’s representative of Buffy’s ability to take supernatural goofiness and imbue it with emotion and tragedy. Boreanaz was in New York not long after the episode aired and witnessed the fan reaction with his own eyes. “I remember doing an appearance at some store and they had to shut it down,” he recalls. “I couldn’t get out—it was like Beatlemania. There were just fans for blocks. The police officers were like, ‘Shit, man, this is crazy.’ ”
Season 2 was also notable for the introduction of platinum-blond bloodsucker Spike (James Marsters). He was supposed to last only one season but was incredibly popular with viewers and eventually became Buffy’s second vampire love after Boreanaz was spun off onto his own series, Angel, in 1999. The debate over whether Buffy should be with Angel or Spike still rages within Buffy fandoms. “I get a lot of hate and a lot of death threats—seriously,” says Gellar. “There was something so beautiful to me about Buffy and Angel’s story. I think that Spike understood a different part of who Buffy was, and I think she needed to discover it. But for me as Buffy, I think Angel.” Even Whedon says he has trouble picking a winner in this fight. “I’m split right down the middle because in terms of a relationship, Spike’s kinda your guy because he actually went and got a soul because of her. But [Angel and Buffy’s] is the grandest love story I will ever tell. You can’t argue with that.”
Buffy also had another romance that transfixed fans: In Season 4, the previously straight Willow began dating fellow witch Tara (Amber Benson). Whedon broke the news to Hannigan in between scenes in Season 3. “We were walking in the parking lot and he just said, ‘Willow’s going to get a friend and she’s going to be a special friend,’ and I didn’t really know what that meant.” But the twist was a progressive and important development for the series. “I’ve never had anything but a positive reaction and it’s been such a profound thing for people,” says Hannigan. Adds Benson: “We got a lot of letters. I think there were a lot of young people who felt very isolated and to see two characters on a television show be accepted by a group of peers changed the game.”
BUFFY GOES DARK
Much of Buffy the Vampire Slayer focused on supernatural creatures that the Scoobies had to vanquish. But in Season 5’s “The Body”, Whedon forced Buffy to face something decidedly mortal and universal: the death of her mother. The episode, which has no musical score, opens with a single unbroken shot of Buffy coming home and finding Joyce dead on the couch. Then it follows everyone, including sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), receiving the news. “Joss wrote complete dialogue for when Buffy comes to tell me,” remembers Trachtenberg. “The whole scene was scripted. And then I think at the very end he used the shot which was silent and just her telling me and my reaction.”
Whedon came at that hour from a very personal place. “I lost my mother in a car crash when I was 27, and the intent was to capture just that first day, the very still-trapped-inamber, almost boring essence of grief,” he says. Adds Sutherland: “Most fans end up talking to me about ‘The Body’. There’s so many people all over the world who lost a parent and weren’t able to process it, and it helped them.
And that’s amazing.” For Gellar, who is close to her own single mother, the episode was gruelling. “I’m so proud of it, but I can’t watch it,” she says. “It’s too hard for me.”
The intense toll of making Buffy coupled with the series moving to a new network due to budgetary issues greatly affected Whedon. He stepped aside as showrunner at the end of Season 5, and longtime writer-producer Marti Noxon ( UNREAL) took on the role. “I was very angry,” says Whedon of the network shift. “I was very beat up in a lot of ways. I was like, ‘I can’t deal with this right now so I’m going to go away and write the musical episode.’ ” Buffy’s now-iconic musical hour, “Once More, With Feeling” found Sunnydale residents forced to sing their emotions due to a tuneful demon. “On some weekends, Joss would have cast members and crew over and we would all read Shakespeare,” remembers Trachtenberg. “Then afterwards everyone would eat and drink. James would get on the guitar or Joss would get on the piano and I think that helped perpetuate the ‘Let’s do a musical episode!’ thing.”
“Once More, With Feeling” was one of the few cheery spots in a sixth season that found Willow channelling dark magic after the death of Tara and Buffy entering into a masochistic sexual relationship with Spike. “I’ve always said that Season 6 was not my favourite,” says Gellar. “I felt it betrayed who she was. You rely on certain things. Joss rewrote every single script and then [in Season 6] we didn’t have him to do that. But he made sure to dedicate the time to Season 7 and that was his promise to me —that we would right all the wrongs—and he kept that promise.”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer finished its run on May 20, 2003, with the stake wielder once again saving the world and also inspiring a whole slew of new female slayers. “Buffy said we can all have the power, and she passed it along,” says Gellar. “So I hope for her sake she’s retired to some island somewhere and is teaching yoga to find her Zen.”
With the success of reboots such as Gilmore Girls, could there ever be a chance of Buffy changing out of those yoga pants and taking down some vamps? The reaction from the cast is mixed. “If Joss is helming it, then hell yeah. If not, then hell no,” says Marsters. Adds Carpenter: “I think the fans would just go crazy if something like that would happen. It would make so many people happy.” But Gellar isn’t looking to mess with Buffy’s legacy: “At a certain point, when things are magical, you don’t want to go back and Godfather III it—right? I’m sure the fans are incredibly disappointed to hear that answer, but I think they’d be more disappointed if we created something and it didn’t live up to the expectation, because the expectation is so incredibly high.”
Besides, for those who made it and for those fans who love it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer will always be more than just a show. “The most important thing to me is that I have had people come up to me and say the show made them feel different about what they could be, about what they could do, about how they respond to problems, about being a female leader,” says Whedon. “People getting strength from my own little terrors is ...” He trails off, then adds, “There is no better legacy than that.”