“It’s my first day. I was afraid that I’d be behind on all my classes, that I wouldn’t make any friends, that I’d have last month’s hair. I didn’t think there would be vampires on campus.”
After a pilot was given the green light by the WB, Whedon shot a presentation reel rather than a full one-hour pilot. Shot on 16 mm, which was grainier and cheaper than the 35 mm film most television was shot on at the time, the presentation reel was a relatively bare-bones affair with primitive visual effects and action. Stepping behind the camera to shoot it would be Whedon himself, but while the presentation itself was unimpressive, the writing and the casting were, which helped get the series on the air.
Among those considered for the titular role early on were Katie Holmes, who would later go on to star on the network’s Dawson’s Creek. But the first person cast by Whedon along with casting director Marcia Schulman was Anthony Stewart Head, who loomed large in the cultural zeitgeist at the time in a series of serialized Folgers coffee commercials (yes, you read that right, Folgers—coffee—commercials), in which Head flirts with his female neighbor over coffee. Such were the nineties for those of you who weren’t there.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator/executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I was very careful to make sure that my leads were really specifically drawn out so that they’re not so generic: “I’ll be pretty this week; I’ll be snotty this week.” I hate that shit! You’ve got Buffy, you’ve got Giles, you’ve got Xander, and Willow, and what’s great about her is that she is also someone you just respond to emotionally whether she’s in jeopardy or being hurt, you’re just completely open to her in the same way that you’re open to Sarah.
GEORGE SNYDER
(former assistant to Joss Whedon)
With Giles, Joss knew exactly what he wanted. Tony just so nailed the part.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
(actor, Rupert Giles)
Early on, Giles didn’t have the faintest idea what he was doing. He just knew it was his duty and his life’s mission to find this girl and to teach her how to deal with vampires. She is the One. The One who possesses all of the talents. Giles is the Watcher, so the fact that she had no desire early on to get on board was infinitely annoying to me. And the fact that she was this young American high school girl and I’m very English, so there was a lot of fun to be had.
GEORGE SNYDER
What’s amazing to me is that the English got Ally McBeal before they got Buffy and they said, “You can see that Buffy comes out of the Ally McBeal mold.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, quite the reverse, and that’s no reflection on David Kelley.
In addition to his relative fame in the Folgers commercials, Head had also had guest-starring roles in such shows as Highlander: The Series and NYPD Blue and had roles in films like A Prayer for the Dying, Devil’s Hill, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover. On the London stage he appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Julius Caesar, The Heiress, Chess, and Rope. To genre fans, he was probably best known for his costarring role in the short-lived VR.5, in which he more or less “watched” over that show’s star, Lori Singer.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
I read the Buffy script and it was really exceptional. You never know what will happen, of course, but I had never seen anything like it on TV before. I chose to take the script with me when I popped out for something to eat. I sat there eating with my script and found myself laughing out loud, which is a bit embarrassing when you’re sitting on your own. But it is something that is strangely accepted in L.A.—people sitting at tables reading scripts and trying desperately not to look obvious that they’re reading a script. I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out what happened, but at the same time I couldn’t help but crack up.
This was amazingly new stuff, so I couldn’t wait to meet them. I met Gail Berman, Joss, and a few others. Had no idea who Joss was. He was so young anyway that I probably thought he was an intern or something. I didn’t pay him much attention the first time around, but then again when you’re greeted by a bunch of faces in a room, you don’t really know who’s who. Joss has apparently said that I picked up the part and walked away with it under my arm at that moment.
JOSS WHEDON
The poor man had a ton of exposition on the show, because we wanted everyone to understand what’s going on. He’s got such extraordinary range, yet at the same time he’s extremely funny and plays the person who is so hapless and confused by this young American so perfectly. People used to ask why he was cast. We heard him read. Then that was over. Soon as he did, we knew we had our guy.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
The first test I did was for Fox, and just before I went, my agent said, “Have you seen the movie?” I said, “A long time ago.” He suggested I see it and I was saddened, because it wasn’t at all what I had read. I thought, “This is bizarre. This is not what I envisioned at all.” Later I saw Joss in the hallway, and, by that point, I had worked out that it was him and said, “I saw the movie,” and his face fell. He said, “Well, we’re not doing that.” I’m a great believer in instincts and intuition, and I knew then when I talked to him, I just felt it would come together.
So I had to audition in front of a bunch of Fox executives, which is bizarre, because it’s a room of about twenty people. Very crammed, like a small Equity Waiver Theater. You go in and do it. Some of them laugh excessively, because they’re working very hard to make you feel at home, and some people are completely blank and you have absolutely no idea how you’re going down. It’s rather like being a bad stand-up comic. Added to that, you sit in the corridor before you go in and they give you a contract to sign, so flashing through your mind is, “OK, I’m going to be away from my family for five to seven years. Do I know what I’m doing? What’s going to happen?” At the same time, they’re bringing pages of the contract that have been faxed from the agent with points that have been renegotiated or changed. You’re flipping through this contract trying to figure out what you’re saying that you’ll do instead of being able to concentrate on acting. It’s bizarre.
RAYMOND STELLA
(director of photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
He’s always got his glasses. That was his big thing. That is a distraction that keeps you busy. He loved his props.
MARK HANSSON
(second assistant director, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Anthony was the brother of Murray Head from Chess and Sunday Bloody Sunday. He was a very nice man, but he has some birth-defect hand deformity. I remember he was always careful to never show that on camera.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
One day, Tony and I walked up and everyone was surrounding Tony’s trailer. Joss had a CD cover from the show in his hand. I remember I looked at it and said something that was pretty funny, like, “Is this a joke?” His face was made up like KISS, but with colors. And Tony says, “Actually, no, it’s not a joke.” He’s very hip, very cool. The first time I ever saw him, it was funny. We were in the casting office and he had earrings in and he was dressed in baggy pants and Converse high tops and he’s nothing like his character.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
I had said the word “bollocks” and I had pronounced it “bull-locks,” and that was the final straw. He came to me and said, “We don’t say it like that, you prat. You’re embarrassing me back home.” He tutored me by force for about six months until I got my accent right. Without Tony Head, we would not be having a conversation about what a great British accent I had.
The role of one of Buffy’s best friends, Xander Harris, went to Nicholas Brendon, who began his career as a production assistant on the sitcom Dave’s World before securing a recurring role on the soap opera Another World and on stage in The Further Adventures of Tom Sawyer, My Own Private Hollywood, and Out of Gas on Lover’s Lane. Buffy represented his first genuine big break.
GEORGE SNYDER
A couple of guys came in to audition for Xander, but Nicky just hit it out of the park. He, like many of the characters, begged the question, “Which is more Joss, Willow or Xander?” In a way, probably Xander, in another way Willow. There is some part of Joss in all of the characters.
NICHOLAS BRENDON
(actor, Xander Harris)
I was Joss Whedon in high school. I think what Joss wanted is a situation where he could completely manipulate and write the situation the way he saw fit. He played God. If he wanted that girl, by golly, by going through me he was going to get that girl. He could say all the funny lines and have all the retorts quickly, very witty and wry. I liked that. I think he went to high school in Europe at an all-boys school, so it wasn’t a typical high school situation. I think it made him even more insecure when he went out into the real world. We had that conversation where he told me that Xander was him in high school.
JOSS WHEDON
Nick Brendon is extraordinarily likable. He’s real good-looking and brought a humbling quality to the character, which is extremely charming. He can also play a range of emotions.
NICHOLAS BRENDON
I was horribly insecure in high school. I wanted to be funny, but I had a stutter. One of the reasons I got into acting was because I have a stutter, and that’s why I’m hard on myself when I act. I lived my whole childhood life and high school with a stutter that I couldn’t control. It took a lot of hard work. When I want to do something a certain way, it has to be that way; otherwise, I’ll beat myself up for it.
Brendon had hoped to be a professional baseball player, but an arm injury cut that dream short, and he pursued an acting career instead. After some commercial work and a recurring role on The Young and The Restless, he appeared in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest.
NICHOLAS BRENDON
I went into acting. I was a great player, but there are so many politics in baseball and you have to be really lucky and in the right place at the right time. It sounds similar to acting, but with acting I was really naive.
Charisma Carpenter, whose first name was inspired by an Avon perfume, was born on July 23, 1970, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her early credits include a succession of local lounge shows and beauty pageants. By the time she had finished high school, though, she was seriously leaning toward a career in teaching English. College would lead her to a position as an aerobics instructor and then a one-year stint as a cheerleader for the San Diego Chargers.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
Since I was five I was in a dance studio, and I was always involved in the arts. I went to the School of the Creative and Performing Arts, so we learned stage technique and opera and acting, and all sorts of things under that umbrella. One summer I took a three-day seminar and there was scene study, so I was given a scene and you learn your lines and you act it out. There was this one woman who it was impossible for her to give a compliment, and she was kind of wowed by me, and it really caught my attention; something about us heartbroken artists need to have the attention of those who don’t approve of anything.
I grew up in Las Vegas and I was very involved in the community and I was involved in the Young Entertainers, which is basically a talent group for young children. We used to tour the local Travelodges at every entrance and exit of the Las Vegas freeway, of which there are two, and we would do little bars, and we would do the March of Dimes, and we would do old folks’ homes, and I was in talent contests. I was always performing at a very, very young age. On top of that were the recitals, so I feel like, with that kind of background, to be in front of people performing, it came second nature to me, so acting, when that came about, made sense. It was like the next level.
In 1992 she went to L.A. to visit her boyfriend and never moved back. At first she took a job as a waitress at California Pizza Kitchen, and then, after the inevitable questions from her customers whether she was an actress, she decided to actually give it a try. Acting school followed, which in turn led to over twenty television commercials, including two years as the Secret antiperspirant spokeswoman.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I was in my early twenties and had moved to Los Angeles from Las Vegas to be with a boy. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I got a job at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called Mirabelle, and one day an agent asked me if I did commercials and I said no. He said, “What are you doing with your life?” And I said, “I’m here and I’m waiting six months to pay college tuition to go back to school, because it’s an exorbitant fee,” and he said I should really consider acting, because it’s a lot less time-consuming than waitressing. I’m like, “Oh, tell me more.” He introduced me to his son, who was a commercial agent, and I started doing commercials, and then I started studying acting with Robert Carnegie and Jeff Goldblum at Playhouse West and fell in love with that.
It was a really tough school and we had to do book reports. Our teacher was constantly reminding us how impossible it was to make it and this work ethic was kind of pounded into our heads; how often were you working on your craft, if you’re trying to earn a wage, how many hours a week are you really putting forth? We had to do book reports, we had a reading list, and we had to read 1,500 pages a week, because it was imperative we understood what good writing was. So he provided a reading list, and, in a matter of a few short pages, [we had to] be able to discern what is good writing and what is the essence of a story and what is character development. It was quite the curriculum.
Stage roles in No, No Nanette and Welcome Home Soldier were followed by a guest-starring turn on Baywatch, which caught the attention of Aaron Spelling. Ultimately, Carpenter was cast as the bitchy Ashley Green on Spelling’s short-lived Malibu Shores.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I was auditioning for Buffy while I was doing Malibu Shores. I guess they knew it was going to get canceled soon. So I auditioned wearing overalls, a leather jacket, and flip-flops. It was really a bizarre day. I was actually reading for the character of Buffy. Then they wanted me to read for Cordelia five minutes later. I did and I guess they really liked it. Joss Whedon was there and I didn’t know that it was for producers only. Cordelia was always looking for attention and never got it. The fan mail was disheartening too, saying things like, “Are you ever going to be nice?” My response is, “I am nice. They’re meaner to me than I am to them.”
When I was on Malibu Shores and went on to Buffy, I suffered from extreme anxiety. I didn’t really know how debilitating it was. I remember when I was dancing in these talent shows and I would compete in pageants, and I would blank on what the next step was in my routine. You have to remember, I would have four-hour private rehearsals on a Saturday and a Sunday and I had been doing the same dance for a year. It’s not that I didn’t know the steps. For whatever reason, and I could never predict it, which created even more anxiety, I would forget. So in Buffy, I really wanted to do a good job and I believed in what I was doing, but I just never felt safe; I never felt I could trust myself or remember, and it created a really bad confidence problem which was just getting bigger and bigger.
When you find your passion and you know what you want, and you’re living that dream, you want desperately to never lose it—there’s just this pressure that I put on myself, and then there’s the absolute pressure in making TV, which is expensive. At the time we were using film and so it was two takes and you’re done. By the time you’ve shot seven people for about fourteen hours and it’s your close-up and it’s time for you, and you don’t get it in two takes, it’s a problem. It’s an economic problem, it’s a morale problem, and it’s a confidence problem.
GEORGE SNYDER
Originally, Joss was looking for a black actress for the role of Cordelia. But one of the stumbling blocks there was the way we knew Joss anticipated the relationships shifting and changing. There was some concern at the network at the time that interracial relationships would be problematic. At that point the WB was a different kind of network. I know that came up and Joss said, “I can’t have restraints on how I mix and match the dynamics. That’s part of the fun of the show, that Willow is in love with Xander, Xander is in love with Buffy, Cordelia can’t stand any of them yet finds herself drawn to Xander.” Joss decided it wasn’t worth fighting that fight at that particular time, but he didn’t want to be hindered in the dynamic of the shifting triangles.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I had gotten a call on Malibu Shores from my agent for this audition. She said the word on the street is that Malibu Shores was not going to continue, so she got me an audition to keep me employed. I went in, I got the monologue, the Buffy monologue that was the audition with Giles in the library, just talking about why she doesn’t want to be the Slayer and she doesn’t want that responsibility—she wants to be a kid—that was the speech. I read for Joss Whedon and [casting director] Marcia Schulman and it was a rainy day and I was in these overalls and bright orange JCrew flip-flops that were plastic, and it was a really bad choice. I don’t know how they saw Cordelia in any of that, but I read for it, and they loved me; they just said, “Can you do me a favor, how do you feel about reading for this other part, Cordelia?” I’m like, sure. And they were like, “Can you just go prepare it, go in the corner and come back in fifteen minutes?” I was more fearless then, so I did, and they loved it.
I went back to work on Malibu Shores, and I got a call that they wanted me to go to the network and meet with Garth Ancier, who was running the WB at the time, which no one had heard about. It was a crazy story, because I was at work at Malibu Shores and I knew I had to be in Burbank at 7 P.M., and my job was cooperating, to get me out, which was nice, and it’s rush hour and I’m in Long Beach and I had to get to Burbank. I’m driving this Nissan Sentra, my very first car, with no air-conditioning, no radio, and the next thing I know I’m in gridlock traffic in the middle of downtown L.A. and I’m freaking out, because I’m late. And I get this 911 beeper message from my agent. I get off the highway and stop at a liquor store with a phone booth to call her back, and she’s like, “Where are you, they want to leave, they’re hungry.” Literally, I said to them, which is so Cordelia, “Wendy, you tell them I have been in gridlocked traffic for the last hour and a half and I will be there in the next ten minutes and they should wait and order pizza! They’re going to see me today. I’m coming, I’m almost there, and they can’t bail now, not after everything I’ve been through to get there. They don’t know my pain.” So that was it and the rest is history. I got the part. I was in a 7-Eleven parking lot when I got the offer. It was thirteen days after the final audition. I was going crazy. I just went into the 7-Eleven and started telling people.
DAVID GREENWALT
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
They were all so funny, particularly Aly, Charisma, and Nicky Brendon. I wrote a line for Nicky in “Teacher’s Pet,” I can’t remember it now, and he was just so good. He could use these words that he didn’t necessarily know what they meant and Willow could give him grief. They were funny and they could play all this. Willow’s got a thing for Xander, Xander’s got a thing for Buffy, Xander gets a thing for Charisma that blows everybody’s mind. They were eighteen, Nicky was maybe a hair older, but they were all really young and suddenly making a lot of money. It changed everybody’s lives. It was a big deal.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I really liked that I was the truth woman. There’s also another word for that. One of my favorite lines was something that takes place, where Giles says to Cordelia, after she says something rude to Buffy, “Do you actually have any tact?” And my response is tact is just not saying true stuff. So forget it. I enjoyed that very much, that I could be vulnerable and at the same time express myself.
It was a great part. I wish I was as witty as her. One of my favorite lines is, “That’s just propaganda spouted out by the ugly and less-deserving.” She said hilarious stuff. I had Joss speaking in my ear 24-7, so thankfully some of the wittier things in her way of speaking sunk in. There’s got to be some of that in me, or I wouldn’t be able to do it.
JOSE MOLINA
(former assistant to Howard Gordon)
Charisma was never supposed to be part of the regular cast, but she was so great in that character that everybody just started writing toward her, and so this girl who had been created to be a thorn in Buffy’s side and nothing else became a regular. She and Harmony were basically the same character and there was no depth, because they were just the bullies. So when they’d decided that she was going to be a part of the show, then they had to figure out, well, how do we show different parts of this without taking up too much broadband from the other characters that everybody’s already in love with?
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I was a series regular that wasn’t going to be in all shows produced, which is a fact my agent kind of left out of the equation and it wasn’t good news. I think they were really happy with me and decided to keep me, which is why they tried to make me a part of the Scooby Gang, if you will. They probably never initially had any plans to do that, which is why I never fully fitted in, because the role was never meant to be like that. I think they finally started to develop the character a little more when she and Xander got together.
One of the many unlikely recurring stars of the series was Mercedes McNab, who played Harmony Kendall in the unaired presentation reel, returned for “The Harvest,” and then appeared in a recurring role throughout much of the series and into Angel, where she became a series regular in its last season. A member of the “Cordettes” who is later turned into a vampire, McNab’s other clique was even more exclusive: she was one of the many actresses on the series who had auditioned for the titular role of Buffy.
MERCEDES MCNAB
(actress, Harmony Kendall)
I auditioned for Buffy like pretty much every other girl in L.A. at the time. I went back in a couple times and then I never heard anything. After all, it’s just not that unusual. Then they just called out of the blue and said they had a role, and they wanted to offer it to me, and it was the role of Harmony. It was just a guest star, not a huge part, nothing to write home about, really. But I was excited, because I wanted to be a part of the project. Of course, I would have much preferred to be Buffy.
At the time I didn’t think that my character would ever return to the show. As far as I knew, it was just a one-time-only kind of a gig. I was in high school at the time and I remember I was allowed to drive on the freeway. I had just gotten my license and it was the only time my mom and dad would let me drive on the freeway since I was going to work, so that was kind of a bonus.
I just thought I was Cordelia’s sidekick and I didn’t think anything would come of it. I had no expectations. I really didn’t think it would get picked up, let alone that it would be on the air. Then to last eight years was even slimmer. I don’t think anyone thought anything of it.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I barely worked first season, but at the beginning of the second season, I was hung upside down on a meat hook by my feet. The pace was much swifter than first season. I don’t know if I was sick from nerves, but in my episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” toward the end I was throwing up. There was a scene with the invisible girl in the bathroom and it was a really convenient location because right after that scene was over, I threw up three times. It must have been nerves or something.
MERCEDES MCNAB
There wasn’t really a difference between me and Cordelia originally in the first season. From the point of an audience, I wanted it to be a little bit more interesting. And then also have the opportunity to stand out, because you don’t necessarily need two of the same characters in one show. There was an opportunity for that when we were in that computer science class. I remember this pretty vividly. We were doing some project on our computer and I just remember taking a moment playing that I’m not just the bitchy girl, but I’m also just so dim. I thought maybe that could differentiate me from Cordelia’s character.
Before landing the role of Willow Rosenberg on Buffy, Alyson Hannigan began her career in Atlanta, where she started shooting local commercials, moving on to national spots such as those for McDonalds, Six Flags Amusement Parks, and Oreo cookies. At age eleven, she moved to L.A. with the hopes of breaking into film and television.
ALYSON HANNIGAN
(actress, Willow Rosenberg)
I moved out [to L.A.] to be near acting, because that’s what I always wanted to do since I was a kid. I started commercials when I was four, and I’ve been doing it all my life. It was an after-school sort of thing. Some people would go off to ballet; I would go to a commercial shoot. Commercials are just a day here or a day there and I didn’t miss much school. And I loved it. I also had regular activities. I was on the soccer team. I was a kid; I just had a job that I loved.
My first picture was My Stepmother Is an Alien. An interesting thing is that Seth Green also played my boyfriend in that film. After Stepmother, I did a short-lived sitcom called Free Spirit. It was sort of a Bewitched kind of show. It went for thirteen episodes, then got canceled. I did some guest spots here and there, nothing really too wonderful—movies of the week and all that stuff. But nothing great until Buffy. By far Buffy was the best thing I’d done. I did some movies of the week that were horrible, but they weren’t the same thing as a horror series.
GEORGE SNYDER
The casting of Willow was a problem, because the network said, “Why don’t we just get an Aaron Spelling girl and put glasses on her?” The notion of casting a not classically beautiful girl—“beautiful” in the television sense or Spelling sense of the word—was something Joss was absolutely committed to. He had somebody in mind that didn’t work out and then there was somebody else who didn’t work out. There was a lot of shuffling actresses to the network and the studio and finally, in the midst of it all, came Alyson. And that’s when he said, “You know, this is the one!” Fox got it, I think. The WB was a little reluctant at first, and her look—as you watch through the first season—changed a bit. Finally they began to realize that she had a look that was equally important. Joss basically said, “Trust me.” The WB did, and she got all the prisoner mail in the first season. Actually, in the first season her mail was second only to Sarah’s.
ALYSON HANNIGAN
I almost didn’t get the part of Willow. My agent had submitted me, but for some reason they wouldn’t see me. They had cast someone else for the presentation, but then she got fired when the show was picked up. I finally was able to get an audition for the recast … and I auditioned for what seemed like forever. Then I waited and waited, but didn’t hear anything. I’m not the most patient person. After a while, I was at the point of, “Oh, please, just tell me yes or no, because I will kill myself if I don’t find out!” I figured, even if it was bad news, at least I would know. Well, I was at a 7-Eleven store one day when I got a page to call the producers. After all that auditioning and waiting, they told me I had gotten the part! I was like, “All right, cool!”
On the first day of shooting I was a little bit nervous. Nick [Brendon], Charisma [Carpenter], and Sarah [Michelle Gellar] had all known each other from the pilot episode, and I was pretty much a stranger. But it didn’t take very long for all of them to become very good friends of mine. Everyone involved with the show was so great and nice. During the first season hiatus, I had my tonsils taken out, and Sarah visited me in the hospital and brought me a little Beanie Baby.
JOSS WHEDON
Alyson Hannigan played the shy, bookish one and what’s great about her is that she is also someone you just respond to emotionally. Whether she’s in jeopardy or being hurt, you’re just completely open to her in the same way that you’re open to Sarah. She is also sort of a temptress. She brought a real life to the character and made her very much a part of the group. If these four didn’t have different perspectives on stuff, they were going to be boring.
ALYSON HANNIGAN
I’m a fan of the genre, but such a wimp when I watch the movies, because I will basically jump into the lap of the person next to me. There was an episode, “Prophecy Girl,” where there’s this huge, enormous slimy monster attacking my leg. It’s wrapped in a tentacle around my leg and is pulling me. They gooped it up with the slime stuff. It’s really disgusting and really scary, and then they turn on these air things so they would flop around and they would make this hissing sound, so I was genuinely screaming to myself at that point. I watched the footage and my hands were up in my face and it looked so fake. It was my natural reaction, but it looked really fake. Of course, only I noticed it, because I’m so critical, but I thought, “What a dork.”
JOSE MOLINA
I was probably a cross between Xander and Willow. I kind of wanted to be as funny as Xander, but I was more dorky and studious like Willow and you know, like Xander, Buffy was a dream girl. Who doesn’t want to date her? But there is a moment in the season one finale where Xander does ask Buffy out and Buffy is like, “I don’t know, we should just be friends.” And then I think Willow asks him, “What are you going to do tonight?” And he just says, “I’m going to go home and listen to country music. The music of pain.” As a guy who sat with a lot of sappy music and licked my own wounds in my time, I could definitely relate to that.
Aspiring actor David Boreanaz—who was making a living parking cars, painting houses, and handing out towels at a sports club—was famously discovered by an agent while he was walking his dog. This led to guest appearances on Married with Children, the TV movie Men Don’t Lie, the stage shows Hatful of Rain, Fool for Love, and Cowboy Mouth, as well as the feature films Aspen Extreme, Best of the Best 2, and Eyes of the World. Whedon cast him as Angel, an early protector of Buffy who quickly became her love interest, and revealed himself to be a very soulful vampire.
DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
I wanted to be everything. I wanted to be the fire guy, I wanted to be the police guy, I wanted to be the cowboy, the Indian. I guess I didn’t say I wanted to grow up and study the Shakespearean art of acting. I’m not good at that kind of stuff. I love people. I love experiences. I love going out. I love traveling. I love adventure, I love learning, and I love involving myself in things where I’m going to learn more about people and seeing people. I’m extremely voyeuristic; I like to look at things. I can go to parks and watch people and their personalities. I didn’t study at the Royal Shakespearean Academy or whatever. I have a high respect for those people, but my method is trying to get down and dirty with it. I understand the level it takes in order to achieve the impossible dream, and for me, the dream is, “Be very simple.” And that’s very hard to do. It’s very difficult. It takes a lot of work, a lot of effort. I just want to work hard and do what I’m doing.
DAVID GREENWALT
That’s a hard part to cast, a young really good-looking guy who maybe isn’t a star yet, but probably could be one. I remember David came in and in the scene he’s supposed to be riding a motorcycle. He turned a chair upside down and kind of sat on it as if he was on a motorcycle. Gail Berman and Joss and I, particularly the women, really responded to David. Then, you know, I think it was about episode seven, somewhere around Christmas, where this first kiss between Buffy and Angel happened. I just said, “I’ll just write the episode.” I didn’t know it was going to be that big a deal. It went on the air and, you know, the rest is history.
Recalled casting director Marcia Schulman at the time, “The breakdown said ‘the most gorgeous, mysterious, fantastic, the most incredible man on the face of the earth.’ I think I saw every guy in town. It was the day before shooting, and a friend of mine called me and said, ‘You know, there’s this guy that lives on my street who walks his dog every day and I don’t know what he does, but he has all the things you’re describing.’ And the minute he walked in the room, I wrote down in my notes: ‘This is the guy.’”
DAVID BOREANAZ
I’ve always liked horror films. When I was a kid, Frankenstein, the original movie, scared the hell out of me. I’ve always been fascinated with the film Nosferatu, and when I saw the film the first time it was eerie. You had no choice but to get into the genre when you were on the show, because you’re surrounded by all these vampires and it’s amazing when you have all these extras in vampire makeup, or you’re in the graveyard shooting and you look around to see vampires hanging out. The show itself was really well written and it just goes to show you that if you have the writing and the right chemistry between the cast, things really do work out for the best.
JAMES MARSTERS
I like [David] so much. The man does not whine. He refuses to whine. One time I saw him break a two-by-four with his head. He was trying to get into Buffy’s mom’s house, because he saw me in there. He was supposed to try and get in, forgetting that he wasn’t invited, so there was a force field that kept him out. The way that we did that was to rig him with a steel cable out of his back so that when he got to a certain point, he’d be pulled back by a cable. Well it was one of those things—dusty floors, maybe. God knows what it was, but the cord was shorter than he expected and he got yanked off of his feet, back through the porch, and splintered a two-by-four in half. Not just a crack, he splintered it! The whole set hushes. They think David is going to the hospital and we’re shutting down for a week. But David pops up and says, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”
The other story is that when I went over to Angel, he had just gotten rear-ended on the highway at high speed. They just took him to the hospital because they suspected whiplash, but the doctor says it wasn’t and he should just be careful. He went back to set and he was strung up on chains and hung off the floor for sixteen hours while we tortured him. The man would not complain. The one time I realized he was in pain was when he thought no one was looking at him. I saw his face go ashen. But he’s like a stunt guy; he won’t admit it.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, “It’s About Power”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
The first real iteration of the sympathetic vampire came about with the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, in 1976. In it, Rice introduces Louis, a vampire who is repulsed by the joy his maker, Lestat, takes in killing and feeding on his victims. While Angel is not the first sympathetic vampire, his character certainly helped popularize this new conception of the vampire, as following the end of Buffy and Angel, both television and the movies saw a rise in this depiction of a vampire, which seems to have become a staple of the vampire genre.
In 2008, much to tween girls’ delight, the vampire Edward Cullen was brought to life on the big screen, in Twilight. The same year also saw True Blood, a television program which showed the southern gentleman—and vampire—Bill Compton. The following year, in 2009, television viewers were introduced to Stefan Salvatore of The Vampire Diaries. All three characters are essentially the same type of vampire, refusing to feed on humans and wanting to help, rather than hurt, humanity. Since then, there have been dozens of other less popular sympathetic vampire roles on television and the movies, as the fascination around this now prototypical vampire has grown immeasurably.
GEORGE SNYDER
Angel was not designed as an ongoing character. What would you do with Buffy and Angel? If we froze them in time, if we had stayed in high school forever, maybe we could have kept it going. Anybody else would have been tempted to stay in high school and stay with that unrequited love. What is more boring than that? It’s Sam and Diane from Cheers. No, you don’t let them go to bed, and we all know that when Sam finally did get into bed with Diane, it was the end of an era. So your gut reaction is, “Let’s just keep him a dark, mysterious, brooding guy who helps out Buffy.” Joss said, “No, at some point you’ve got to go to the next step. Up the tension and go for the dark.” What’s the last thing you have happen? A Slayer in love with a vampire! So you do it. But having done it, oh my God, now he’s bad.
Of course the mail came in: “Turn him back, turn him back.” Even the network came in with, “He gets cured next week, right?” Joss is like, “Oh no, not next week. First of all, he’s never going to be cured. Second of all, he’s not going to turn back and he has to go to Hell.” They said, “He’s a very popular character and we’re a little concerned.” But, again, it was the narrative driving the show. Then, of course, we did turn him back and he was redeemed. Then the question was, “Now what?” Of course that led to him being spun off into his own show.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
David’s a good friend of mine but an odd duck. As a matter of fact, I’ll tell you a story about his show, Bones. My daughter went to work on it on season two, and she said the assistant directors don’t even look at David Boreanaz when you go to set. I said, “Well good, when you get called to set, I want you to run up to David and jump in his arms and when the ADs freak out, then you better whisper real quick you’re my daughter.” She said the assistant directors went crazy, but David loved it. He’s a good guy. As with most actors as they got more and more famous, some of them change drastically. David’s a good guy. He has a big heart. David did get his nose up in the air toward the end, but he was still a great guy. Let me put it this way: I got fired by Don Johnson. There were no Don Johnsons on set.
RAYMOND STELLA
(director of photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I remember he was always kind of an asshole. I worked with him on Angel, too. He was kind of stuck-up a little. Married a Playboy model and he liked to play golf.
DAVID GREENWALT
I thought the way David handled his position on Buffy and his relationship with Sarah was really great and terrific and also very smart. He always treated her like she was the star of the show and then he got his own show and, of course, did a lot of crossover stuff. I never saw him misbehave in any way on any of my shows with him.
The producers couldn’t have hoped for better casting when Sarah Michelle Gellar entered the process as Buffy. Already an acting veteran, having appeared in many television commercials, in 1980 Gellar moved over to the daytime soap opera Guiding Light, and guest-starred on William Tell; Love, Sidney; and Spenser: For Hire. In 1989 she cohosted the syndicated teen show Girl Talk before costarring in the teen soap opera Swan’s Crossing. A fairly big break came in the form of the TV movie A Woman Named Jackie, in which she played the young Jackie Bouvier. Small roles in several films were next, followed by Neil Simon’s Broadway play Jake’s Women. This was followed by a two-year stint on the soap opera All My Children, for which she was awarded an Emmy. As her tenure on the soap was coming to an end, Gellar went to the Buffy office to audition for the part of Cordelia and walked out with the lead.
JOSS WHEDON
Sarah Michelle Gellar embodies Buffy extraordinarily, and she brings an intelligence and depth to the character that I certainly couldn’t write. She is so incredibly sympathetic—she’s somebody that you just love to watch—but she’s also this extremely intelligent actress who thinks her way through everything. So she makes Buffy an emotionally very-connected character, which is huge. It’s never, “Oh, look at her, she’s a dork,” even though she’s kind of an eccentric. It’s never, “Oh, laugh at her and her silly ways.” You’re completely sucked into her story, because Sarah is so gifted.
GEORGE SNYDER
We had seen a lot of actresses for the role of Buffy. She read for Cordelia, but then they had her read for Buffy and knew she was right. The other actresses couldn’t get the balance. Somebody said to me, “It’s very interesting that for a girl as beautiful as Sarah is, she nevertheless has been able to sell the idea of being an outcast.” That’s no small feat. There’s a vulnerability there. Your initial reaction is, “Yeah, right, she’s not the most popular girl in school?” Yet when you watched, you got it. She sold it.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
My manager spoke to the WB and they mentioned they had this Buffy show. He thought it would be a great opportunity to use my tae kwon do and do comedy and drama. I probably had eleven auditions and four tests. It was the most awful experience of my life, but I was so driven. I had read the script and heard about Joss Whedon and how wonderful he was. I went to the audition the week he was nominated for his Toy Story screenplay. I thought, “I’m going to have this role.” He tells me I nailed it, but I still went through eleven auditions.
JOSS WHEDON
There was no second place. We read tons of people and several were staggeringly untalented. Buffy is a tough part. It is a character actress in the part of a leading lady. This girl had to look the part of the blond bimbo who dies in reel two, and yet she’s not that. Buffy is a very loopy, very funny, very strange person—kind of eccentric. Sarah has all those qualities and you don’t find them in a beautiful girl very often.
She gave us a reading that was letter perfect and then said, “By the way, it doesn’t say this on my resume, but I did take tae kwon do for four years and I’m a brown belt. Is that good?”
Finding Buffy was the biggest challenge, and I think if we hadn’t found Sarah, the series might not have happened or lasted. What Sarah brought to the part was her intelligence. At the same time, she had the hormonal idiosyncratic goofiness that made Buffy not just the Terminator. She approached the vampires with total irreverence, which drove them crazy. I called her Jimmy Stewart, because she suffered so well.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
I picked up tae kwon do when I was about nine or ten. It just seemed like something interesting to do at the time. I thought it would be fun, kick around a few people, get a couple of aggressions out. I studied for about four years and had my brown belt when I stopped training. So when Buffy came up, it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to use that. We shot the fight scenes very carefully. We usually tagged the other actor, which is sort of just a light kick. We used stunt doubles when necessary if it was really dangerous. Martial arts is a form of meditation—it’s an art form—and what I studied was a defensive form, not an offensive form.
JOSS WHEDON
My attitude is the show wasn’t so good that it’s worth anybody getting hurt for it. Sarah was always covered with bruises and I was saying, “Sarah, don’t do this stuff. We’ll get the close-up of you saying the funny thing after.” “No, no, I can do it,” she said, and then she gets this giant black-and-blue mark on her arm. “Sarah, stop, please!”
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
When I was growing up I watched Mallory worry about her dates and her boyfriends on Family Ties. I watched Blair on The Facts of Life. There were no strong female characters. I’m sorry, Tootie was not a role model. But with Buffy, we were showing real situations. Buffy was not the prettiest girl in her school; she was not the smartest. She made mistakes; she made good decisions and bad decisions. She was dealing with real situations that we can put on a fantasy level.
As an actor, you can always bring parts of yourself to the characters, but hopefully it’s only a small portion of it, and the rest is a new character that you developed. My junior high school was like Buffy’s. I was kind of a nerd. I didn’t have many friends and I was an outcast. But I think Buffy was an amazing role model, because the one thing that I was able to do at my high school was to be an individual. The problem with most high schools is they don’t stress individuality. Buffy showed girls it’s OK to be different.
GEORGE SNYDER
I think Buffy was different from other high school–based shows in that it allowed its characters to move through their grades naturally. They all got to grow up. A decision Joss made early on was he didn’t want forty-year-olds in high school. So the decision was made that they would be sophomores, juniors, seniors, go to college, etc. Actually we weren’t sure what she was going to do, but we knew that she was going to graduate from high school in three years. This attitude allowed us to change the looks and to let them evolve as actors and in their characters.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
It’s always interesting when you go from being a child actor to an adult actor. All My Children was really that transition for me. Buffy was a really wonderful opportunity for me to play someone a little closer to myself and the situations I’d been in. Minus the vampires.
JOSS WHEDON
We had scenes where we’ve shot her reaction and she makes the entire scene even if she doesn’t have a line. I was the luckiest man in show business.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
Usually, you’re doing one thing on television, you’re funny, it’s action, and there were few shows on television where all of us get to do all of it. We got to be funny, sad, we got to fight. As an actor that’s your dream, to get to do all these amazing things.
HOWARD GORDON
(consulting producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
One of the genius things that Joss did was to not take the Buffy character and go with someone in terms of looks like Charisma Carpenter or Kristy Swanson, who played her in the movie. To not make her an airhead, but someone who’s beautiful and accepted by those girls, but at the same time is essentially a nerd herself. So I think Sarah Michelle Gellar was a great bit of casting, and she made her a more substantial character who fit in among the nerds and would have been welcomed by the popular kids had she chosen to do that. I think that was a genius reinvention of Joss’s original premise.
DAVID GREENWALT
I love Sarah. I directed a bunch of these and directing her was like driving some really high-class Lamborghini automobile. Sarah was very young, but she was very old for her age. I think she was eighteen when that thing started, but she’d been working since she was a kid. Sarah loved to have a director pay attention and give her notes. I swear to God, you could go up to her, it could be a big scene, maybe four or five pages, and give her eight or nine notes, and she would do every one of them in the next take. She was just born to do that job.
RAYMOND STELLA
Sarah was brilliant. She hardly needed more than one take. She really knew what she was doing and she was a joy. She would do more than one if the director asked. She started in soaps and commercials where she was the second person and the lead didn’t show up who had all the lines, and they were wondering what to do. Sarah knew all the lines. They weren’t even her lines, but she knew them and read them and they gave her a chance apparently and from there on she got a reputation that she knows what she is doing.
DAVID GREENWALT
She liked to have somebody important like Joss or me watching her performance, and I was sort of like, “I’m not going to spend all my life on the set doing this.” I do remember one time she said, “Well, are you going to be here?” I said, “No, I’m not.” Then Joss ended up having to soothe her a little bit, but she always delivered.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
(actor, Principal Snyder)
When they cast me and I got the offer for Snyder, I’d already been watching the show, because my friend Kenny was on it playing Principal Flutie. I really liked the show a great deal and I wasn’t watching it for Kenny anymore, I was watching it because I really enjoyed it. But when they called and said, “You’re going to be doing this show,” I wanted to know who I’d be working with and what Sarah Michelle Gellar’s background was. They told me she’s a nineteen-year-old soap opera actress and I, being a theater actor and an older guy, went, “Ooooh, a soap opera actress.” I had a bad attitude about that. When I got to the set on the first day, they had me walking down an aisle in an auditorium and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to deal with these kids. And I’ve got a regular job, why am I doing this?” My attitude was not very good. And that’s Snyder. Snyder grew out of that attitude. They just built on it.
JAMES MARSTERS
If you know your lines and you show up on time, she was like your best friend. The beautiful thing is that no one screwed around, because Sarah doesn’t. Sarah doesn’t pull shit or diva stuff. She didn’t come in late, she’s always prepared, she always has little jokes to keep the set light without messing around. She’s pretty amazing.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
After about the fourth or fifth episode of Buffy that I had done, I marched myself up to Sarah’s trailer and knocked on the door. She was surprised to see me, because after all she only knew me really as Snyder. We hadn’t really talked much and there was some antagonism between the two characters. I said to Sarah, “I need to apologize to you.” I told her the story about my initial reaction and then I said, “But I’ve come to realize you’re one of the finest actresses I’ve ever worked with.” And it’s true. I’ve rarely worked with actors as gifted, as talented, as amazing as Sarah Michelle Gellar. After that, we became great friends and we were very close off camera.
MARK HANSSON
All the makeup and hair people would do a synchronized hand movement from above their heads to their waists, saying in unison, “She, who must be obeyed,” whenever Sarah’s name would be mentioned. It’s from an old sci-fi movie.
RAYMOND STELLA
I remember before Buffy I was up to take over Gilmore Girls and the leading lady was, like, forty and that’s much harder to light. On Buffy, I had to make Sarah look better than everyone else and keep her on your good side. I remember she got so pissed off at me one time and I didn’t even think about it. The director never came back. He’s got Sarah somewhere and he goes, “I need a real wide lens right up here when she comes up out of this trash bin at the Doublemeat Palace,” or something, and she’s going, “This camera is too close and it’s too wide.” She got me in a corner and laid it out. And I’m going, “I’m sorry I wasn’t thinking. I won’t let him do it.” She was pissed, and so he never came back. I didn’t think about it. But, she’d get so tired. You just go with it.
JOSS WHEDON
I’ve worked with my share of divas. But I also have enormous respect for divas. They’re usually people who do something extraordinary and know it and show up and do it. And you have to deal with a lot of other stuff but they usually come in and say, “You’re going to have to deal with a lot of other stuff. I’m a diva. So here we go.” And then you get this beautiful work and you’re like “OK, good, and thanks for the heads-up.” Really toxic people I avoid. I cast for sanity. That’s a very important thing to me. But toxic people are different than divas. Divas are complicated but they know that there’s a simplicity to what they’re going to give you that you need and want. Truly toxic people are just about trying to tear something down. Whether it’s somebody else in the thing, whether it’s the story—they’re about power. Those people have no business in my life as far as I’m concerned in the industry.
HARRY GROENER
(actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)
Sarah’s been doing it since she was an embryo. She is such a pro. There was never any crap on the set. They all seemed to like each other and enjoyed working together. That’s a wonderful environment to be part of and you want that.
Gellar’s first efforts as Buffy were showcased in the original half-hour presentation reel for the series—directed and written by Whedon—that sold the series.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
That presentation was pretty ropey. I don’t think anyone would disagree with the notion that it left a lot to be desired. There were elements in that script that were strong, though. There was one really cool moment with me and Buffy in the library. We had a library set that was two tiers. There was a mezzanine balcony with a spiral staircase coming down from it. In the middle of a conversation Buffy is on top and I’m down below. While she’s talking, she does a handstand on the banister rail and flips twice and lands on her feet. At that time we had two stunt doubles, one to do acrobatics and one to do fight scenes. The acrobat was just astonishing; she did this great flip.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
That was Joss’s first directing experience and he didn’t have a very good support team behind him. We didn’t know what we were doing with the show. It was like all these ideas in your head and they’re not working out right on paper. We had a whole summer to fix it by the time we did the real pilot, and I think we did a pretty good job. What made everything work is we needed to find Alyson Hannigan. She was the best and what allowed Nicholas Brendon and myself to become a threesome. Once she came aboard, everything clicked.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
Joss did not have a very sympathetic crew for the presentation. Generally you hope when you pull a crew together and it’s your directorial debut, there will be some give and take and some leeway. But they were very odd. I’m being very general here, because some people were great and some people were off, but they weren’t very generous, which was all rather surprising, really. By the time we got the unit together for the series, it was a very different matter.
This presentation reel featured a different actress in the role of Willow, Riff Regan, who didn’t make it to series. Cherubic and acerbic, she was completely different from Alyson Hannigan but would later nab a starring role in the popular NBC series Sisters.
The pilot presentation begins with Julie Benz’s seemingly innocent Darla sneaking into school with a boy who appears to have malevolent intentions, when she turns into a vampire and chows down on him. The next morning Buffy arrives at Sunnydale High and is greeted warmly by Principal Flutie (played for the first and the last time by perennial character actor Stephen Tobolowsky [Groundhog Day]), after which she meets Xander and the mysterious librarian, Giles, who throws a VAMPYR tome in front of her—at which point she flees the library. She is befriended by Willow when the Cordettes, comprised of Cordelia and Harmony, attempt to co-opt Buffy for their own clique.
Only after finding out there’s a dead body on campus and learning it is the work of vampires does she return to the library, where Giles tells her she can’t escape her destiny. But Buffy insists she’s given up vampire slaying for good. Meeting Xander at the Bronze, she learns Willow has gone off with a mysterious stranger, prompting Buffy to take up her old ways, defeating several vampires in the process. The reel ends with Xander and Willow now hip to Buffy’s secret and her throwing a stake through the heart of a handbill for an upcoming screening of Nosferatu on campus.
Watching the twenty-minute presentation, it’s easy to see why the WB saw something in the show. Most of the performances are terrific (particularly the troika of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicholas Brendon, and Charisma Carpenter), Joss’s trademark puns and wit are all in evidence, and the sales reel, despite its clear lack of budget, is original and charming. Whatever it lacks in polish, it makes up for in heart. Also, it is certainly abundantly clear that Regan was the wrong choice for the role of Willow, not just physically—it required a more wispy (not to mention willowy) actress and the playfulness and neuroses of Alyson Hannigan’s effortless portrayal.
DAVID GREENWALT
They had shot a pilot, but they replaced the character of Willow with Alyson Hannigan, who is now my good friend, as is her husband, Alexis Denisof, who appeared in Grimm for me.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
[Regan] was the opposite end of the scale. Basically, she was a very different concept of Willow. I must admit that when I first saw her, she wasn’t how I envisioned Willow. Alyson is exactly the way I envisioned the character. The girl who played her was lovely, really gorgeous, we had great fun, but she didn’t feel comfortable in the part. She just didn’t feel comfortable in the gawkiness of it, which was hard to play. It just didn’t fit right, and I think she would be the first to admit that.
The first thing we had to film was the last scene when we say, “Well done,” and pat ourselves on the back and go on to the next thing. I was playing it as I thought they wanted me to. When you’ve tested three times and each time you’re thinking, “Christ, what was it I did last time that they really liked? What was it that got me this job?” It does make you self-conscious and you are desperately searching for whatever it was that got you the gig. But in that last scene, I was appalling. Seriously appalling. And luckily, as fate would have it, my dressing room was next to the room they were using to show dailies. I heard my voice coming from next door, so I puttered in and had a look, and was appalled at what I saw myself doing. I was then able to pull back from that.
I was play-acting the man instead of being the man. So then the scene that Sarah Michelle Gellar and I had in the library was the one that made all the sense and the one that felt completely right. It was night and day. Very different. Thankfully, there were a couple of good scenes like that, and that offset this dreadful scene.
MERCEDES MCNAB
I’d seen the original movie and liked it because it was very clever and relatable. So I liked Joss’s work, but didn’t translate completely to this show. Obviously, the show was a lot different. I was a fan of that. But him personally, I just thought Joss was very creative and smart and kind of goofy and quirky, and there was just so much going on. We really didn’t have a ton of time to connect in that first pilot presentation.
Based on the presentation, the WB greenlit the series for a mid-season debut in 1997. That meant Whedon and his cast and crew would be producing the first twelve episodes without any feedback from either the critics or the audience as production on the entire season would be wrapped before it even aired.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
We finished the entire first season before we went on the air, so we were able to do it in a bubble without having anybody on the outside interfering. When I was in North Carolina shooting I Know What You Did Last Summer, we didn’t get to see it, because it was on a cable channel we couldn’t get in the town we were in. I was able to avoid the craziness, although Alyson called me every week going, “You don’t understand, every time you go past a grocery store there’s a Buffy billboard.”
We sort of felt it was time for the show, because the network bought it. And they wanted to do the exact kind of show we wanted to make. And they were interested in making it with us, which is good. I sort of figured they would say, make it stupid. But they didn’t. It pretty much went the way we planned except it dug down a lot deeper. And we just didn’t know we could put so much pain up on the screen and how good it would make us feel.
JOSS WHEDON
I don’t think we would have existed anywhere else. No one else would let us do it, they wouldn’t have been there with us, they’d try to micromanage it into something they understood.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
The network wasn’t exactly sure what we were doing in the beginning. After the praying mantis episode, they said, “We’re just not sure if we’re sending the right message.” We’re like, “What message? You have sex with her and she bites your head off.” These are situations that children can relate to. The themes throughout the show are common: loving a friend, being at an age when you’re having problems with Mom, and wanting to be an adult and wanting to be a child at the same time.
DAVID GREENWALT
We wrote episode one and two and took a lot from the pilot presentation. Everything was shot from scratch.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
All of my friends felt sorry for me, because I was on a mid-season replacement show, on a network no one had heard of. People would look at me and go, “At least you got a pilot your first time out! That’s great! Next year you’ll get one that’ll go.”