Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  CHARISMA CARPENTER

  I think my bosses knew my heart and knew how much I cared, so they wouldn’t fire me just because of my work ethic and because of my passion and my extreme effort to overcome what I was going through. Then there came a time, I think it was the third season of Buffy, when they were, like, “What can we do to help you?” And I said, “I need an acting teacher on set to run lines with me.” Really, what I probably needed to do was to stop running lines. I needed to stop and relax, which is easier said than done. That’s so cliché: how do you let go when you’re driven like me?

  So that was my big thing, and my costars were probably annoyed and it didn’t bode well with my relationships with them. Not that they were mean; there was no drama like that. But you know, poor Sarah, spending thousands and thousands of hours on a set, I just can’t imagine that this girl, six years younger than me, who was working her ass off, consummate professional, and then, it’s Charisma’s turn! There was shame around it and the anxiety and fear and really empathizing with everyone I was working with.

  With all of that, Carpenter was also dealing with insecurities over the fact that the show’s growing fandom had not yet embraced the character of Cordelia, the actress believing it having to do with Cordy’s perceived bitchiness.

  CHARISMA CARPENTER

  I remember in the first season how when fans would come to set or come to our location they were there to see Willow and, of course, Buffy. No one was looking for Cordelia. I say it because she was so mean. I remember the difference when I made the jump between Buffy and Angel and she became more fleshed out.

  First of all, they loved to hate her, and at some point—I think it was in season three of Buffy; it was during the homecoming episode, and I have to do this spatula thing, where I’m swatting the air with my spatula and Buffy is looking at me, like God help me—and I remember just going to Joss and David and saying, “I’m so tired of being the damsel in distress, the stupid one, the idiot.” Like that’s such a good idea! I had all these ideas about Cordelia, like why does she have to be such a slut and making out all the time and I don’t like that; I don’t like this image. I probably said only those two things in the entirety of the series, and I remember being shut down so succinctly. Joss said to me, “But that’s why America loves you.” I was, like, “OK, I’ll just keep doing that then.”

  Honestly, I never felt that fan love for the first three seasons of Buffy. I would go everywhere and people knew I was on the show, but people would never come up to me. I guess I was a very convincing bitch. People even to this day on Twitter never call me by my name, they called me Cordy or Cordelia. It’s silly. I laugh at it, but then it’s hard from tweets to discern whether they’re doing it to be sarcastic—it’s a beloved character, and I’m so grateful that she’s finally beloved. It took a while for people to warm up to her.

  In the penultimate episode of the third season, Angel is poisoned by Faith, and the only way to save his life is for him to drink the blood a slayer. A reluctant Buffy attempts to procure the lifesaving antidote by killing the only other slayer in Sunnydale, which leads to a violent fight between the two in which a defeated Faith falls off her apartment building and onto a truck, putting her in a coma. In a desperate effort to save Angel’s life, Buffy decides to let him feed off of her as Mayor Wilkins prepares for his ascension, culminating with his commencement address to the students of Sunnydale High before he transforms, destroying the school in the process.

  ARMIN SHIMERMAN

  When they finally did kill me off, they did exactly what I asked Joss to do, which was to have me eaten. When I knew that they were going to graduate from school, I didn’t know how they were going to graduate, but I knew that they were seniors and were graduating and I knew that I was no longer needed. I said, “Listen, I know you’re going to have to get rid of me one way or another, but I want to be eaten.” Because Flutie was eaten. And they agreed to my wishes.

  HARRY GROENER

  During the transformation, they rigged the suit to sort of fall apart. There were two people on either side, holding twelve fishing lines each that they were to pull at the appropriate time and it would fall apart. So the transition starts and I feel this pull and pull and the damn thing is not coming apart. So we set it again and try again. What’s the problem? We don’t know; we’re not sure. Try it again—it would not work. Ultimately, we never got the suit to work on that night. So we had to go to a green screen and do it again. Even then it didn’t work the way they had envisioned.

  Season three is also marked by some of the series’ most fun episodes, including “Band Candy,” in which the adults of Sunnydale all revert to adolescent behaviors after eating the titular band candy due to the sinister machinations of the enigmatic Ethan Rayne, and “Lovers Walk,” in which a lovelorn and heartbroken Spike returns to Sunnydale after being dumped by Drusilla.

  ARMIN SHIMMERMAN

  I’m very proud of “Band Candy.” It was great, great fun. Certainly in my career in front of the camera that’s the freest I’ve ever been. I decided I was just going to have a hoot and did. When I came back for the next episode, which was probably three or four weeks later, I remember both Sarah and Alyson just quoting my lines from “Band Candy” at me. To this day, I go to conventions and people ask me to repeat, “Summers, you drive like a spaz.”

  I consider myself to be an enormously lucky person. My contract with Paramount with Star Trek said that I was only allowed to do one other TV show a year. For some reason, the line producer, my fairy godfather, Steve Oster, decided I could do whatever I wanted. And it wasn’t just Buffy. I went off to do Seinfeld. I did Stargate, and other shows as well. The true hero here was Steve Oster and the assistant director on Buffy, Brenda Kalosh. They juggled their schedules so that they could get me on different days. However, there were two days during the course of my working both shows when I left Star Trek in the early afternoon; drove to Torrance, where we usually shot the exteriors for Buffy; and then would go to work for Buffy. Those two days were enormously long.

  In fact, one of those days I remember specifically was a “Band Candy” day. It was difficult as far as hours, but it was enormously invigorating. I cannot explain this to the regular public, and very few actors understand this as well, but it’s like doing repertory theater. By doing two disparate characters, doing one made me excited about doing the other, because I didn’t get bored with doing the same character three years or seven years straight. It was a chance to get my batteries recharged, because I was doing different characters. It was enormously invigorating, but it also was a lot of time. My wife, Kitty, didn’t see me for long swaths of time, because I’d get up early in the morning for either one of the shows and not come home until very late.

  Later, when I had friends on Voyager, I would say to them, “You know, you really should try to do other shows,” but the line producer on that show stuck by the Paramount contract and didn’t let them out. So I was enormously lucky.

  DAN VEBBER

  In “Lovers Walk,” we were stuck on this outline with the idea that Xander and Willow were trapped in a basement somewhere and the Scoobies had to find some way to find them. How the hell do they do it? Do they have a tracker on them or something like that? I, at some point, came up with the fact that Oz is a werewolf, so maybe when he gets stressed out he can sniff out Willow. I think that they ended up using that in other episodes as well. So that was a contribution of mine.

  “Lovers Walk” marked the return of a series fan favorite, James Marsters’s Spike, whose character would grow in importance throughout the remainder of the series, which is surprising given at the end of the second season it appeared Spike was toast.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  (actor, Spike)

  I didn’t really see Joss that much. He didn’t direct the first episode I was in. It all went very quickly. People were telling me that it was really fun to watch, and so I thought I was really in and then was surprised when Joss walked by m
e and got in my face—didn’t push me up against the wall—but I backed up into a wall and he shook his finger at me and said, “I don’t care how popular you are, kid, you are dead! You are dead, do you hear me? Dead.”

  I was, like, What the fuck? I’ve come to realize what was happening was Spike was imperiling the theme of the show. Evil is not cool to Joss Whedon, and I really respect him for that. He thinks of evil as being pathetic, which I agree with. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampires are metaphors for the challenges that you overcome in adolescence. And so vampires are supposed to be very ugly and quickly killed off. And that’s why we had the vamp face in Buffy, so that the moment when we bite people is never sensual. It’s always horrific. He once told me, “I don’t like that Anne Rice crap; that’s not what I’m going for.” He had gotten talked into one romantic vampire character by his writing partner, then David Greenwalt, which was Angel, who just took off like a rocket ship. By the time I got on the show, there were already plans that he would have his own show. I think Joss had said, “OK, that’s one. We’ll do one. No more romantic vampires, that’s it.”

  Then I came along. The character wasn’t designed to be romantic—the audience wasn’t supposed to respond to me that way. But I think once you made my hair blond and allowed me to have that much mascara on . . . it probably explains why the audience thought of me as a romantic character. But that was really dangerous, and this was in the beginning of season two and I think Joss was afraid that the show was slipping away and was just going to become another show about hot, young vampires, which to him is much less interesting.

  I am forever amazed and grateful that, in the face of that, he decided not to kill me off. To, instead, really engage with the character and this universe and this theme. It speaks to his courage and his talent that he did that. Because, I gotta tell you, I produced theater in Chicago and Seattle: I would’ve killed me off in a heartbeat . . . probably before five episodes. As soon as the audience said, “Oh, he’s romantic,” I’d have killed me off after two episodes just to, you know, get it out of the way. So I’m very lucky.

  DAN VEBBER

  “Lovers Walk” was an episode that was not as heavily rewritten as “The Zeppo.” My pitch to Joss for that episode was “we should do a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern episode, where it’s following a really boring character, and in the background the most exciting, world-ending story is taking place and we just don’t even address it.” He liked that idea and he ended up doing it. In my draft, the B story was brought to the forefront and the A story was in the background, whereas in Joss’s draft of it he had brought up the B story much more. I feel like it might have lost a little bit of that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern element, but, for all I know, it wouldn’t have been watchable if that were the case.

  ARMIN SHIMERMAN

  I knew I was going to be gotten rid of certainly when they graduated, so there would be no reason to have me move on to their college existence. None whatsoever. It wasn’t as though I was a good friend. They weren’t going to use me to solve problems or anything like that. The writing was on the wall. Except for asking to be eaten, I had no other input into my character. Except, one has to say, because I’ve learned this from years of television work, what the actor brings to the character influences the writing. The actor doesn’t necessarily have to say anything. But simply by choices that the actor makes in the course of acting the character in dailies, writers, producers see things and they go, “You know, we can go a little further with that.” “Oh, we can see that, you know, Armin has a tendency to go this way as a choice in the character, so we can further that or we can go in a different direction.” So I didn’t actually say anything, but I’m sure my performance spoke reams to them.

  DAVID FURY

  There were a couple of missteps, but overall I thought season three was great. It introduced Faith, who was a phenomenal character, and the Mayor was great. I was so happy to be a part of it. We also knew it was going to be the last season of high school, which was going to throw the show into a whole new direction when we got into season four. It’s a very different dynamic in college than in high school. Joss first sold the show as high school is hell. Everybody gets that. That was the perfect allegory. But college doesn’t hold that kind of weight. High school is such a microcosm of society, but college really isn’t. College is something more open and more about adulthood and it just didn’t have the same clear allegorical signposts that high school does.

  Season three was the last year of high school and it was our last attempt to try and tap into them as much as we can. “The Prom” episode is great. The acknowledgment of the class body understanding what Buffy has meant to them. There was a lot of great emotional things in that episode, and Angel was being transitioned out at that point. Overall, it was a really good season and maybe because I was thrilled to be so much a part of it that it felt so warm and fuzzy. When you’re doing twenty-two episodes, they’re not all going to be golden, and nothing would ever top the Angelus story at that point. We were in a state of transition. High school to college and Angel to his own show, which had its own growing problems.

  HARRY GROENER

  By the time I died, I was actually sad, not because of not being able to do it anymore, but because I wanted to know what happened to the kids after graduation. I didn’t want to leave that story yet.

  THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

  “Welcome to the story of the world! Things fall apart, Buffy. Evil comes and goes. But the way people manage is they don’t do it alone.”

  After barely surviving high school graduation (literally!), the Scooby Gang heads off to college sans Xander, who continues living at home. As such, it was a season of major changes, on screen and off. Spike became a series regular after being abandoned by Drusilla, and is rendered incapable of harming humans due to a chip implanted in his head by a secret government organization that fights and studies demons, known as the Initiative, its base of operations located rather conveniently in the bowels of UC Sunnydale.

  And with the departure of Seth Green’s oz, Willow meets a fellow Wiccan, Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), who will become an important love interest for the series and a groundbreaking lesbian relationship on television. At the same time, Xander begins an unlikely but charming romance with the acerbic Anya Jenkins, the former vengeance demon from third season’s delightful episode “The Wish,” in which Cordelia found herself in a world in which the slayer never came to Sunnydale.

  DAVID FURY

  (producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  Joss wanted to get Xander into a relationship, because Cordelia left to be on Angel. Anya was not meant to be a character that returned. That was a one-shot deal, but then he hit upon the idea of, What if it’s her? It’s always great when you can pull from the history of the show rather than just introducing a character. So you realize, “I can use that girl Anya for that,” and they were great together. That was a really fun couple. More so than Cordelia and Xander. She was so great. I loved writing for them, and there was a terrific dynamic between the two of them.

  More pivotal, however, was the relationship between Buffy and new boyfriend, Riley Finn, played by actor Marc Blucas, a graduate student who is also a top soldier in the Initiative under the guidance of Buffy’s professor, Maggie Walsh (Lindsay Crouse). The intent of Walsh and the organization is a merging of demons and cybernetics to create deadly supersoldiers, which eventually leads to the reveal of season four’s Big Bad, Adam. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto?

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  (author, It’s About Power: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)

  The Initiative is introduced to the show in season four, which immediately follows Buffy’s “graduation” from the Council. Buffy gets involved with the Initiative when she discovers that her college boyfriend, Riley Finn, is a rising star of this secret demon-hunting government agency. From the instant she walks into its operations, she is ostracized. B
uffy is one of the few females in the facility and sticks out like a sore thumb with the way she dresses and speaks.

  When a room of Initiative soldiers and Buffy are briefed on a demon, or what they call “hostile subterrestials” (HSTs), Buffy is noticeably frowned upon by all of the soldiers, including Riley. She asks questions in a childlike and unprofessional manner (“why can’t we damage this poke-a-things arms?”), and when it is suggested that she change out of her bright salmon-colored halter top into the camouflage suits that every other soldier sports, she declines, not wanting to look “all Private Benjamin.” Buffy’s deviation from the norm is both ridiculed and laughed at, as the camera pans the room of angry and amused faces of soldiers.

  JOSS WHEDON

  (creator / executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  Season four was about, How do you keep the group together without being sort of 90210 about it, and believably? The answer is, you don’t. By season four, we were into mission statement. Season two was “Spike and Dru”—and then we realized we were doing the Angel thing—and then that became the season. Season three we knew we were going to do the Faith thing and graduate and there was going to be some growing up to do. We didn’t come into real mission statements until season four, because things were so different. What we said was this is the first year of college, the first year of college is about being able to do whatever the hell you want, completely losing yourself and trying on new identities and changing and obviously in Willow’s case changing a lot. Exploring sexuality, exploring freedom to fuck your boyfriend all day, which Buffy did for a while.