Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  (actor, Male Oracle)

  It’s a very small world. I was probably one of the first people Glenn Quinn met when he came over from Ireland. I grew up down in Long Beach, California, and one of my close friends was his cousin—this guy named Damien, who worked at a paint store in Long Beach. One day he told me his cousin Glenn was coming in from Ireland that day, and I remember us hanging out and waiting for Glenn to come in. And this was years before he was an actor. When I met him, he had this huge hair, like Bono from the second U2 album—all mullet and incredibly huge ’80s hair. So then years later, doing the show and talking . . . Glenn was a sweet, sweet kid and it was just funny that all those years later I would guest-star on his show.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  When it came to Doyle, we did something pretty outrageous in this business. By then I talked to Steven Bochco, who trained me that you never suffer a misbehaving actor. He taught me how to look an actor in the eye and say, “Look me in the eye. I’m a serial killer; you’re going to die. You’re either going to behave or you’re going to die.” I was determined that I was not going to take any shit from any actor under any condition, because life is too short. We loved Glenn. He auditioned and was great. The three of them—David, Charisma, and Glenn—made a great cast for the show. I didn’t know until later the full extent of Glenn’s problems, but what I experienced on the show is he would have trouble remembering his lines. I don’t recall him showing up late so much as screwing around on the set and laughing.

  Look, I totally support actors laughing and talking right up until the call of action. Except when they’re laughing at their performance and their lack of professionalism. I took him into my little motor home; we were in downtown L.A., and let’s say this was around episode four or five. I said to him, “Look me in the eye. I’m a serial killer. You’re going to die. You may not come to my set not knowing your lines. You may not come to my set and laugh over not knowing your lines. A lot of these people are driving a long way here to work, and they have eighteen-hour days. They work very, very hard for a hell of a lot less money than you’re making, and I will not stand for it. Do you understand me?” And he began to cry.

  So I assumed he understood me, but then of course absolutely nothing changed and we ended up killing him, heroically, in episode nine. But think about it: we’ve got a twelve-episode order and to kill one of the three main characters nine episodes in, it just creates the feeling of, “Watch out, folks, anything can happen.” It was a bold move, but I was pretty adamant that I was not going to spend my life dealing with that kind of crap.

  CHARISMA CARPENTER

  Working with Glenn and David, it was impossible to get any work done, because they were so rowdy and really bonded early on and were total boys. It’s really precious to reflect on, but working with Glenn was so much fun. Not many people know this, but Nicky Brendon from Buffy has more talent in his pinkie than most people and just gets away sometimes. That’s a struggle, but when he works his magic it’s amazing. That’s how I felt when I was with Glenn; I felt the same kind of thing in terms of getting in his way. He got in his own way with other stuff; he had some demons. It’s a weird industry, especially when you have extreme talent and some trauma in your life, and it can be really challenging to reconcile all that money and adulation and work demand. “How do I have a personal life? How do I work nineteen hours a day? How do I balance all that stuff?” And you’re young, so it’s a lot.

  Nicky is probably one of the smartest people I know; he’s very witty, he has a lot of issues, but he’s amazing, and when we worked together it was always magic. When I went over to Angel, that was going to be one of the things I was going to miss the most. When I met Glenn, it was sort of like that familiar love, brotherly love, great affection for him, but just in awe of his talent. And the chemistry between David and Glenn was palpable; they were peanut butter and jelly, and I miss him very much.

  TIM MINEAR

  I thought Glenn was great. He was charismatic and troubled. His sort of personal demons came out through some of his performance. The problem was he had real personal demons, and it was really a problem on the set. David Boreanaz was always so incredibly supportive of Glenn and tried to help him through in any way he could. They were truly friends. David really understood him and wanted him to get better, but when someone has a problem like a drug addiction, there’s really nothing you can do for them unless they decide they want to do something for themselves. I know this personally.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  It was a terrible thing to watch. He came in with a horrible drug and alcohol problem. It was amazing the work he did for us, because I thought it was pretty good. Poor Glenn, he had a tiger on his back; there was no doubt about it. That poor kid didn’t stand a chance. Listen, I came up in the ’70s and ’80s. I did the Dukes of Hazzard, where everyone was on blow. I’ve seen it. A lot of us crossed that muddy field. Most of us didn’t get out, and those of us who did are very, very fortunate. And he definitely affected production. Lateness and hungover, not being able to get his lines out. It was very, very tough.

  CHRISTIAN KANE

  (actor, Lindsey McDonald)

  Glenn was going through a bunch of shit. Me and Boreanaz would pick him up and we’d go out and have a cocktail . . . I didn’t know him well. I knew him well enough to know that he was quiet, but the only person that can answer what was really happening would be Boreanaz. Boreanaz and him were very tight.

  DAVID BOREANAZ

  Glenn is a tough thing to discuss, because he was such a good friend of mine. I kind of keep that unanswered. It’s still tough to talk about. But God bless his soul; it was a big learning experience for me working with someone of his talent.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  I felt bad about the whole thing. I don’t feel guilty, because what I offered was tough love, which was his only shot. But it’s a horrible, horrible chapter. I knew there were drug issues with him, but not the extent. God rest his soul, he overdosed two or three years later.

  CHARISMA CARPENTER

  When I found out he died, I must have fallen to my knees. Alexis was the one who told me. I was on set and he said he had something to tell me. He told me Glenn passed away and he took me in his arms. It was so painful, because you see someone trying to figure it out a little bit and think it’s going to be OK, and then it just hits you sideways. It makes no sense.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  I have no idea if Glenn was having a negative impact on David Boreanaz, as some people were saying. My experience with David was never anything but stellar. Showed up, did the work. I never had a problem with him ever. I think the two times he complained about a script, he was right. Other than that, he behaved extremely well. On Buffy he understood that she’s the star and his place in that universe. I never saw him misbehave in any way on any of my shows with him. He has really good parents from Philadelphia. I used to say to him, “If you misbehave, I’m calling your mom and dad.”

  TIM MINEAR

  We also looked at the impact the death of Doyle would have on the show as a whole. Again, you look at the pilot and the story where Angel doesn’t save the girl. You look at episode nine of a twenty-two episode season, and the guy who is in the main titles, the sidekick, dies. The reason for that is that it proves anything can happen. And there was some feeling, too, that David’s and Glenn’s characters were very similar. They were both half human and half demon, they both had a past, they both were brooding-type characters, and they were both searching for redemption. It just seemed like the same note to some degree.

  HOWARD GORDON

  If the death of Doyle was in Joss Whedon’s head from the beginning, I honestly don’t know. While he didn’t say, “We’re going to kill him,” he did say, “We could kill him if we want to.” It was more of a fluid understanding that this character was a tryout in a way. In the end, I think they felt how much more bold it was to develop this character and then kill him. What it does is create a way of handling
the fact that, generally, in television you know that no one is going to die. It has this wonderful effect of saying that nothing is safe, which is kind of cool. At the same time, I can’t say I take any pleasure in killing a lead character.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  I think by the second episode after we let him go, everybody realized that the decision made was the right one. Before that, people thought it was a shitty thing to do, but then everybody just got back on the train and realized it was really good for the show. And, you know, even if Glenn had been a model citizen, the way things went after his departure, I think helped the show. That’s my opinion. And we certainly got a lot of mileage out of it, absolutely, in the sense of him giving his gift to Cordelia, his prophetic visions. Which changed that character, too, and gave her more to do.

  CHARISMA CARPENTER

  I didn’t know when the evolution of Cordelia began, but there is no question that there was major character development. And they kind of had to, because at that point I was the only female in the regular cast and what’s the point of my coming over if they weren’t going to?

  JOSE MOLINA

  “Hero” turned a curve for the show. Or the show turned a curve with that episode in that all of a sudden it wasn’t a guest-star-of-the-week show. You were really telling stories about your characters and how their relationships affected each other. Doyle leaves Cordelia with part of his gift. That the Powers That Be are now in her head, Doyle remains a part of Cordelia and is there for a part of Angel’s life. Would they have killed him off without Glenn’s issues? I think they might have by the end of the season anyway, because that trio of characters just wasn’t gelling as well as it could have.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  It actually did hurt the show a little bit in that I would get letters like, “Dear Mr. Greenwalt, if in fact that is your name, how dare you get rid of Doyle?” He was a great character and he was terrific, but I said to him, “This is not a game,” so we ended up killing and replacing him with Alexis Denisof, who had appeared on Buffy, as the Wesley character. Alexis stayed with the show and became a very good friend of mine to boot.

  TIM MINEAR

  We had always planned to add characters throughout the season, and the idea to bring in Wesley came after the decision to kill off Doyle, but it came shortly after. In fact, my script “Somnambulist,” which had been banked early on, had to be revised, because the first version was with Doyle. By the time we got around to making the episode, Doyle had been dispatched. I had to revise it and turn it into Wesley, which weirdly made more sense that Wesley would have all this knowledge about Angel’s past. Also that he was suspicious and not quite on Team Angel at the time the story takes place, so that actually made perfect sense.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  When Wesley joined the show, you know on Buffy he was more comic relief. It was interesting to bring him onto this and try to evolve him into something more serious. I love humor, but you have to be careful that it doesn’t go into camp. Buffy was never camp, but a lot of directors didn’t know that in the early days. The same with Angel. The humor has to grow out of either tragedy or the drama of the show. One time I wrote this thing for Wesley about a massage parlor somewhere, and he sort of knew exactly where it was. The implication was that he went there, and Joss and Alexis were, like, “Uh, no. Can’t say and do that.” That would’ve been too far with his character, although it would’ve been funny. He did some good slapstick for me. I remember he was flipping and falling down on these newspapers. Alexis is pretty versatile, but, you know, him going so dark and then Angel comes in and tries to smother him in the hospital with a pillow in season three? Great stuff. You could go there in those shows; you didn’t have to protect people too much.

  TIM MINEAR

  Alexis was fighting an uphill battle. People hated him because they loved Doyle. They were absolutely dead set against him; they didn’t like him in Buffy. But he wasn’t supposed to be likable in Buffy. You could say the same thing about Cordelia. You know, “This character in Buffy, I don’t know how she’s going to work in this show.” Well, you bring them into this show and suddenly you get to see more sides of them. Eventually Alexis won over a lot of the fans. Some of them begrudgingly, some of them whole-heartedly. And, for the record, Wesley was not supposed to be a replacement for Doyle. Cordelia was the replacement for Doyle, which is why she was given the visions.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  The thing about Alexis is that he’s a pretty tremendous actor. He’d been on London’s West End, choreographed fight scenes for a fairly famous production of Hamlet there. This guy really knew his stuff, and he’s very subtle and very precise and I liked what he brought to the show. We gave him more of a life separate from Angel; we didn’t want him to just be the guy coming in to read from a book. The character wasn’t a total buffoon, although a guy who can fall down on coffee beans always has a place in my show. But you have to balance him. The whole thing that attracted me to the Joss Whedon universe as a former movie guy is that I could do humor and drama in the same shows. I like the tragedy and the comedy.

  JOSS WHEDON

  On Buffy we had a great time just having Alexis be as dorky as possible, but there comes a point with every actor where they say, “Can I be cool now?” Alexis was, like, “How can I be dorkier? What can I do to be sillier? How can I fall down more? Let’s think this through.” When we brought him on Angel, we knew we would want to find what made that character tick. It really is fun to see exactly how he evolved. When somebody becomes a regular on a show, they can’t be a caricature. You have to find out what makes them behave in such a silly fashion. In Wesley’s case, it had a lot to do with the way people perceived him and a lack of self-confidence and a lot of naïveté, much of which he lost.

  TIM MINEAR

  Later in season one we did an episode called “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” about a possessed kid, and the group tries to help the family. This was one of the very early scripts that we wrote before Doyle was killed. The thing I pitched to Joss was the parallels between this family and our little family. My idea was that Angel should accidentally call Wesley Doyle, because it should be about these two men who lose a son. At the end of the story the father loses his son, and at the beginning of the story Angel has lost a “son,” sort of. These two men are desperately trying to keep their family together, and through no fault of their own they can’t.

  Once we sort of hit upon that, the theme became much clearer. If you can find the emotional resonance with your character in a plot, then the thing starts to fall into place much more easily. It’s not just a bunch of moves, which is what it was before. We went in a million different directions in the development process: Angel lost this youth, Angel was possessed by a demon, Angel understands this kid. That’s kind of there, but not really. Then it became about that moment where the kid speaks in Doyle’s voice and Angel grabs the towel, wraps it around his hand, and grabs the cross. The idea of a vampire having to perform an exorcism is just too great.

  Originally, in an earlier version of the script, there was a priest who was brought in and got locked out of the game and Angel took over. Joss at some point said, “Do we need this priest? Can’t it be Wesley?” Suddenly it made perfect sense, because Angel’s problem at the beginning of the story is, “I let Doyle die. Things got too dangerous and I let him die, because he did something that I couldn’t do.” Now you have Wesley saying, “I can perform this exorcism; you can’t.” And you have Angel saying, “I can’t let you do that.” He finally agrees, but at the end of the day he really saves Wesley’s life. So he’s sort of atoning for the Doyle thing, even though that really wasn’t his fault. That’s why we could keep going back to episode nine and say, “It was absolutely right to kill Doyle,” because it made the second half of the season that much stronger.

  Like Buffy, one of the big struggles of Angel early in its run was the practice of stand-alone storytelling versus serialized story arcs, and initially the write
rs intended to focus on the former. Somehow, though, the show itself seemed to demand serialized story arcs, resisting every attempt by the writers to tell self-contained stories.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  In those days, and even up until when we started Grimm, networks were terrified of too much serialization. Even back on The X-Files, they said that a regular fan is seeing every second or third show. Only the rabid people are seeing every episode. But the serialization was so natural on Buffy, because we were so into the emotions of all the characters. We could do stand-alone episodes, but that still had all these great character conflicts. We did a lot of that kind of stuff. I can’t remember if the network was pushing for one thing or the other, but when you’re first showing off your wares, usually that first twelve or thirteen, you want people to just really come to the show and enjoy it.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  I think the reason they were trying to do the case of the week is, back then, before DVRs, on demand, and streaming, with a lot of those series we found that if people missed an episode or two, they got lost and then they were done. So Joss thought case of the week would work on Angel, but it was obvious that it had to be serialized.

  CHARISMA CARPENTER

  Season one was probably the most frustrating for me, just because they were really wonderfully written one-off shows, so they weren’t continuous, but they were wonderful for the guest stars. Anybody that would guest-star on our show then was going to get a juicy role with amazing writing. And good for them, but I was annoyed. I mean, I don’t want to offend anybody, but I wanted to get into the relationships between David, Glenn, and I, and then David, Alexis, and I.

  It’s obvious in hindsight, and you never know when you’re in the middle of it, but I remember feeling at the time that I wanted more to do and how lucky for these guest stars, that they get to be vulnerable, they get to laugh, they get to do all this great stuff. I think we kind of found our groove in season two, where it started to be about us as an investigative group and our inner workings and our relationships with each other, and how we cared about each other and how we supported each other. That’s when Angel really resonated and went to the next level with the audience.