As the third season began, Amy Acker’s Fred had become a full-blown regular, and the actress felt that she fit right in with the rest of the cast.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred)
You know, maybe I was so inexperienced and young at the time that I didn’t know that I should be worried that there could be dynamics that I was interfering with or anything. But everyone was so great. I mean, David, Charisma, J., Alexis—it immediately felt like they were happy I was there. And we were a super tight-knit group. There was never any real weirdness with anything on the set.
I had this sort of little-sister relationship with David. He was always playing jokes, and if he was off camera, he would be trying to make me laugh (which wasn’t very hard to do)—teasing me and that kind of stuff. Charisma was just so sweet and nice, always just working so hard to do good at her stuff. She would run lines with you if you wanted, which was just super-helpful. J. and Alexis . . . any show I could do with J. and Alexis would be my dream job. Alexis, obviously, I love, and that’s part of the reason getting to do Much Ado About Nothing with him was so special. I just think he’s such a wonderful acting partner and makes everything come alive and elevates your performance. And J. is probably the most positive person that I’ve ever met in my life. You can’t be around J. without smiling, and that’s just a wonderful person to be around. And then he’s supertalented on top of that.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
(actor, Charles Gunn)
I knew what it felt like to be the new guy in the cast, so I tried to be the most welcoming person that I could. It wasn’t difficult, because everyone loved Amy and she’s so easy to love, and quickly.
TIM MINEAR
Here’s what Fred brought to the mix—and this is just my opinion. Besides the fact that Amy is wonderful in a scene, tears your heart out, and is gut funny, there is a scene in season two’s “Through the Looking Glass” where she’s with Angel and she’s very worried about Cordelia. Angel says, “Oh no, they made her a princess.” She just stops and says, “When I got here, they never did that . . . That’s good for her.” Then we cut to Cordelia on that throne, going, “Maybe I should just leave.” Back-to-back gut funny performances from our two actresses. The fact that we could have two funny women on the show was a good thing. But I think the thing Fred brings to the party is this: Angel doesn’t owe her an apology. She is somebody with whom he has a clean slate. I think it’s important to have somebody in his life to whom he does not owe an apology, that he hasn’t hurt. That was an important element for the show. The other thing I think she brought to the show is the science, so she was valuable in that respect. Also, it wasn’t a bad thing to have another female character for all of them to play off of. No-brainer.
AMY ACKER
Shooting on the Paramount lot was one of the most fun parts of that job. Paramount has this amazing old-Hollywood feel. You can just kind of “see” all the people that drove through those same gates, making all of these wonderful movies that you’ve watched forever. We would park next to the big lot where they fill it with water and have the big sky mural painted on it so they can use it for filming. It’s probably my favorite lot that I’ve ever worked on.
Integral to season three was the character of Daniel Holtz, an eighteenth-century vampire hunter and a constant obstacle to Angelus and Darla. The conflict seemed to culminate with them slaughtering Holtz’s family, being sure to leave his turned daughter to greet Holtz, a sequence that, after Holtz spent the night holding and singing softly to her, sees him thrusting her into the morning sun, thus destroying her. All of this set him on a path of what some would call vengeance but he referred to as justice. An incorporeal demon known as Sahjhan—in an act of self-preservation—brings Holtz to the present to unleash him against Angel.
Added into the mix was the return of Julie Benz’s Darla, who, after having had sex with Angel in season two, is now pregnant—which is supposed to be impossible for vampires. Thus, Angel suddenly finds himself an expectant father.
Cast in the role of Holtz was Keith Szarabajka, an American-born actor whose credits include playing Mickey Kostmayer on The Equalizer, Harlan Williams in Stephen King’s Golden Years, and Charles Henry “Chaz” Gracen in Profit, created by John McNamara and David Greenwalt, who thought the actor would be perfect as Holtz.
DAVID GREENWALT
Keith has got the greatest voice. An aside about Profit: Adrian Pasdar has a low voice, Keith has a low voice—all these people have these incredibly low voices—and on Profit they were all trying to outdo each other at who could talk lower. But Keith was great.
KEITH SZARABAJKA
(actor, Daniel Holtz)
I’d worked with David Greenwalt on the show Profit, probably five years earlier, and it had been a wonderful experience. It was one of the greatest shows I’d ever been in. Unfortunately, it was ahead of its time and we were infinitely disappointed when it crashed and burned. David called and asked me if I wanted to do Angel and I thought it would be great. I was originally signed for eight shows and I think I ended up doing eleven. I was told that his name was Holtz and that he was a Van Helsing type of character, so I thought maybe they would want me to be Dutch or German. We went through a whole bunch of different possibilities and he said it was really England. “OK, so we’ll give him an English accent.” We didn’t make it too Northern, just a standard British accent. And I just loved doing it. I mean, what’s not to love about it? I got to ride a horse; I had a sword, a crossbow; I wore a duster; I got to speak with an English accent and do all these sort of pseudo-Shakespearean sort of riffs.
The season-two episode “The Trial” featured a flashback with Angelus and Darla making their way to a barn to escape the vampire hunter who is seeking vengeance for the fact that the duo murdered his family.
TIM MINEAR
We knew. Sometimes we would go back and say, “Hey, why don’t we explore that?” But in this case it was definitely a plant. The Holtz character is an interesting Big Bad, because he’s a very righteous man. It’s not only that he believes in what he’s doing, but he’s right. Angel did terrible things. Angel murdered his entire family. This is a guy who has a legitimate beef, and he’s not going around killing innocent people. Ted Bundy reforms—so what? He still killed all those people. Hitler reforms—so what? He’s still guilty. So it creates an interesting dilemma. This is a character who believes he’s on a quest from God, and in fact he may have been.
KEITH SZARABAJKA
Holtz was brokenhearted, and he wanted justice somehow for what had happened to him and his family. I mean, I challenge you to think about this: Angel, when he was Angelus, killed my wife, ate my baby, and then turned my eleven-year-old daughter into a vampire, forcing me to dust her. And I’m the villain? At the same time, I think there was a sort of begrudging admiration that Holtz had for Angel and vice versa. They knew they were enemies, but they were good enemies in a way. He was an antivillain in the same way that, in many ways, Angel was an antihero. That, at least to me, is what made it interesting.
JEFFREY BELL
(producer, Angel)
With each season, it’s really the material leading us. What I mean by that is in season three, the decision was made that Darla comes back pregnant, which makes it very much about Angel. The hotel became very much family. Angel became not so much a vampire but an expectant father. In a supernatural world, that brought very real, very understandable emotions to a genre of show. I think once we sort of did that in season three, the show got interesting in kind of an arcy way. The emotions of Angel and him losing his son, and his son coming back and hating him—to me, that all came out of Angel’s relationship with his father and all the angst that comes with that.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
Julie Benz is a wonderful actress, and whenever her character was on the show, nine out of ten times I wasn’t in it, because it was in flashback and I wasn’t in those scenes. It was until
season three that there was more interfacing. For the first time I got to know her better and I remember her behind the scenes knitting me a scarf, which I still have to this day, and it has a little label in it, “Made by Julie.” So she is a wonderful addition to any set and a wonderful talent. As far as the story line goes, I remember she tried to fight me, which brought Angel and Cordelia closer, so that was good; he got protective because of her reappearance.
TIM MINEAR
We knew season three was going to be in three pieces: revealing Darla’s pregnancy, involving Angel with that pregnancy, Darla’s death/the birth of Connor . . . all of that threaded throughout. Then Holtz stealing Connor and Connor returning as an angry adolescent. So, yeah, I think the show changed enough in the course of events that it kept things interesting.
JOSS WHEDON
Here’s an interesting tidbit: at that point we had five players, which were enough for an ensemble and stories that are created from within, and conflicts and romance and all of that stuff. But we felt, “Great, that’s our season.” But it wasn’t enough. We loved it, but we hadn’t really finished it yet.
TIM MINEAR
We brought Darla back in that box at the end of season one, and it is sort of a famous story in the Whedonverse that I made a dirty joke. Joss said, “What can we do in season two?” and I said, “Well, we brought Darla back in a box, maybe we bring back something in Darla’s box,” which is where he got the idea of impregnating her, so that was the idea that came up early. I remember him saying that she comes back as human, and once she finally accepts being human, Drusilla can come in and resire her and turn her back into a vampire. So we knew that that was going to happen early on. We had some great kind of orange cones set down along the road of season two, and we wrote up to those big moments, which of course led us to season three.
JOSS WHEDON
Tim Minear and I were attempting to figure out what unknown quantity was missing from the show. While we were talking, we reflected on the fact that we’d already done “Darla in the Box.” Then Tim made a dirty joke, and that dirty joke actually made me stop and say, “Darla’s pregnant!” And it literally came from his twelve-year-old humor. Of course she’s pregnant, and then we did the math and we realized that, yes, she’d be a couple of months away from giving birth based on the fact that she and Angel had had sex when they did in the second season. At that moment we had our third season; everything mapped out of the idea of fatherhood, the idea of what the pregnancy meant to Darla.
JULIE BENZ
(actress, Darla)
When I showed up pregnant, I had to wear a leotard that was stuffed with a pillow and it was pretty uncomfortable, but I think the biggest challenge during all those pregnant scenes was being on camera without any makeup on. That’s pretty much a challenge when you’re an actress, just to go on camera completely raw. But I felt that Darla was pretty strung out by then, so it worked.
TIM MINEAR
The reveal of Darla’s pregnancy was the first episode post Buffy and Angel being on the same network. And instead of just pretending that that—Angel having sex with Darla—never happened, we had to deal with it in some permutation. We’ve also played the trick before where Angel finally comes to some peace about an issue, but it doesn’t last—in this instance it’s that you can’t live in the past. But we discover that sometimes the past comes back, ’cause here comes Darla. You know, just because you decide that it’s OK now doesn’t mean that the people that you affected will agree.
In season two, part of the reason we went to Pylea was that we had scheduling problems with Julie Benz. So instead of having a giant resolution with her, we just wanted her to kind of fade away, because it became not about her. But some fans felt cheated, that it seemed like we were building to something, because the Darla story was not over. I remember David Greenwalt, Joss Whedon, and myself were walking down by the beach near Santa Monica, talking about the third season. We knew we were going to bring Holtz in, because we’d set that up in season two in “The Trial” with just a mention of him—the idea being that Angel’s past would come back to haunt him. Holtz would appear, and somehow Wesley would either fall in with Holtz or be corrupted by Holtz, but we knew that something like that was going to happen. It still didn’t feel like enough, so I made the dirty joke about Darla. That’s where that idea first took root, but immediately we knew it was the right thing to do. It was just so mythic. And impossible.
The episode “Lullaby” represents the culmination of the first part of the season’s arc, as it ends with Angel and Darla trying to escape from Wolfram and Hart and other factions who want to get their hands on this miracle baby—destined for a key role in the impending apocalypse—before it’s born. It all ends tragically with Darla staking herself in an alley, leaving behind a crying baby that Angel scoops up.
JULIE BENZ
Darla’s whole world was rocked. She never thought she could get pregnant and then all of a sudden she’s carrying this child and experiencing this soul for the first time in four hundred years. She recognized that as soon as the baby’s born, the soul’s going to go away, and it’s the first time she really experienced true love, so she was going through a lot.
JOSS WHEDON
One of the most beautiful things we’ve ever done was Darla’s speech about how—because she has a baby with a soul—she loves it, and once it’s out of her, she knows she won’t be able to feel that again, and she can’t stand it. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on the show. And when she stakes herself to save the child, it’s a beautiful sacrifice.
JULIE BENZ
I was up in Vancouver working on Taken and I got the script sent to me and I just sat in my trailer and cried. I thought, “What a beautiful exit to a great character.” I just felt that it was such a great gift from the writers to Darla, to be able to go out in such an epic way.
BEN EDLUND
What I think happened is that someone came up with that image of Darla staking herself, and no matter what it took, and no matter where it went, they needed that.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(producer, Angel)
When Darla stakes herself to give birth to her baby, not only was it magnificently filmed by Tim Minear, but it’s one of those moments where you’re, like, “I can’t believe they just did that.” That’s the kind of TV I love. That’s the Twin Peaks of it for me, when you sit there with your mouth open saying, “I can’t believe they just did that.”
DAVID GREENWALT
My mouth hung open a lot during those years. You know, working with Joss, breaking story with Joss—I compare this to playing music with Mozart, which is just that that guy is incredibly good at what he does and works harder than everybody else, if you combine those two things. Most of these stories were broken by Joss; Joss and me; Joss, me, and Tim; Joss, me, and Marti—whatever the combination. Knowing Tim, Darla staking herself was his idea. I loved it. Joss used to say, “We don’t give people what they want; we give them what they need.” I always like the crazier pace, but it still had to be emotionally true, because it has to be inevitable but surprising. And that was just an amazing film school for me during those years.
KEITH SZARABAJKA
To me, the best episodes that we did were “Lullaby” and “Benediction.” Those are my two favorites in that there was just such remorse and regret at the same time that Holtz had to do what he was going to do. It was much more evident in “Benediction,” because “Lullaby” was where everything kind of happened.
TIM MINEAR
The episode is Angel’s face-to-face confrontation with Holtz. Basically, since everything had been playing in real time for the last episode or two, when we came into “Lullaby,” act one, it actually plays like act four. It’s not so much a setup as it is a resolution of the previous episode. This is also the revelation that Angel and Darla just didn’t kill Holtz’s family, but they turned the little girl and Holtz had to come back and find her, then throw her o
ut in the sun. Once we got that, I kind of knew what to write. I mean, I knew that this was about Angel starting to allow himself to believe that he was going to have a son, or a child. But then juxtaposing that with this other man’s family that he had destroyed, all of which built to what I thought was a really cool moment in the alley in the end. After Darla stakes herself and Angel’s holding the baby in the pouring rain and Holtz steps aside to allow him to pass.
KEITH SZARABAJKA
That wasn’t a change of heart on Holtz’s part, just a piece of the plan. I don’t think Holtz ever really believed that Angel could ever not be Angelus. Even in the show there was always the possibility that he could change. So while Holtz recognizes that he’s been “in-soul-ated,” I don’t think he ever really trusted that Angelus had become Angel and was going to be Angel permanently.
TIM MINEAR
When we’re watching the episode, it feels like Holtz has found within himself some measure of understanding and, I don’t know if I would say forgiveness, but compassion. And then when he says to Sahjhan, “I told you I would show no pity and I won’t,” we realize it’s much worse than that. In fact, he’s not ready to just kill Angel, because he sees a way to make him suffer the way he has had to suffer. And that moment of letting Angel pass plays out for the rest of the season until Holtz grabs the kid, then brings the kid back as a teenager and seems to have forgiven Angel yet again, and fucks him over completely.
DAVID GREENWALT
Losing a child is the scariest thing in the world. I don’t know a worse one than that. Luckily, it’s never happened to me, but I do know quite a few people it’s happened to. You don’t ever really come back from that, you know? You go on, and if you have other kids you go on well, hopefully, but you don’t get over that.
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