“If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.…”
By the time Angel had gone into its second season and Buffy the Vampire Slayer into its fifth, the secret was out and the Whedonverse had become a darling of the critics and certainly the audience. Both shows were considered to represent a new wave in the television medium—despite appearing on the relatively low-rated WB network—where the show runners were becoming almost as famous as their creations, and where storytelling was becoming bolder, riskier.
For season two of Angel, David Greenwalt remained primary show runner, though Joss Whedon was executive producer as well; Marti Noxon was consulting producer, with some scripts written by Buffy’s Jane Espenson, Douglas Petrie, and David Fury. Tim Minear became co–executive producer midseason, Mere Smith moved from script coordinator to staff writer, Jim Kouf became a consulting producer, and Shawn Ryan joined the staff.
The season kicked off with an episode called “Judgment,” in which Angel kills the wrong demon—a protector in its own right—and finds himself having to protect the demon’s charge. For the series, it was deemed an important installment. The same could be said for “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,” which was born out of the fact that the decision was made to change the home base for Angel Investigations in season two from an office setting to a hotel. The latter was first seen, in dilapidated condition, in “Judgment” and followed up by this episode in which Angel, despite his first impulse to ignore the situation, comes to the aid of a young woman in the 1950s and ends up being “murdered” for his troubles by a McCarthyesque mob of people being manipulated by the paranoia demon Thesulac. In the present, after freeing the one person who still lived there—the now elderly woman he had tried to help, whose guilt kept her a prisoner for all those years—and dispatching the demon, Angel decides to buy the hotel and turn it into his new base of operations.
TIM MINEAR
(co–executive producer, Angel)
First episodes back are always difficult; it’s more or less a mission statement. You want an audience to start the show off fresh and get what the show is. It had all of the elements that were required. It introduced everybody again, and it demonstrated that this is an action show with really, in many ways, a traditional action hero lead and what his relationship was to the people around him. It also dropped some hints as to the coming continuing story. I thought it worked. I liked that Angel screwed up. We also felt that ending the first season with the “Pinocchio’s going to be a real boy some day” prophecy was something we had to complicate. Which is really the idea behind the episode in terms of the series. Once there’s a prophecy that everything is going to work out, it sort of takes the tension out of the story that you’re telling. So what Angel learned in that episode is that it was not about the prophecy, it’s not about the end of the tunnel, it’s about the tunnel and the journey through it. Nothing is assured, which is another thing we kept trying to hit in the stories we told over season two. Something that appears to be good news could turn out to be terrible news. Something that appeared to be bad news could be something good.
In season two, we also really wanted to delve in to Angel’s mythology. It was a bit of a trick to create the mythology for this show, and what I would always do is go back to Buffy episodes where there had been a little bit of his backstory and always try to do the math so that it would make sense. You may not have suspected that he lived in a hotel in the 1950s in Los Angeles, because the first time you saw him on Buffy he was in the ’90s when he showed up at her high school with Whistler. So I was telling the story from before he was a vampire to after he got reinsouled by the gypsy curse, to his trying to get back together with Darla when he had a soul, to his kind of wandering the Earth. You know, he’s not always going to be living on the street. Sometimes he’s going to be living in a hotel. The episode in the hotel—“Are You Now or Have You Ever Been”—was to say there was a part of him that tried to be a hero, who tried to help, and when it went wrong and he was disappointed by the people one more time, that sort of sent him down a darker path until he found his mission fifty years later.
DAVID GREENWALT
(executive producer/cocreator, Angel)
There’s no denying that Angel grew out of Buffy, but when we spun the show off originally, our notion was this will be a really dark, gritty urban show, and then we got really bored with that, because the sets were ugly and brown and stuff. That’s why we had to blow that office up the first year. So it was always clearly, to me, its own show.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Angel)
I don’t think Joss was ever happy with the first set we put up, Angel Investigations, so he thought it would be much more interesting to have more space to roam around in and spend time in, and that was the purpose of the hotel set. And it was a gorgeous set. The exterior played on a condo in West L.A. I don’t remember what street it’s on. No matter where you pointed the camera, there was a great look. That’s my memory of that set. In season five when we changed the location to a law firm, I really shit.
STUART BLATT
(production designer, Angel)
I remember a lot of sets over those five years, but the hotel was a biggie and a joy. One of the great things with Joss and David Greenwalt is that they gave me and us pretty much carte blanche once they signed off on something. “OK, I see where you’re headed with this,” and they let us take the reins and run with it. One of the great things about the hotel is that for the exterior we used the Los Altos Apartments on Wilshire Boulevard, with the garden in front of that, and then we elaborated. We built a beautiful lobby and beautiful garden outside and the upstairs stairwell. We had elevators in there that didn’t work, but then we built a whole series of upstairs hallways, literally very reminiscent of Barton Fink. We were motivated by the spookiness of that, and how the walls would come alive with the old wallpaper and carpeting.
DAVID GREENWALT
The hotel was actually more appropriate than the first year’s thing, which was meant to be more like a private eye, film noir kind of L.A. thing to make it look different than Buffy. Angel is more Raymond Chandler than Buffy. Also, for me, I grew up in the small-hotel business, so I naturally took to that. And it just made more sense; you could have a lot more people and it still functioned kind of as an office for people to come to and look for him and get cases and stuff. It just looked a lot cooler to me.
IAN WOOLF
(first assistant director, Angel)
Changing to the hotel was certainly a learning curve for all of us, because it was a completely new lighting rig—everything was new so everybody had to relearn. People get sort of comfortable in a standing set. You have to learn how to light it. Once you do that, you can light it fast, because you’re there all the time. Then when you start to build a whole new permanent set like that, again, it’s a bit of a learning curve for everybody, from the cameraman on down. Just how do you get into the set? Where do you stage everybody and what’s going to be safe for picture and all that?
DAVID FURY
(writer, Angel)
We found the original office was just kind of dull and dark and difficult to shoot in the way it was designed. The openness and idea of living in a hotel seemed more appealing, much more cavernous, more depth. From filmmaking points of view, the directors didn’t love the old space, so getting a little bit more grandeur in the hotel provided the opportunity for all sorts of rooms, ballrooms, or individual hotel rooms, or office. They just made the decision that they wanted something more inviting for the audience. And for the network, the literal darkness of the show was always an issue, and this was designed to help with that. We had to keep explaining to them it’s a vampire show; they only go out at night. I know we’re also dealing with demons, but when you’re dealing with Angel and your hero is a vampire, you can only operate at night. It’s going to be dark. But we wanted to get some light, and that’s where the hotel came from.
STUART BLATT
The episode “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been” was one of the most fun episodes, because we got to really explore the hotel, and we built a fantastically huge basement for it.
TIM MINEAR
We wanted something that had some scope to it, that was different. Actually it was Rebecca Rand Kirshner, a writer on Buffy, who suggested an abandoned old Hollywood hotel, and that just clicked with us. And at the end of “Have You Been,” Wesley says, “You know better than anyone that this is a house of evil,” and Angel says, “Not anymore,” because he’s exorcised the demon from this place. I think the hotel represents Angel himself. If you take the scene at the end of the episode and apply the conversation that Wesley is having with Angel, I think the metaphor is pretty clear. This is a place that has seen the worst side of demonic influence as well as the worst side of human action, and Angel is saying that that has changed. So the hotel represents him, and the idea of coming into a place that was once a house of evil and making it a force for good is a metaphor for Angel on the show. And also just a really cool place to shoot.
In the season one episode “War Zone,” J. August Richards was introduced as Charles Gunn, leader of a street gang that spends its evenings hunting vampires. In the end, Gunn and Angel form an uneasy alliance, which leads to the character becoming a series regular in season two and, gradually, a part of Team Angel. More recently, the actor, born August 28, 1973, has starred on such series as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (he played Deathlok) and Notorious.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
(actor, Charles Gunn)
My uncle from the time I was a little boy always was amazed by me, because he didn’t understand how I was born knowing what I wanted to do. Probably before I knew what an actor was, I knew that I wanted to be inside the television. I thought that you literally could open up the back and get in it. It wasn’t something I had to figure out I wanted to do. It’s just who I am.
I was really supported by my parents to explore anything that I wanted to, and encouraged by them as well. That was 90 percent of it. I think also, not to sound arrogant or anything, but I was born with a certain ingenuity. My first big job was on The Cosby Show. The way I did that was I noticed on every TV show that I was watching at that time that they had these lists at the beginning and end of the show, and I gathered that those were the people who helped put it together. I kept noticing something called a casting director, and assumed that meant that person was in charge of putting people on the show, so I wrote down his name because I felt like I belonged on The Cosby Show. I called his office and [I told] the person that answered the phone … that I wanted to be on the show, and she said, “You and everybody else,” and hung up on me. Then I called back and asked for the casting director by name. I told her my name, and he picked up the phone. I explained that I wanted to be on The Cosby Show. He was like, “Do you have an agent?” “What’s that?” “That’s who would get you on The Cosby Show. Get an agent.” “How do I get an agent?” He was kind and patient enough to talk me through the process.
That same casting director was a speaker at a New York acting camp that Richards attended, where he caught his attention, which eventually led to that role on The Cosby Show.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
Obviously, I’ve done a lot of this genre, and I do honestly enjoy it. I feel like my theater training comes in extremely handy in this world, because when I was in theater school we’d have to find a way to personalize the experience of people who lived way in the past, whether that was Chekhov or Shakespeare or Gibson. We’d have to find a way to learn about what was going on in the world at that time and find a way to personalize it and make it mean something to ourselves. I’m very drawn to that, and in this world you have to do the same thing. Also as an actor, I have a lot more of a fighting chance in this world, because it’s not easy to make the circumstances of these characters personal. I know that the genre is something I love to do, so I feel like when it comes down to the auditioning process, I have a fighting chance, because oftentimes you have to do scenes with a green screen or you have to be looking at a dot and imagine that it is a massive outer space being, and that work is what I love to do.
TIM MINEAR
The idea behind Gunn is that Gary Campbell, a freelancer, came in and pitched the idea of these street kids battling vampires that nobody notices. That was sort of the genesis of that idea. I know that Joss wanted to introduce another guy who would be very different from Wesley and also very different from Angel. Gunn is a character that shoots from the hip. He’s a little bit hardened by his experience, and he doesn’t have any sympathy for people who act like victims.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
I’d heard about Buffy but had never seen it. I remember reading in the trades that David Boreanaz was getting a spin-off. At that point in my life, I was obsessed with being on the WB, because I noticed that all of the actors on there were going on to have film careers. I thought if I could get on the WB, then I’d have a film career, too. I auditioned for a few other shows, then got this audition for a show called Angel to play a character called Day, a vampire hunter. Day as opposed to Night. They were seeing all ethnicities. Ricky Martin was a big thing at the time, so there were a lot of Hispanic and Latino actors there, and a lot of white actors there, and a few black actors. That was my first step into being on Angel.
TIM MINEAR
The other thing is that we were actively trying to bring some diversity to the show. It was an incredibly white show. We also wanted to not just show the glamorous sides of Los Angeles; we wanted to say maybe in the rougher sections of town, you take the metaphor of the vampires and the demons and the otherworldly things under the surface of L.A., and so it is not just sort of the storefront-detective vampire and the fancy law firms but also the kids on the street in the gangs. It was a way of doing The Lost Boys a little bit. They were sort of the anti–Lost Boys, because they were fighting vampires as opposed to being vampires.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
Auditioning for the show was definitely one of those magical moments in my life and in my career. It was interesting, because the sides that I received, the audition material, was not from an episode. It was a stand-alone piece of writing for this character. Basically the scene was three pages of this character called Day talking to Angel, who was a vampire, and telling him how much he hated vampires and would never work with a vampire ever, because his job in life was to kill every vampire he’s seen. “You might say that you’re different than other vampires, but I hate all vampires and I know vampires are horrible people.” Three whole pages of basically the same thing. What was I going to add to that?
On my way to the audition, I heard the voice of Meryl Streep in my head. I saw her on Inside the Actor’s Studio, and she said, “Always examine the opposite of what your character is saying.” I thought about that literally as I walked through the door, and said to myself, “Oh my God, I actually do want to work with Angel, but because my parents were killed by vampires and I’m a street kid, I’ve essentially been orphaned and orphans often have a hard time asking for love. The way that they do it is to push a person away until that person proves that they’re worthy enough for them to be let in.” For the first time, I did the scene with that. By the time I was done, the casting director asked me to come back a few hours later, when Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt were present.
DAVID GREENWALT
J. August Richards came in and knocked the hell out of that. Later we got that little triangle between Wesley and Gunn and Fred. We got a lot of mileage out of that. But in the beginning, there was a certain reckless abandon about the character, a certain, “I love the hunt and the thrill and I kind of like killing vampires,” which at the same time there was also, “I protect a lot of people.” Angel as a vampire should be killed by him and his gang, but Angel does some good things, so they’re a little confused if they should kill him or not. Gunn certainly wants nothing to do with Angel, but there is a point where Angel is saying, “You may not want anything to do with me, but I may need your help some day.”
TIM MINEAR
J. is just charismatic and great, and he got the part. I think we struggled a little bit to try to figure out how to incorporate that stuff into the show, because if there was one thing we were kind of bad at, it was writing something that felt [like] real L.A. street gangs or any of that stuff. It was hard for us; we just weren’t very good at it. The episode that I wrote that I’m the least fond of was called “That Old Gang of Mine.” It was the story of Gunn severing his ties permanently with his gang, and I just had so much trouble writing that. Not because of Gunn and not because of J., but I just didn’t feel comfortable writing that world for some reason. It was hard for me to make it feel lived in and real. We eventually conquered that; Gunn was definitely an important member of the ensemble by the end of the series.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
Everyone was just so warm and welcoming, and it just made me feel really comfortable and really at home very quickly. Obviously, I’ve made some lifelong friends from that show and from Buffy. We’re all as close as we can be. Everybody’s got their own lives, their own families, and things going on, but the admiration and the love is still there. Everyone on the crew was amazing. I’m still friends with so many people and have worked with them again. It was a really tight-knit family. Some sets are not like that at all. A lot of people say that, but not every set is what I experienced on Angel. I’ve experienced the opposite since and before.
DAVID FURY
Every new character is going to bring a different dynamic. The fact that you brought in Gunn, who is a street fighter but with a chip on his shoulder about vampires, was a way of bringing a different dynamic. What was great about Wesley was when he came onto Angel, he was not the same guy as he was on Buffy. He refashioned himself. He had his own midlife crisis and stopped being auspiciously British and suddenly tried to become something a bit more. It helped to have familiar characters coming on, like Wesley, but bringing Gunn [on] was something more specifically to add to the mix and create a bit more of a fighting force. A bit more of a dynamic between everyone. It was just a way of creating their own gang that they just didn’t have. It was a slow build finding the right mix of people, and J. was great, but there was always that trick of, like, now what do we do with him? But, again, the growing pains of once you figure that out, once you give them your own agendas, they become an interesting part of the mix.
DAVID GREENWALT
With Buffy we began asking, “Who of our characters can we bring back?” At one point they had something like forty-one people in the Buffy pantheon. We had a lot fewer people on Angel, but as time went on we began adding to the list. The idea was we wanted to get a great big mix that would give us more people to draw on and more arcs to build.
Another charming new character “tested” on the series was Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan, who was first introduced as “The Host” and then as Lorne. Whatever name he goes by, he was the owner of the demon karaoke bar Caritas, who had the innate ability to “read” a person’s feelings through their singing and thereby to get glimpses into the future. The green-skinned, horn-adorned Lorne was played by Andy Hallett. Born August 4, 1975, in Osterville, Massachusetts, Hallett was actually an assistant to Joss Whedon’s then wife Kai when he came to the attention of Whedon himself.
ANDY HALLETT
(actor, Lorne)
I used to drag Joss into karaoke bars, and I think he was stunned by that whole scene. He got such a kick out of them and I think somehow, some way, he saw this vision of Lorne in there somewhere. So he asked me one day if I wanted to audition for this role. He said, “It’s inspired by you, but you still might not get the part.” He said he wanted me to audition for this part of the karaoke demon, and what did I think. I was like, “Oh my God!” I thought it would be a couple of times, but I did fifty-one episodes as a guest cast member before he asked me to be a regular. That wasn’t until season four, episode fourteen. He called and said, “We want you to join the team. What do you think?” Luckily, I can say that I already felt like a team player,… like I was part of the family. So of course I accepted instantly.
DAVID GREENWALT
When Joss created that character of a guy who ran a nightclub, I mean, the character was Andy. Totally Andy. So as a lark, as we began to read and test people, we tested Andy, and, lo and behold, he was the best. I think he may have had some theatrical experience. He certainly was a theatrical personality. So we cast him.
ANDY HALLETT
The thing that I’ll never forget was when he said, “None of us know what the future holds, and who knows what will happen with the show. I just wanted to have you have the opportunity to say that you were a series regular in case the show doesn’t get picked up next year.” I thought that was really wonderful on his part and really considerate, to think of me and my résumé and so forth. Having that on your résumé holds a lot more weight than saying you were a guest star. So I just thought that was spectacular.
TIM MINEAR
With Andy, it turned out he was great. We all just felt that he was so fun and so easy to write, so in a lot of ways the part just expanded and became less of a device and more of a character. And the truth is, I don’t think it took Andy long to get where he needed to be. He was pretty great from the beginning, especially for someone who had no experience and who had to act in all that crazy makeup.
ANDY HALLETT
It took three hours for makeup. Dayne Johnson also became a real dear friend of mine. He was head of the makeup department. He used to be on Buffy; then he came over to head the staff of Angel, and obviously he has a lot to do on the show. He did my makeup, and we got along great. I couldn’t imagine spending that much time in the makeup chair with someone you can’t stand. Getting up at 4 A.M., traveling to the studio, and then sitting for three hours without being able to move or do anything makes it hard to stay awake. It could be pretty boring. But Dayne went out and bought a DVD player, a TV, and a VCR, and it was wonderful, because then I could watch movies in the chair. I never used to watch movies, so he got me watching movies.
DAVID GREENWALT
He hated the makeup. I mean, passionately. It made him claustrophobic and he was not happy. Did we expect him to become as prominent as he became? I think you can apply that to any of our characters who became more prominent. You know, why not use people you’ve already cast and know? So when you’re breaking stories, you’re like, “What if Andy did this? What if so and so does that? What if Christian Kane does this?” You use your stable, because you know them, the audience knows them, you can depend on them, and the fun of TV is you’re not writing short stories like you are in a movie; you’re writing big sprawling novels. I’m always happy to see people grow in a role in a show. It’s fun.
TIM MINEAR
In the second season we did an episode called “Happy Anniversary,” and what I liked about it was that it got Lorne out of the bar. Basically, it’s a buddy movie with Angel and Lorne, and I think it was really interesting that those two characters, wherever you put them together, are an intriguing pair. They’re so different, but Andy and David really complemented each other when they were on screen together.
In the season one finale, Wolfram & Hart brings Julie Benz’s Darla from the afterlife. (Darla had been dusted by Angel in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when it was revealed that she was the one who had originally turned him into a vampire). In Angel she is unexpectedly brought back as a mortal, with a soul, and is completely disoriented. Wolfram & Hart, largely through Lindsey, uses her to manipulate Angel, who thinks he’s losing his mind.
TIM MINEAR
The return of Darla gave us an opportunity to dig deeper into Angel. In the episode “Dear Boy,” we had a flashback to Angel’s first encounter with Drusilla. There’s a moment in the episode, during the flashback, where Drusilla’s cowering in the convent and Darla is saying, “I thought you were going to kill her.” Angel says, “No, I decided to make her one of us.” Darla says, “She insane,” and Angel responds, “Yeah, eternal torment. Am I learning?” There’s a look on Darla’s face that says, “This guy’s much worse than I am right now.” That’s the whole point of that. He’s the student up until that point, and after that he overtakes the teacher and becomes something that even she can’t quite grasp, which I think is interesting.
CHRISTIAN KANE
(actor, Lindsey McDonald)
I loved working with Julie. She’s such a talented actress. I looked forward to going to work every day when she was there. I loved that the fact that her story line brought me more into it. You’ve seen Lindsey confused and you’ve seen him have morals, but you never saw him with a heart, and that’s what I thought was so smart with the writing, was that when Darla showed up, you saw that Lindsey had a heart. He actually wasn’t a bad guy. He just worked for a bad guy. He actually loved this woman so much, and there was nothing he could do to ever make her fall for him.
DAVID GREENWALT
Julie Benz came back as Darla, and what a great actor and person. I had so much fun with both her and David; I directed them quite a bit. But you never know; you put a person in, they do one little thing, and later on you’re thinking, “What if that person came back and did this?” It just grows kind of organically, and that’s always fun. We’ve done that quite a bit on Grimm, and when it works, it works.
JULIE BENZ
(actress, Darla)
I was actually a little worried coming back. I was afraid that maybe I had lost Darla. I’d done a lot of work since Buffy and I thought my work had grown a lot in those four years. But what that did, I think, was enrich the character more, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to play her at that point rather than being given the story line back then. I don’t know that I could have handled some of the things I was required to do as an actress four years earlier.
TIM MINEAR
We brought Julie back as Darla as a human, and my feeling was, “What does that mean for her?” The best way to explore that would be to look at what she was as a human four hundred years ago before she was a vampire and do an origin piece of her. That’s what “Darla” was. You can only do that so much, because it should really be her story with Angel throughout the 150 years that they were together. But I wanted to show her as a person and what that means.
JULIE BENZ
Having a soul is like a cancer to her. To Darla, having a soul is the most disgusting thing in the world and for a while she is in denial of it. It’s really hard to live with a soul when you’ve been alive for four hundred years. She didn’t walk Angel’s path. Of course, with a soul you start having feelings, and she has very strong feelings for Angel because they were together for 150 years.
TIM MINEAR
I realized, “That’s a big fucking romance is what it is.” A hundred and fifty years of being with somebody, that’s what I call having a history. But at no time was I trying to play this as being Angel’s true love. It’s more like the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—this troubled old married couple with secrets. I wasn’t trying for her to take Buffy’s place in his heart by any stretch of the imagination. But here’s a guy who’s been around for a couple of hundred years before he ever met Buffy, and certainly he was shaped in some way. Having Julie allowed us to explore that a little bit.
JULIE BENZ
The revelation that she never made him happy kind of screws her up. I think if she was a vampire, that wouldn’t have bothered her that much, but as a human that rejection is real human pain. That’s something she’s never experienced before. She’s always done the rejecting. I think that was very hard for her. As a human you have more feelings and emotions, and she was having a hard time dealing with the fact that Buffy made him happy and she didn’t. He and Darla were together for so long, but Buffy was only with him for three years. There was also the disappointment that he’s not the man she loved anyway. He’s Angel and she loved Angelus. It’s this epic story, and when you get past the whole vampire thing, it really is a classic love triangle. I think that’s why the audience could relate to it. Darla was the jilted girlfriend or the ex-wife.
TIM MINEAR
What we needed was sort of the anti–Angel/Buffy relationship, and a lot of that actually made it into the episode “Guise Will Be Guise,” where T’ish Magev is talking about Darla and his relationship with Darla and he suggests that what Angel should do is go out and find another powerful small blonde and break her heart, and then he’ll get over Darla. Which is sort of me, with a nodding wink, saying, “Maybe the entire series of Buffy was about Angel not being over his first love. Maybe it is more about Angel and Darla than it is about Angel and Buffy.” Which I think is a perfectly reasonable point of view to take when you are writing a show called Angel.
Indeed, there comes a moment in season two when Angel puts his life and soul on the line: he attempts to give Darla, who is dying from the syphilis that was killing her before she was first turned, another shot at life by participating in a series of deadly otherworldly tests. Although he ultimately passes these tests, the revelation that Darla has already been given a second life through Wolfram & Hart negates the possibility of his saving her.
In the end, Darla, moved by Angel’s willingness to sacrifice himself, accepts the fact that she is dying and takes Angel up on his offer to be with her until the end. Then Lindsey appears on the scene, using a Taser on Angel while Drusilla enters the room and bites Darla, turning her back into a vampire.
The following episode, “Reunion,” has Angel desperately trying to locate Darla’s body before her vampire resurrection can take place so that he can stake her, but Drusilla interferes, allowing the final transformation to occur. From there, Dru and Darla go on a killing spree. Angel, blaming himself for what’s happened to Darla, seems to go off the deep end, firing his crew and going this-side-of-Angelus dark, ultimately allowing the not-so-dynamic duo to feast on a bunch of Wolfram & Hart lawyers.
TIM MINEAR
Back at a lunch I had with Marti, Joss, and David where we came up with the idea that Darla was going to be human, the moment I mentioned that idea, Joss immediately came up with the scene. He said, “Later in the season, Drusilla will walk in and re-vamp her in front of Angel.” We knew that was going to happen. What I find amazing is that some of the fans didn’t care for the Darla arc and complained that it was Darla all year and was boring. I disagree, and in fact in almost every episode she appeared, something new happened. There was the big reveal, “Oh, she’s human”; then there was the big reveal, “Oh, she’s dying”; and then, of course, Drusilla walked in and she was a vampire again. So Darla—not a static character for us in season two.
And with Angel going dark, the card you don’t always want to play, that you want to save, is him going evil or losing his soul or becoming Angelus, so we were looking for a way to give him a dark night of the soul while he still had his soul. It’s often referred to as the beige Angel arc: he’s not exactly dark, he is not angelic, he is not evil. We felt like we wanted to explore sort of existential despair, because that is always fun, and it just made for more interesting stories. I mean, it is certainly my favorite thing on the show. And it’s actually better than him being Angelus, because he is making a moral choice, so that when he locks lawyers in a wine cellar with vampires, you completely understand it. This was before the war on terror and before waterboarding and that sort of thing, but it kind of falls into that category where it’s sort of like, why should I have a responsibility to not lock up these people in there with the things they have brought on themselves?
DAVID GREENWALT
We always had that darkness in us. We terrified the WB, and they were right at that juncture. But that’s what’s interesting about that character: he’s got a soul, but he has this other side and he is such an old soul, if you will, and such a tormented guy. The more evil he was, the more fun for us and for the audience. It just made him deeper and deeper, really. Then you’d do these flashbacks and you’d understand all the different things that had happened to him and how he came to be how he was. Just a lot to draw on. The metaphor for Buffy will always be the strongest, which is adolescence. There isn’t much of a metaphor for your twenties; it’s actually a bunch of wasted time until you decide what you’re doing. But because this guy was so old and had been through so much, you could do a deeper, darker arc to the stories with him. You could go anywhere.
TIM MINEAR
It’s not something we hesitated over. Not even a little. He doesn’t kill those people, though he certainly is complicit and aids what happens to them by not only shutting the doors but locking them in. What’s cool about Angel is that we can do that. Sometimes there are two different things at work in terms of whether or not he should take certain steps. Your character might do a certain thing, but the actor playing him may want to protect that image. David didn’t do that to us. He happens to be the kind of actor who’s game for anything. He allowed himself to look goofy, he allowed himself to be beaten, he allowed himself to do dark and heroic things, and I think for David it was more interesting to go to those places.
DAVID GREENWALT
One could say that in that arc we went just south of Angelus, but it was scarier in some ways because he still had a soul during all of this. My answer to how dangerous it was for the image of the character is that I hope it was pretty dangerous, because that makes interesting drama. I would further comment that what is interesting about Angel is that he contains the good and evil that you and I have inside of us, except that he is a very extreme version of it. He’s sort of a naturally dramatic form of it. It was necessary for him to go dark, first of all from a structural level of we didn’t want to repeat ourselves where we’re a formula show of Cordelia has a vision, we solve a crime; Cordelia has a vision, we solve a crime. I was getting bored with that formula when Joss said, “What if he locks lawyers in a room with the vampire girls, and afterward he goes home and his people are like, ‘We’re all that’s standing between you and darkness,’ and he says, ‘You’re right. You’re all fired.’”
The way he went dark was when you watch the show unfold, you discover that he knew that he had to go to a place where he had to kill Darla and Drusilla, although he in fact set them on fire. Killing is bad, but burning them is pretty dark, too. He knew he had to go to a dark place. It’s like those tunnel fighters in Vietnam—what they would have to do to their mind and soul to go into a tunnel that’s probably filled with mines and people with knives and having to try and kill people. So Angel was, in fact, trying to protect his people; at the same time, he was doing something that was very harsh to them.
DAVID FURY
For Buffy you understood what it was about. It was initially about high school is hell and surviving that. But then when we started doing Angel, the question was, what is the show really about? It’s about trying to remain a good man in an evil world. So the struggle of Angel to remain good is very much part of the show. It’s very much a struggle we all have to some extent. We always take the shortcut, or maybe do underhanded things, but we try to be moral creatures. We try to do the right thing. That’s kind of what Angel’s struggle is. There’s a little bit of an angel and devil on his shoulder, and pushing him toward the devil is definitely a cool thing to do.
DAVID GREENWALT
Look, the darker the better, if it’s justified. If there’s some kind of emotion involved. The thing we had to keep in mind is [that] nobody is a villain. Nobody is evil. Nobody thinks, “I’m evil; I’m bad.” They think, “Oooh, this is a great day,” or whatever they think. A hero who is all good and who only does good things is A, boring; and B, I don’t believe it. I don’t know if there would be a C or not. The C would be when I was a kid, my favorite shows were things like Maverick and Rockford. These sort of heroes were like, “I don’t want to get hurt, I don’t want to fight. I’d like to get a lot of money for what I’m doing.” I could identify with that. Somebody who is just square-jawed, never does anything bad, is always good—is bullshit. So, you know, the darker the better. And the truth is, some things you cannot bring a character back from.
DAVID FURY
They were trying to do a very different show than Buffy at that time. It was trying to separate itself and be the much more adult version, the dark version. They were pushing that envelope. Remember, that first episode I wrote for season one got thrown out because it was way too dark. The network was scared of it. So we backed off and said, “We’ll start here and make it a little bit darker as we go.” I could have done that episode, “Corrupt,” in the second season, but it wasn’t going to fly as the second episode, because they weren’t ready to go that dark. But the darkness kept sneaking in more and more, and eventually it snuck in so much that we had to pull back on it.
TIM MINEAR
Then, when all of that was over, we didn’t just hit the reset button. It took him a while to regain the trust of his crew, but he had to learn something. And then they got to go and learn something about themselves in his absence, and when he came back he said, “I don’t want to run the team; I want to work for you guys.” It altered the dynamic, even though he still sort of ran things. The show is not called Wesley.
You know, we were ahead of the curve on a lot of things. What I mean is, we did things like Angel locks lawyers in a wine cellar with vampires, turns his back on them, and lets people get killed. Or when he fires his crew, or when he takes a particularly dark turn. That was absolutely thrilling at the time. It was so exciting to do that stuff, and even to the fans just how shocking and great that was. You have to remember, this is before FX. This is before The Shield. The Sopranos was around, I think, but that was really the beginning. This is before serialized storytelling was happening on cable. Because we were on the WB, we could get away with things like Angel’s existential crisis, and throwing Darla around the room, and having hate sex with her, because he’s in a moment of existential despair.
That stuff was not happening on television. At least not that I recall. In a way, the WB was a forerunner of the kind of storytelling that you now see with Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. Obviously, The Shield was the real beginning of that, but, you know, Shawn Ryan came out of our shop. Shawn Ryan was on Angel, and working with me on that show before he went off and made the pilot for The Shield. I’m not saying Angel influenced that script or anything. I’m just saying that we were doing it before anybody else. I don’t want to make it sound like we were reinventing the wheel, because there was NYPD Blue, and there were other adult network shows where main characters had dark nights of the soul. I’m just saying that what we were doing on the WB was, I think, really a forerunner to the things that now live on FX and Showtime and HBO and places like that.
Moving from strength to strength in season two, the dark Angel arc came to a close with “Reprise” and “Epiphany” and his discovering the truth about Wolfram & Hart’s home office—that the Home Office is Earth—and that the evil in the souls of humans fuels them. In total despair, Angel finds Darla and gives himself up to her sexually, a moment set up in such a way as to duplicate the moment that cost him his soul on Buffy in “Innocence.”
Shockingly, it has the opposite effect in that it makes him rediscover himself and his purpose. He leaves her, saying that if he sees her again he’ll kill her. Later, he’s confronted by Lindsey—enraged by jealousy over Angel and Darla—who runs him over with his truck and attacks with a sledgehammer, though in the end Angel gets the upper hand, smashing Lindsey’s false one to pieces.
TIM MINEAR
I remember when we were talking about it, that this would be the episode where he had an epiphany. I said to Joss, “Look, he slept with Buffy and lost his soul. What if he sleeps with Darla and metaphorically gets his soul back?” Like at one point he has a moment of perfect happiness, so he loses his soul. But here it is an echo of that—we shoot it the same way; we make it seem like that is where we’re going—but really he has a moment of perfect despair and he realizes what he must do. Everyone sort of understood that I was riffing on that. And the truth is, it wouldn’t make any sense for him to have a moment of perfect happiness with Darla. That was another thing that I was trying to point out, because everyone kept thinking, if he has sex, he is going to lose his soul. The truth is, that was never the point. I mean, if he had the perfect chocolate soda, would that turn him evil?
CHRISTIAN KANE
That whole sequence in “Epiphany” was a huge moment for me. To see the guitar in the closet and not be able to play it; it’s dusty. Then I put my hand on to go to work. It was an unbelievable moment for me. The night before we shot it, David Boreanaz and I had hung out and we were very hungover the day we shot the scene. We were both really hurting that day.
TIM MINEAR
That fight was probably the most violent thing we’d done. David Greenwalt wanted me to tone it down a little bit. He left it up to me, but he said, “I feel like this is too violent.” I felt it wasn’t, and he was like, “OK.” It’s so funny that we didn’t get a note from the network about that. The note I did get was about the end of “Reprise,” when Angel drops the ring and says, “Do you want this?” and Darla grabs for it.
We filmed an extra slap which had to be cut. It’s all about context, because he’s about to take her and it does start to look a little bit like rape. The funny thing is, they didn’t give me a note on this throwing her through the doors. He throws her through the doors, and she lands on her hands and elbows on a pile of broken glass. They didn’t give me a note on that, but the little face slap they insisted on cutting. Then with the Lindsey-Angel thing, I didn’t get a note at all, and that was incredibly violent.
Christian Kane was doing all his own stuff in that scene. He was really into it. The fun thing is that Christian for a year and a half complained about the shirts and ties. Hates them, doesn’t want to wear them. And I had to be very explicit and say, “He’s got his tie on in this scene; it’s very important because later he’s going to pull off his tie and it’s going to mean something. Therefore he needs to have his tie on.”
CHRISTIAN KANE
Look, man, in a world of superheroes I was a lawyer. Everyone had a sword and I had a pen. I didn’t know that that pen was going to be that mighty, but it was no fun for me. Then they cut my hand off, and I’m sitting here in a suit and tie—while everybody else is dressed in leather, flying around the set—without a hand. I was miserable. I remember directors coming in and they would be like, “So, Drusilla’s here and Julie Benz’s character, Darla, is here … Oh, Lindsey’s here. Let’s have them punch Lindsey.” I’m like, “No!” He’s like, “They’ve got to punch somebody when they walk in, so you’ll just be the guy.” “No, man, stop having girls hit me!” And remember, I’m right-handed and they cut off my right hand, so I couldn’t even eat lunch. My hand was in a plastic surgical glove. Then there was a brace put on; then there was another surgical glove taped on that, and then it was painted. That was twelve hours a day. I used to have to ride home with my hand out the window, because it smelled so bad. One time I was sitting next to Tim Minear at lunchtime and I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m writing the next episode,” and I looked over at him and said, “Fucking kill me.” He didn’t.
TIM MINEAR
Wherever you put Angel and Lindsey together it’s interesting, and the idea of them working together, which happened in “Dead End,” certainly sparked everybody’s imagination. The idea that Angel had had this epiphany and was more easygoing would infuriate Lindsey all the more, which just made it so much fun. They really have a great chemistry. Actually, Lindsey is a perfect fit for the show, because here’s this morally ambiguous guy who is seeking his own kind of redemption. So he fits right into the universe.
Although she wouldn’t recur until season five,“Disharmony” saw Mercedes McNab reprising her Buffy role of Cordelia’s old friend Harmony, who shows up in L.A. Harmony’s behavior leads Cordelia to think, humorously, that she’s a lesbian, but then Cordelia discovers that Harmony is actually a vampire. She tries to redeem Harmony, but that proves impossible as Harmony nearly betrays the group to a vampire cult.
MERCEDES MCNAB
(actress, Harmony Kendall)
Being called for Angel was very shocking for me. By that time I had moved to New York. My run with Buffy was over, but then I got the call when I was in New York and they asked me to come back for Angel. That was completely out of the blue.
TIM MINEAR
That was one of the few episodes where we did get to do the “metaphor” on Angel, which is “my old high school friend shows up in town and we’ve both changed.” And she happens to have changed into a vampire. I thought Charisma was hysterical in that episode. But more importantly, it put Cordelia in a situation where she ends up doing the same thing Angel did with Darla, because she needs to forgive him and this kind of puts them on the same moral level to some extent.
MERCEDES MCNAB
I think Harmony was always trying to find her way. She would try to be whatever person she thought she was at the time. Inherently, she is selfish and evil. And out for number one, which always supersedes all else.
JOSS WHEDON
(executive producer/cocreator, Angel)
As well as things were going in season two, we had our guest stars drop out after episode eighteen—Julie Benz and Christian Kane. We couldn’t get them and here we were with four more episodes, and the two people who had sort of driven the entire season were gone. So we sort of looked at each other and scratched our heads.
TIM MINEAR
We had assumed we would be continuing the Darla story, that either Angel would have to kill her by the end of the season or there would be some ultimate confrontation. But because Julie wasn’t available, we couldn’t do that.
JOSS WHEDON
As much of a problem [as] not having those actors was, after “Epiphany” what we wanted to do with the last four episodes was have an unbelievably grand adventure where we sort of comment on where we’ve come as characters.
DAVID GREENWALT
We were like, “What the fuck are we going to do for the last four episodes?” Joss just thought and thought, and he basically spat out the idea for these last four episodes. You just didn’t see Pylea coming. It was a really fun twist and an interesting way to go, and having to be rescued from that world where Cordelia had the experience of being a goddess.
JOSS WHEDON
I said, “Can we just go to Oz? Can we just be ridiculous? Are we allowed to do that?” And everyone seemed to like that, so we decided to go and make a really strange comedy—a real fantasy comedy. Those are the Pylea episodes, which I think are among the funniest things we ever did on Buffy or Angel.
If you substituted the simians from Planet of the Apes with demons, you’d have a sense of Pylea, an alternative dimension where humans are viewed as animals and the more demonically inclined reign supreme. It also happens to be the home world of Lorne, which he was desperate to escape from—the reasons for that quickly becoming obvious.
This world, which can probably best be described as medieval, is one that Cordelia accidentally goes to, resulting in the rest of Team Angel having to follow and rescue her. Once there, it’s a pretty topsy-turvy ride; for a time, it seems that Cordelia doesn’t need rescuing. In Pylea they meet Winifred “Fred” Burkle, also from Earth, who has been there for five years and is definitely in need of rescue. While there, Angel can walk around in the sun and see his own reflection, the downside being when he “vamps” out he becomes a demon that threatens to eclipse his humanity permanently.
Also added into the mix during the Pylea arc is actor Mark Lutz, who portrayed a warrior from that realm, the Groosalugg, ultimately nickamed “Groo” by Cordelia. Half demon, he’s a character who would return in season three when Groo came to our world.
MARK LUTZ
(actor, Groo)
If you talk to a lot of actors, a lot of them will tell you the same thing: a fish out of water is one of the most fun things to play, which was particularly true when Groo came back to L.A. with the gang—there was an opportunity for comedy there and a silliness that I loved. Nonsense is the route to my very soul, so it was fun to play the dichotomy of Groo being this champion that has all these great, wonderful qualities on paper, but all this naïveté. A lot of people characterized him as being dumb, but I don’t think he was. He was naive and earnest and meant well. An innocent in a lot of ways. And besides being a fish out of water, he was also the pivot in the love triangle between Angel and Cordelia. You get to play the fish out of water and the guy who comes between the hero and the girl? Great, sign me up.
TIM MINEAR
We knew we wanted to do Pylea, and the question was whether or not we could afford to. It was incredibly expensive to do. Think of all the demon makeups, first of all. Shooting on location; creating a place to shoot it; creating a castle—all this stuff was expensive. We actually ended up going to this little Mexican village that’s not a real village. It’s sort of a back-lot thing out in the boondocks where film companies shoot sometimes. If you look closely, you may notice that Pylea is also China from earlier in the series. Same exact village but redressed. So that was a lot of location shooting and a lot of day shooting, which we didn’t normally do.
STUART BLATT
To make it Pylea, we put half timbers on the houses, which gave it a somewhat medievaly, English countryside look. We cobbled together whatever we could to convey the image of a sort of medieval storybook land. We built a stock in the middle of town, where their heads were put through a chopping block.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
It was fun to shoot outside during the day. It had a totally other feeling for us, because everything we did was usually late at night. But by the end of the week, we were always working until about 6 A.M. Thursday and Friday were always late calls going to work at five or six P.M. and be out by six A.M. the following day, so it was just nice to be able to shoot during the day.
MARK LUTZ
Pylea had that Old West feeling in a way, and that was the nature of the buildings there, which had probably been there since the ’30s. So there was a nice ring of authenticity. And I remember shooting the fight with David Boreanaz; it was like two or three in the morning. This was back in the day when it actually rained in California—I know it’s hard to believe—so it was pouring rain, and we were basically rolling around in it. It wasn’t warm. Not Canada cold, but it wasn’t warm, and I felt like Conan or something, going mano a mano with the main guy in the show.
When I came back in season three, we were running through Echo Park and I’m still in the full Groo garb. There’s crowds of people around that aren’t on set, just the public, and it was funny to see the looks when you’re running in your Conan outfit, with this broadsword, on a street. The passersby are like, “What’s that guy doing?” Kind of a fun moment.
KELLY A. MANNERS
Pylea sounds like a gum disease. Those episodes were really challenging. The funny story about that is that we’re in a van and Joss was the character who did the dancing in Pylea. He’s all in his green makeup and his long red wig sitting in the van, and a stunt guy sits down right next to him and turns to me and goes, “Whedon’s lost his mind. This script is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever read.” I think the Host character was part of the Death Walk Clan, and we called this stunt guy the Dumb Fuck Clan. He’s sitting down next to Joss Whedon and doesn’t know it. Well, he wasn’t back the next season.
TIM MINEAR
What we wanted to do was basically give each of the characters an opportunity to live out their fantasies; they kind of get to express the part of them that is important to them. So Angel gets to be in the sun, he gets to be a hero, but then that has a flip side. Cordelia wants to be a princess and she gets to literally be one, but there is a dark side. Wesley gets to be a leader, but he has to lead people to their deaths in order to win the battle. And Lorne is like a classic story of a guy who is gay and is rejected by his family and has to go off to the city to create his own family.
We never said specifically that the Host was gay, or that Lorne was gay, but that was definitely the way we wrote him. When we went to Pylea, the idea was to make it the dimension that he escaped from. It gave him something to do; he had to go back and kind of face the family that rejected him and realize that he had made the right decision to leave. So everybody gets to express their most primary color.
DAVID GREENWALT
From a structural standpoint, Angel went dark from episodes ten to sixteen, but by sixteen he had begun to make his amends. He came back and worked for his people on a whole new footing. So it wasn’t the last part of the season in which he went all dark, but, instead, we went to Pylea for a romp in this Wizard of Oz–like place, but still a place where he turns into a horrible beast and had to, again, confront this whole, “I don’t want to be this thing that wants to kill my friends.” You have Wesley saying to him, “You’re not a demon with a man inside, you’re a man with a demon inside. You need to remember what you are.” We were always looking for ways for Angel’s dark side to come out and get a little out of control; that’s what made him interesting.
BEN EDLUND
(supervising producer, season four)
From Pylea we get Fred and had already gotten Lorne, important parts of the universe. To me, something like the Pylea arc has the breeze of stand-alone, because it’s omnivorous, it’ll go somewhere and eat that little delicious lighter fare of being in Pylea where you don’t have to weigh as much for at least a portion of it. But then you also get these profound characters that come out of it, profound in terms of they each have their own angst and their own plight and their own need. And they fold into the larger mythos. It’s like, why the hell does Gilgamesh go out into the woods to meet Enkidu? Why? I don’t know. Maybe he wants to fight and fuck a hairy man [laughs]? He’s a real pain in the ass around town, but is it episodic or is it serialized? It turns out that after three thousand years it seems serialized, but it’s pretty fucking episodic.
TIM MINEAR
The fans were divided about Pylea. They were saying things like, “Where’s Darla? Where’s the angst? What’s going on?’ We brought in Darla and instead of Angel staking her and saving everybody and they’re off for pancakes and eggs together at the end of the season, Darla was demoralized and just went away. I think that people weren’t sure what to make of that. It didn’t seem like a resolution to them, and in fact it was not, as they—and we—would discover in season three. What people had to remember is that the season was about Angel, not about Darla. If you look at Pylea, and what we did there, it’s sort of a metaphor writ large for what all our characters had been through in the second season.
JOSS WHEDON
Pylea also gave us the opportunity to introduce what would ultimately be the final piece of the puzzle in creating an ensemble: Amy Acker.
TIM MINEAR
We felt that we needed another color for the show, and that was a character that Joss had been considering before we’d ever written an episode for her. He was actually reading actors for the part when Amy came in. He saw her and immediately saw the star potential there, and I totally agreed.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred)
I had had a pretty big awareness of Buffy. My college boyfriend, his roommate, and his roommate’s girlfriend, they hosted “Buffy night” at their house. Everybody came over and ate pizza. I was a theater major so wasn’t always around, but whenever I had a free night, I would see them and wonder, “Why are they so obsessed with this?” Then I got into it myself.
A native of Dallas, Texas, she was born Amy Louise Acker on December 5, 1976. Graduating from Southern Methodist University, she made some television guest appearances prior to Angel but subsequently was either recurring or a regular on such shows as Alias, Drive, Dollhouse, Happy Town, and Person of Interest.
AMY ACKER
I had been a dancer and mostly done ballet growing up. I ended up having knee surgery and I had to take a credit in school for arts, where I had this amazing theater teacher in high school that was so good that when I got to college, I felt like, “Oh, I already know all this.” She just really pushed everybody in her classes. You read Stanislavski and about all of these people … we did The Crucible, and Tony Kushner, and these great plays that were not dumbed down for high schoolers in many ways. I had always been super shy, but I found out that if I said words that other people wrote, and got to be characters other than myself, that it was sort of this amazing thing that I couldn’t imagine doing anything else after it started.
I think that’s part of the reason I’m drawn to this genre. I mean, all of my favorite roles that I’ve gotten to do have been in genre TV. Those roles really allow you to transform—sometimes from a human to an alien—but it also gives you a journey as a character that a lot of other shows don’t really always have. When I look back at Angel and think about the role of Fred, it was almost like I had seven different parts on the show. I had been to the crazy alternate dimension in a potato sack, and then head of the lab, then Illyria … there’s just so much room for a character journey.
DAVID GREENWALT
I knew Joss was going to love Amy Acker from the time we tested her. We were shooting something in a library downtown, a little scene with her, and right from the start she was like a Joss Whedon character. She’s a doll to boot and really talented and well trained and, of course, makes it look easy. You see Amy and she’s sort of a sweet Audrey Hepburn, but she has this whole other level that she can play with that sweet face and you really want to use all that if you can. We used her in Grimm and she was like a soccer mom who also was a spider woman who sucked out people’s innards. She was great and can do two sides of the coin really well.
AMY ACKER
I had moved to New York and then to Los Angeles, and I had only been there a month when I got an audition for the part. They were looking for this little three-episode part on Angel. So I went in and met the casting director, auditioned, and got a call back. I went and got to meet Joss, and then all of a sudden, when I was about to start, they said, “Well, actually we’re thinking of maybe having a new series regular,” and they were toying with the idea of characters that had already been on the show or introducing a new part.
TIM MINEAR
Joss wrote these very funny scenes that were not part of a script, just as audition pieces, and I remember how great she was in that stuff.
JOSS WHEDON
As we did with J., we brought her in for a little arc-let to make sure she would register and then brought her in as a regular.
TIM MINEAR
I don’t think it’s a mystery that the character of Fred is very much a Joss Whedon type; he likes those cute, frumpy, brainy girls who end up becoming knockouts. She sort of falls into the Willow mode of a brainy girl.
AMY ACKER
Joss, before I actually started filming, wrote that little Midsummer Night’s Dream–inspired scene that’s on one of the DVDs that Alexis and J. and I did.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
That screen test was when we first met her even before she got the role. It was awesome. Joss really put her through her paces. He had a lot of notes, and she took everything like a champ. He was just trying to see how much he could play with her, and he can and he could. As you see with her ultimately becoming Illyria, he had great faith in her ability to change. It was awesome. Her being added to the show. It’s hard for me to even think of a time when she was not on the show.
AMY ACKER
When I started, I found out that I was actually going to be a regular on the show. And I was ecstatic! It was my first real TV job, so I was terrified, excited … all of those things. Looking back at it after so many auditions from that point to now, it just seemed like it all went way too easily. I guess it was just meant to be. Usually there are so many more hoops to jump through—it spoiled me for future auditions. There were definitely aspects of Fred I could easily connect to. I don’t know that they were even necessarily there to begin with, but being from Texas and a little awkward and shy … well, that didn’t take too much acting on my part [laughs].
For J. August Richards, season two represented an important turning point in his career and his life—and represented the first year he had ever spent as a series regular.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
In that season we were all finding out how to incorporate Gunn into the group and we found him, slowly but surely, what his purpose would be and how he would interact with everyone. One thing I remember was having a really great off-camera rapport with Alexis and us bringing that on camera. We invented a handshake that the characters would have, because we liked the idea that they were so different but they could be so close. Consciously I made the choice that Wesley was Gunn’s best friend.
I also think over the course of season two, it was about Wesley, Cordelia, and Angel becoming members of Gunn’s family. I feel like’s Gunn’s superobjective throughout the course of the five seasons never changed, which was to protect his family. Because he’d already lost his parents, every kid on the street, and ultimately Angel, Wesley, and Cordelia would become his family, so it never changed. He would die for the people he loved. That was really the essence and the core of the character for me, that he was just someone [who] would give it all for the people that he loved.
JOSS WHEDON
In season two, again we sort of figured that our strength lay with the people we knew, so we started to have more fun with Lindsey and, of course, Darla. Darla was our big shocker at the end of the first season. Season two also aired at a point when we were still matching Angel up with Buffy, because they were on the same network and the same night. For example, we had an arc in season two that I love where Angel just got very, very dark and very into beating the bad guys. We deliberately set it up so that his epiphany—his return to grace, if you will—was aired the same night as the death of Buffy’s mom. We knew we could not do a depressing Angel after showing “The Body.” People would be killing themselves, including us. So the series still sort of matched.
TIM MINEAR
Season two took Angel to his own personal existential dark place that he crawled his way out of. He was able to be happy for a second in Pylea, and then the shit hit the fan when he got back to see Willow waiting for him, which was our way to tie in to the season five finale of Buffy when Buffy died. So we definitely go off on a cliffhanger. I will say the Pylea arc in and of itself had a beginning, a middle, and an end. That story gets resolved. And then when we come back to the real world, it’s a little bit like when you come back from vacation and you’re like, “I had a great vacation, but now I have to go back to real life.” That’s kind of where we leave you off.