Slayers and Vampires
Page 38
TIM MINEAR
The episode “Five by Five” really was something. Faith was hired by Wolfram and Hart to kill Angel, but she ends up putting a wedge between Angel and Buffy in her quest for redemption. It’s a story that just fell into place. It was just so clean and simple that I loved it. She’s supposed to be the assassin, but she has a death wish. It’s just that simple. The turn doesn’t come until the very end, and it’s just beyond powerful. The way they played it, it gets me every time I see it.
ELIZA DUSHKU
It was at first a little intimidating, but that was in the first two days. At the time, I was in those scenes with David Boreanaz, whom I love to pieces. He’s so much fun to work with, and I can see that even he was going through changes, and his character had turned into something else. I thought, you know, we’re trying to make a little bit of reality in this world of these hugely fictional scenarios and scenes. That’s reality. People change, and the characters are going to change with us. What I’ve gone through is kind of what Faith has gone through, too. It was good to be back.
DAVID GREENWALT
In the episode “Five by Five,” written by Jim Kouf, there’s a scene where Faith and Angel have this big fight in an alley in downtown L.A. We say to Kelly Manners, our great line producer, that we’ve got to have rain and a lot of it. He’s just, like, “No, we can’t afford it, can’t do it, not going to happen.” Well it rained for real that night. Just crazy, and now you have this great fight in the rain.
TIM MINEAR
It poured while we were shooting. It was the first night of a big torrential rain storm that we had for several days. It started that night, on the set of Angel, while Angel and Faith were fighting.
The challenge of “Sanctuary” is that it was Faith as we had never seen her before. It was sort of easy when it was just Faith, which was a lot of fun. The problem was trying to make her turn realistic.
JOSS WHEDON
That moment between Buffy and Angel, where she talks about Riley, was a very important scene for me, because we all assumed that they were going to resolve it; that they were going to get into an argument about Faith and at the end of the episode they were going to resolve it and it would be nice and pretty. I was working on that scene and was having trouble writing it, until I realized that it was because they can’t make up. He has to cut loose at her. As soon as I started to write it, I realized that it was the defining moment when he basically said, “I have a show and it’s not just an offspring of your show; it’s something different.” And at that moment, the training wheels came off. That, to me, in a very different way, was as powerful a moment as “I Will Remember You.”
A significant moment in Minear’s relationship with Joss Whedon, which reflects his creative influence on Angel, occurred during the season one episode “Sense and Sensitivity.”
TIM MINEAR
The first script I had written for the show that got made was “Sense and Sensitivity.” Joss felt that the director had kind of air-balled it, because it wasn’t funny the way it was on the page. He just didn’t like the way that it came out. I remember sitting in David Greenwalt’s office watching the cut with Joss on the Avid, and Joss saying, “We can’t air this; it’s so bad. This is the worst thing that this company has ever produced.” I’m, like, “Great. That’s just great.” I felt somewhat responsible. What I said to him was, “Look, let me go in . . . I don’t like the way this was cut. If you’d let me go into the editing room, I think I can make it better.” He kind of said sure. I went in with the editor, and I reset the whole thing. When I showed it to him, he was hugely relieved and thought, “OK, it’s improved enough that we can at least put this on the air.” I think the fact that he hated it so much and that he ended up liking it OK after I went into the editing room told him that I was valuable to his show. After that, they would bring me the scripts that they didn’t think were working. I did a lot of rewriting in the first year without my name on the scripts.
Two other elements of the show introduced in season one were the conduit between Team Angel and the Powers That Be—a cosmic force that seems to be guiding everything—and the law firm Wolfram and Hart. The former was represented by the Oracles, as played by Randall Slavin and Carey Cannon, from whom Angel would occasionally seek guidance and who, in their arrogance, could barely tolerate his presence.
And then there was Wolfram and Hart, which on initial introduction seemed to be merely a law firm for supernatural creatures but very quickly became the representation of evil itself in this world. Indeed, what’s revealed in season two is that the firm’s often-referred-to Home Office is actually Earth and that the firm exists in direct response to the evil that lies within every human soul. The human workers at the firm, including Christian Kane’s Lindsey McDonald, Stephanie Romanov’s Lilah Morgan, and Sam Anderson’s Holland Manners, work to ensure that Angel, whom the prophecies claim will be a key player in the coming apocalypse, is on their side. For Angel, that apocalypse is particularly significant in that it’s been foreseen that, after it, the vampire with a soul would be made human again.
In the season one finale, “To Shanshu in L.A.,” Wolfram and Hart looks to bring Angel to its side by tearing him apart from within, notably by taking out his crew. In the episode, a Vocah Demon blows up Agent Investigations, nearly killing Wesley, who’s hospitalized, then affecting Cordelia’s visions so that instead of getting them one at a time, she’s assaulted by all of them at once, plunging her into a catatonic state. Angel goes to see the Oracles and finds they’ve also been killed by the Vocah to cut off his ties to the Powers That Be, though the female Oracle does reach out to him spiritually, pointing him in the direction of Wolfram and Hart. He interrupts a ceremony involving five vampires being sacrificed around a large crate, kills the demon, severs Wesley’s right hand to obtain the vital scroll Lindsey was about to burn rather than let Angel get his hands on it, and, with the scroll, Angel is able to cure Cordelia.
At the very end, Angel, Cordelia, and Wesley are drawn together, stronger than ever, while the contents of that crate are revealed: Wolfram and Hart has resurrected Julie Benz’s Darla, the vampire that sired Angel.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
My coach and I did a lot of research for the scene where Cordy’s mind is overloaded. She went out to the library and checked out a couple of books, because I was working so much, and we were very specific in what we were looking for. Then we got this amazing book of Life magazine’s top photographs from around the world, and we were looking at images from the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, fire victims—photos that captured in the moment what disaster is on a personal level, what it looks like on a human face. I took those images and expanded on them with my imagination. Sometimes when you’re acting you worry that your well will be dry, and that was a day that a concern like that would be completely valid and justified, because it was basically eight hours of that one scene.
Also, in that episode David was grabbing me and trying to restrain me and I told him I really wanted him to restrain me. I know this is so incidental, but I was wearing a mesh-type shirt and the fabric was very coarse, so I had the worst lesions on my shoulders from where he grabbed me, which just helped the moment, of course. When I was having the seizures, it was a really great moment for me artistically, being able to experience a moment like that. Self-satisfaction is very difficult to attain for anyone. You know, “Are you pursuing what your life’s work is meant to be? Are you happy and fulfilled?” That was one of those days where you go into a scene scared shitless and you walk out going, “Yeah! I did it!” It felt good in my heart, so I could walk away from it happy.
TIM MINEAR
The fans called the Oracles the “Glitter Twins.” I understand. It’s a little bit Star Trek-y in terms of the look.
CAREY CANNON
(actress, Female Oracle)
When I went in to audition, I remember thinking that it was really smart. I only got two pages—you get six or seven lines—and I und
erstood that the principal character in the series would be in the scene, and that’s always exciting when you’re an actor. And I got an idea of who the character was, how they were imagining these Powers That Be, and it just seemed sort of arch and smart. I thought the writing was really good. It was fun to audition for it, and it was a nice change from hamburger commercials.
RANDALL SLAVIN
I had no idea what Buffy or Angel was. Most jobs you just sort of go in wondering, “What am I doing here?” I have to be honest, it was sort of the end of my days as an actor. Acting was a miserable experience for me, honestly. I had no desire to read these scripts or understand what was going on, or to know the story. It’s why I went into photography.
CAREY CANNON
Being painted gold and wearing the toga for the character was so fun. It’s always interesting to get to talk to the technicians who make that stuff happen, and these people have been doing this for a long time now. The makeup trailers had any number of latex monstrosities and beautiful creatures in and out, and they had lots of creatures they’d make and paint. It took several hours, as I recall, to spray all that gold on. Plus I had tattoos—I remember they cut out these templates and used an airbrush to spray in, but it was fun. Their work was interesting. They liked to talk about the different vampires and demons.
RANDALL SLAVIN
I’d known Charisma Carpenter before I did the show, and I remember sitting in my little dressing room in my stupid purple toga and painted gold on the Paramount lot, and I didn’t want to run into Charisma because it was so fucking embarrassing. Once I snuck out to eat lunch and ran into her and she was, like, “Hey, I’ve been looking for you. I didn’t know where you were.” And I’m, like, “Ugh, I’m trying to avoid you.”
CAREY CANNON
It was pretty clear what the writers thought these Oracle characters were, and they were sort of declarative, so there’s not a lot of area for doubt, right? You just say the things as if they were true. I work in a Shakespeare theater and we do a lot of Greeks, and you’re not looking for Apollo to shift. You just sort of say the thing.
RANDALL SLAVIN
The whole experience was awful. It’s sort of like an actor’s dream in a sense, because they’d call me once in a while and say, “Hey, we need you next week,” and it’s great, because you don’t have to audition anymore. You go and just do your thing; it should have been a dream and it was miserable. Every time I’d go back, I’d have to stand in my underwear and get painted. And it was always a different person, so there was no sense of any familiarity. So every time you go back, you get a stranger standing in front of you and you’re in your underwear and they’re slobbering paint on you. Miserable experience, and no fault of anyone, but it probably would have been a miserable experience on any job I was doing. Let’s just say my passion had waned.
CAREY CANNON
David Boreanaz was unfailingly kind as was everyone on that set. I’d actually done very little before this; this was the only episodic TV I’d ever done before I left L.A. It took a number of people to make the couple of scenes happen, and one of them involved a rigged watch that had to fly across the space, so there were all these people standing around to make this little gimmick happen, which felt like stage magic. It wasn’t CG’d in; they just had to make this happen. So David was a distance from us—he introduced himself and he was gracious—which I think stars tend to be when they have to welcome people all the time, so he did that.
I also remember not being able to tell when it was my turn to talk, because he was so far away and he was used to TV—he’d been doing this for a while and he knew the mic was an inch from his mouth. I’d been used to working in theater, and I literally didn’t know when it was my turn to talk, because he didn’t move his mouth much. He was speaking so quietly. He was not an emoter—very stoic, and he was at his most stoic in those scenes. There was not a lot he had to do with his face, and so I think I screwed up a take or two because I was looking at him and didn’t know it was my turn to talk. That’s the part of the anxiety that stands out. But he didn’t react badly at all. It took a minute for them to reset the gimmicky thing.
RANDALL SLAVIN
David was an asshole. He was just unpleasant, whereas on other shows you’d guest and they’re really warm, because they know it’s an awkward thing to walk onto an established show, and they know it’s an uncomfortable situation for everyone. Some people you work on a show and they’re really warm and you feel like they’re welcoming you there, and other people definitely make you feel lesser than. David fell into that second category. He was just dismissive and unwelcoming, just playing at the hierarchy of set life, because there’s definitely a hierarchy.
I remember I had this stupid line, which I couldn’t remember for the fucking life of me. I was having some sort of family issues, and there was this one stupid line, and as an actor sometimes you can get stuck on it, and the longer you’re stuck on it, the harder it is to get out. And as a guest star it’s a really uncomfortable experience, and David was really fucking frustrating, and he had it in for me. It was this stupid line; I couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t get it out, now, however many years later, I can tell it to you without question—I must have done twenty takes on this stupid-ass line—“That which we serve is no longer that which you serve. You are released from your fealty.”
JAMES MARSTERS
This is why you never pay attention to critics. I remember doing plays and you’d have these things called previews before you’d open the play and sometimes you would talk to the audience after the show about their impressions. Sometimes the audience would fill out questionnaires and you’d read them together as a company. You would be amazed. You would read one person who said, “This is the most amazing piece of art; I was transported, thank you so much; I learned a lot; hats off to you.” And then the very next one would be, “This is the biggest piece of shit I’ve seen in my life. How dare you waste my time?” These people could’ve been sitting right next to each other, watching the exact same performance, and they would have radically different impressions. And I came to realize that a critic is just one more view, and they’re human beings. You don’t know how they’re gonna react, but their opinion is not more important than others. So I’m sorry that the guy had a difficult time. I find that when you have a high social position, a lot of people want a lot from you. You can give that to some people, but you don’t have time to give that to everyone and people can get angry about that.
CAREY CANNON
Wasn’t it terrible that the Oracles were killed? We were not very good at reading the future, were we? I mean, really not great Oracles. Again to reference the Greeks, the Oracle of Delphi would have said, “Bad day. You guys should go out for lunch or something.” What’s funny is they ended up killing us rather abruptly, and my agent thinks it’s because Randall’s agent asked for more money. I remember being surprised when I got the script and I was, like, “We’re dead? How can we be dead?” So I’m repeating a sixteen-year-old rumor from my former agent who may no longer be on the planet. But I remember her saying, “I think they were looking for more money, because they originally wanted to bring the characters back.”
RANDALL SLAVIN
I wasn’t happy they killed us. As miserable as I was, you’re still, like, “I’m going to do it.” Apparently I couldn’t see the future for myself, because I was very upset that they killed us and then I was having trouble with other things I was inquiring about. The industry was kicking me out in a lot of ways.
DAVID GREENWALT
The idea of Wolfram and Hart came from Mr. Whedon, of course. Obviously, it grew over the course of the season. It was just a good representation of nefarious interests and power in the show.
DAVID FURY
When you’re doing a show about evil and vampires, the closest thing we have in life to evil and vampires are lawyers. I’m sure most people would agree with that, with the exception of most lawyers. I don’t think that
, early on, they were expecting to lean into it as much as they did, but all of that stuff was so rich. And it was an opportunity to get great actors in there, like John Rubenstein and Sam Anderson. All of these great actors as corporate lawyers who were basically minions of hell. It just lent itself to it, and those characters became very important in the show.
TIM MINEAR
With Wolfram and Hart, I think Joss had a pretty good idea of an evil law firm. It always stood for Wolf, Ram, and Hart, which are three mystical animals that were sort of representing the Senior Partners on Earth, the darkness. That was clear right from the beginning. As far as it becoming so central of a corporate villain, that seed was planted early so that we could do that. And, of course, Wolfram and Hart gave us a character like Lindsey, whom Christian Kane played. He’s great, which is why we kept bringing him back. He does appear in the pilot, and then we started writing for him specifically.
CHRISTIAN KANE
I was familiar with Buffy and I’d seen Boreanaz; we’d worked out at a gym together and were actually friends. Me and David had been friends before Angel, and later on he became one of my best friends. I auditioned for the part of Riley in Buffy’s fourth season. I lost the role to Marc Blucas, and Joss called and said, “We want to hire you for Lindsey.” I didn’t audition for the part; they just hired me because I’d already auditioned for Riley. David Greenwalt actually created my character. There was a show he did called Profit; a great show that didn’t find an audience, but he gave me episodes and said I should watch it. Lindsey was loosely based on Profit.