JOSE MOLINA
I’d known Tim Minear on Strange World and we became friendly, because I was Howard Gordon’s assistant and his conduit to Howard. He let me read a draft of his script and even let me give notes and listened to my notes. He was really open to me as a writer and one of his legacies at Mutant Enemy, and still . . . , is that he does not pigeonhole assistants as assistants. It’s been through him that a lot of writers who were former assistants, starting with myself and Mere Smith, were able to write on those Mutant Enemy shows.
Among additional crew members hired for Angel included Kelly A. Manners as producer, who was “in the trenches” during production and describes himself as the show’s “money man.” He served as coproducer on Buffy, and after Angel went on to Torchwood and Powers. Also hired were first assistant director Ian Woolf (The X-Files, Criminal Minds) and production designer Stuart Blatt (Dollhouse, Quantico, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders).
KELLY A. MANNERS
Angel was my first show as line producer, and that’s a big jump. It was my show, so I loved that. The fact that Joss entrusted me with it was an honor. I was very excited to move on. David Greenwalt and I skipped off the Buffy lot together knowing we were going to create something new and different and have a good time. As to my responsibilities, I had final say on the entire crew. I do get a vote when it comes to the directors. If my production manager brings me an early one-liner of an episode and it can’t be shot, I do a little thinking and I call up the writers and say, “Hey, instead of blowing up these three cars, why don’t we just run one car into a light pole? We can still tell the same story, but we’ll save a lot of money.” The trick of my job is I’m the conduit, the hub, between the studio and the creatives and my job is to give them everything they want or as close to everything they want and yet keep the studio off their backs.
IAN WOOLF
(first assistant director, Angel)
I’ve done so many different shows that it’s really just standard operating procedure for me. I mean, I knew coming in as first AD that it’s all about the scheduling of the project and getting the day’s work done and helping the director get what he needs on the screen. I wasn’t a fan; I was just doing my job.
KELLY A. MANNERS
We stole some of the crew from Buffy. The production designer, although he wasn’t my production designer, oversaw season one of Angel. We had people in place to keep the Whedon franchise going in the same direction and bringing Joss’s vision to the screen, which is what it was all about. Every show’s got its challenges going in, whether it’s not being able to get the correct makeup artists or the correct visual effects house. We kept the same visual effects house as did Buffy. We stole a prosthetics makeup artist from Buffy and brought him over to Angel. Those would have been the biggies, but we had most of that in place going in. I got a leg up and kind of cheated.
IAN WOOLF
As the show went on, the cast became less a fan of the makeup. David Boreanaz didn’t like it especially. The moment you were done with a sequence where you knew that was the last part of the vamp sequence, he would literally stand there waiting. I’d say, “Wait, David. Wait. Let me make sure the gate’s clean before you do anything.” The moment I said the gate’s clean on the camera, he would basically just rip the vamp makeup off his forehead. He hated it so much. He wouldn’t wait for the makeup guys to put the right solvent on to take it off nicely, he would just rip it off.
Stunts were an integral part of both Buffy and Angel, and Woolf remembers well a near-climactic moment in the series’ premiere episode, “City Of . . .”
IAN WOOLF
In the first episode we had the most impressive thing we had ever done, because we shot it off at 1100 Wilshire, which is this huge office building, and we did two double descenders. One stunt guy was on one descender, falling, and above him about twenty feet was our stunt coordinator at the time, Jeff Cadiente. He was free-falling down on this descender rig. About halfway down, the actor, who is a stuntman, obviously, hits a switch and self-ignites himself on fire, because he’s supposed to be a vampire. When we get to the bottom, we had to put him out with fire extinguishers. Like I said, it was one of the most impressive things that I’ve done in a long, long time.
DAVID GREENWALT
Whatever else we faced in season one, I would say “The Ring,” in which Angel ends up captive and fighting other creatures, was the hardest episode of television I’d ever done up until then. Think about that episode. You’ve got twenty-three guys in makeup, you’ve got fight upon fight upon fight, and then you have a riot in that place. So physically it was the biggest show we ever did by then, and it was just a hundred hours in the editing room. There was never an easy moment in that show. Maybe it wasn’t something people hadn’t seen before, but we kept raising the bar. From a production standpoint, it was a hell of an achievement.
Serving as production designer of Angel’s pilot, including the creation of the office for Angel Investigations, was Buffy’s Carey Meyer. For episode two onward, he suggested that a friend of his, Stuart Blatt, who had been working in low-budget features, interview for the position. Blatt did and was hired, staying with the show until the end.
STUART BLATT
(production designer, Angel)
I loved Carey’s design for it. I loved the fact that in the downstairs, Angel lived in this sort of janitor workmen’s closet area, so that was kind of gritty and mysterious and played into his vampire qualities of it being dark and mysterious and somewhat like a tomb. The other great thing is they had built a real working elevator that, even though we built the whole set on one floor, it insinuated it was two floors. In other words, they built the set on one floor, so the upstairs, the Investigations part of it, was one floor, and you get into the old cage elevator and it would start to move down in a pit in the ground. Then, cut, and you’d pick it up on the other side, where they raised the elevator up and they’d bring him to the next level, as if there was a transition from one floor to the next. It was very clever, although it was very slow moving. One of the things Joss said was, “To the Batcave!” and then it was like the calendar turning, because it was such a slow-moving elevator. It was a great visual, but not with any kind of momentum. In a practical sense it worked, but not if you were trying to heighten the tension.
When it came to casting Angel, the one given was, naturally, David Boreanaz. Joining him from Buffy was Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia, who has moved from Sunnydale to Los Angeles in the hopes of furthering/starting her acting career, when she inadvertently bumps into Angel and ends up working with him. Additionally, Glenn Quinn, best known at the time as playing Roseanne Conner’s son-in-law Mark Healy on Roseanne, was cast as Doyle, the half-demon Irishman who serves as Angel’s connection to the Powers That Be.
Unfortunately, because of problems he had with drug and alcohol addiction, Quinn was let go with the ninth episode of the season, “Hero,” in which Doyle sacrifices himself to save a number of demons (the good kind) from being destroyed—and passes his visions on to Cordelia through what became a goodbye kiss. Added to the show in his place was Alexis Denisof as former Watcher Wesley Wyndham-Price, who arrives, somewhat comically, as a “rogue demon hunter” but gradually evolves into something much more. Additionally, in seasons one and two Elisabeth Rohm played Kate Lockley, a police detective and frenemy to Angel who can’t cope with the demon-filled reality around her and tries to ignore it as best she can, but nonetheless does end up occasionally working with him on certain cases.
TIM MINEAR
Building an ensemble definitely gives you more places to go. It’s like the difference between a combo and an orchestra. Oboes are great, but you don’t want just oboes. You want to have the full complement of the sound so you can create what you want. You can see that Joss did that brilliantly in Buffy. He just kept adding characters and you’re thinking there’s just no way he can service all of them, but he did.
DAVID GREENWALT
We
learned on Buffy, and I wished I’d carried it through to Grimm, to start with three or four characters and add one a year. As opposed to starting with seven or eight characters.
TIM MINEAR
Each character that you add brings something interesting to the dynamic and changes it in some fundamental way. I just think he was really right in doing that, and each character is so specific. That’s certainly the approach we took on Angel.
JOSS WHEDON
In the narrative of Angel at the beginning, Cordelia comes to L.A. to be an actress, which didn’t go as well for her as it did for Charisma. When I first was developing the idea, David Greenwalt’s first comment was, “We’ve got to bring Charisma along, because she doesn’t belong in this world at all, and she would have no patience for it.” And so the juxtaposition of those two characters just seemed like a natural.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
Joss and David were very aware of my anxiety issues, and I really appreciate them really saying, “OK, we have this spin-off and you have to be a part of it. So how can we put our best foot forward, because we really want you for this thing?” And to basically say, “We know the devil, we know what we’re dealing with, what are you going to do to help us? And what can we do to help make this work? Because you are what we want; we want that big smile to work off of David, who is dark and moody. We want that bright light; we want you to come over and join us, but what can we do?”
I could have cried. Like, “Really? You want me? OK!” And it was just such a moment, and I think it’s because they saw that my character resonated with people; they saw that I cared; they loved the character and whatever it was I brought to it worked for them. So it was win-win . . . But I had my acting coach there and we worked on my anxiety happening less and less.
DAVID GREENWALT
I wanted to bring Charisma Carpenter to Angel, because I knew Angel would be dark and brooding and somewhat humorous sometimes, so he needed this big ditzy dame to really bring it to life.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
The funny thing is, I didn’t really work with David Boreanaz much on Buffy, which is kind of interesting. We barely worked together, and if we did it was a group thing. When I did Supernatural, James Marsters was on the show and we had never worked together. So there we were, ten or eleven years post our shows and it’s, like, “Nice to meet you.”
JOSS WHEDON
With Cordelia, we knew we were going to have to bring her down a peg by taking away her money and waking her up to the real world while still keeping what was great about her, which is her bluntness and lack of tolerance for brooding.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
At the same time, initially I was very concerned. I wanted to make sure that the writers were the ones that were involved with Buffy so as to ensure quality. Knowing that Joss and David—who happened to be my biggest fans—would be a big part of the show, I was immediately relieved, to say the least.
DAVID GREENWALT
I am Cordelia.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
He’s not kidding. There’s an element in there. He’s in touch with his bitchier self.
TIM MINEAR
Cordelia—off the charts! I love that character. I love Charisma. She’s like a savant. She’s just so good. When she taps into her Cordelianess, it’s amazing. And it was the easiest character for me to write, because I could just hear that voice because of Charisma. Honestly, who would have thought that Cordelia could be this interesting? On Buffy, Cordelia was played for laughs, so what we found we could do was bring in characters who had been comic relief to some degree and give them arcs, give them a trajectory, give them a place to go, deepen them and have them become more three-dimensional. That worked to our advantage a lot, actually.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
Spin-offs, as they go, aren’t usually very successful, so of course I asked if there would be an open door if things should not go well. I wanted to make sure that I could come back to Buffy if I had to. Joss said, “I would never put you out there without a net. Of course, I don’t know if logistics will back me up on that, but sure.” I think he was kidding. He loves to make jokes that make actors insecure; he thinks it’s really funny. He loves to say, “By the way, you’re fired,” and then he gets a chuckle out of it. Then he says, “Every time I say that to an actor, they never laugh.” That’s because it’s really not funny, Joss.
What was great, though, and I know this sounds silly, is we were actually going to shoot at Paramount, a real movie studio. So there was all sorts of goodness happening left and right. It was a really happy time, exciting. The whole thing felt very new and different. It was actually really special, because it was the same character, so there was no sort of panic or scrambling to make it work or discovering who she is and how to play her. All of that stuff had been fleshed out, so it was a well-oiled machine going in and doing something that was the same, but more. I was literally The Jeffersons’ theme song, “Movin’ on Up.”
TIM MINEAR
I always liked the character of Kate, thought she was useful and I used her as much as I could. There was a lot of consternation amongst fandom, because they thought we were trying to create a love interest for Angel, which maybe we were, but that was never the sole intent. We just felt like we needed to expand the cast of characters for this to be a show. Plus, it’s always good to have a character that is from the outside. Obviously, it is always helpful on a show like this where he is a detective, that he has a contact within the police department. That just sort of made sense as a way that you do these things, and then you get to play the reality of how somebody outside of the supernatural world, once they are given a peek behind the curtain, might react to that.
ELISABETH RÖHM
(actress, Kate Lockley)
In a way, I’ve never had as exciting a character as I had on Angel, because of how well-developed she was. Her anger toward her father, her interest in the dark side of Angel and being able to see that he was good. And just the pain about her mother, her attempted suicide, and getting booted off the police force.
TIM MINEAR
Like I said, there was a lot of consternation in fandom and eventually we sort of phased her out. In the end, I think she served her purpose, and what really happened is that Elisabeth got Law and Order. The truth is that a lot of these people we don’t “own,” because they’re not regulars on the show, so if they get another offer or they get another show or something, potentially you will have to figure out a way to write them out, because they just won’t be around to shoot anything.
ELISABETH RÖHM
I’m pretty much grateful for everything. I was lucky to get that job and to be working with awesome people. They were busy writing what they were writing, and I thought what they were writing was interesting. But then I got my own show called Bull, and I was lucky, because Joss was, like, “I’ll keep you as a recurring character.” But I had my own show that I was a lead on, so I would work on this regular show from five in the morning until ten at night, and then I’d have to go over and do vampire hours with the guys and Charisma and be there until six in the morning. Then I got Law and Order, which moved me to New York, meaning that all that L.A. stuff was out. In a way, I wish I had just gotten on a jet plane and come there twice a week and continued doing it until the end of Angel. I would have loved that.
DAVID FURY
The Kate character didn’t pan out as well as we hoped it would. She was definitely used several times, but we were hoping that she was going to become part of the unit, but you try something and it works or it doesn’t. Maybe the chemistry was off? Maybe we just couldn’t feel it.
ELISABETH RÖHM
I felt we had chemistry. Outside of the world of Angel, you look at something like Drusilla and Spike, and it’s awesome. You see the chemistry between Juliet and James, and that’s how it was between David and I. It was great chemistry.
DAVID FURY
Maybe the character didn’t have enough going on. She
wasn’t supernatural; she basically would just be providing police work, which is what you want your characters to do. To be trying to find things out. I don’t know. She was lovely, but it just wasn’t gelling into that she would be part of the crowd. Forgetting the whole Cordelia thing, there was no real need for a love interest. The whole point of Angel is his loneliness. The fact that he gave Buffy up, the fact that he’s come here basically to atone for a lot of things—you didn’t want to see him with another person. And Lockley was devised to be that romantic interest, and I just don’t think people wanted that at that time. They wanted to cling to the idea of the lost love. That’s why Buffy got brought in in the middle of the season, to remind us of that loss in the Superman II moment.
“Doyle is a lunatic, basically,” the late Glenn Quinn related at the time of the show’s first season. “That’s obviously why they hired me. He’s like a gambler, hustler, Irish half demon, half human. And Angel meets Doyle in Los Angeles. Doyle knows Los Angeles like the back of his hand. And he kind of steers Angel around toward the lost souls. Doyle gets a vision—a name, a place—and passes them on to Angel and they go out and see who they can treat, who they can help.”
As to the Buffyverse mythology, he added, “When I was first cast, I got a few episodes sent over to the house, but I’m a pretty avid fan of vampire movies and Celtic mythology and whatnot. Being from Ireland, I kind of grew up with all that kind of stuff. So I’m just really excited to actually walk in Doyle’s shoes and basically have fun with him. It’s going to be really interesting.” He died of a drug overdose on December 3, 2002.
RANDALL SLAVIN
Slayers and Vampires Page 35