J. AUGUST RICHARDS
I’d heard about Buffy but had never seen it. I remember reading in the trades that David Boreanaz was getting a spin-off. At that point in my life, I was obsessed with being on the WB, because I noticed that all of the actors on there were going on to have film careers. I thought if I could get on the WB, then I’d have a film career, too. I auditioned for a few other shows, then got this audition for a show called Angel to play a character called Day, a vampire hunter. Day as opposed to Night. They were seeing all ethnicities. Ricky Martin was a big thing at the time, so there were a lot of Hispanic and Latino actors there, and a lot of white actors there, and a few black actors. That was my first step into being on Angel.
TIM MINEAR
The other thing is that we were actively trying to bring some diversity to the show. It was an incredibly white show. We also wanted to not just show the glamorous sides of Los Angeles; we wanted to say maybe in the rougher sections of town, you take the metaphor of the vampires and the demons and the otherworldly things under the surface of L.A., and so it is not just sort of the storefront-detective vampire and the fancy law firms but also the kids on the street in the gangs. It was a way of doing The Lost Boys a little bit. They were sort of the anti–Lost Boys, because they were fighting vampires as opposed to being vampires.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
Auditioning for the show was definitely one of those magical moments in my life and in my career. It was interesting, because the sides that I received, the audition material, was not from an episode. It was a stand-alone piece of writing for this character. Basically the scene was three pages of this character called Day talking to Angel, who was a vampire, and telling him how much he hated vampires and would never work with a vampire ever, because his job in life was to kill every vampire he’s seen. “You might say that you’re different than other vampires, but I hate all vampires and I know vampires are horrible people.” Three whole pages of basically the same thing. What was I going to add to that?
On my way to the audition, I heard the voice of Meryl Streep in my head. I saw her on Inside the Actor’s Studio, and she said, “Always examine the opposite of what your character is saying.” I thought about that literally as I walked through the door, and said to myself, “Oh my God, I actually do want to work with Angel, but because my parents were killed by vampires and I’m a street kid, I’ve essentially been orphaned and orphans often have a hard time asking for love. The way that they do it is to push a person away until that person proves that they’re worthy enough for them to be let in.” For the first time, I did the scene with that. By the time I was done, the casting director asked me to come back a few hours later, when Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt were present.
DAVID GREENWALT
J. August Richards came in and knocked the hell out of that. Later we got that little triangle between Wesley and Gunn and Fred. We got a lot of mileage out of that. But in the beginning, there was a certain reckless abandon about the character, a certain, “I love the hunt and the thrill and I kind of like killing vampires,” which at the same time there was also, “I protect a lot of people.” Angel as a vampire should be killed by him and his gang, but Angel does some good things, so they’re a little confused if they should kill him or not. Gunn certainly wants nothing to do with Angel, but there is a point where Angel is saying, “You may not want anything to do with me, but I may need your help some day.”
TIM MINEAR
J. is just charismatic and great, and he got the part. I think we struggled a little bit to try to figure out how to incorporate that stuff into the show, because if there was one thing we were kind of bad at, it was writing something that felt real L.A. street gangs or any of that stuff. It was hard for us; we just weren’t very good at it. The episode that I wrote that I’m the least fond of was called “That Old Gang of Mine.” It was the story of Gunn severing his ties permanently with his gang, and I just had so much trouble writing that. Not because of Gunn and not because of J., but I just didn’t feel comfortable writing that world for some reason. It was hard for me to make it feel lived in and real. We eventually conquered that; Gunn was definitely an important member of the ensemble by the end of the series.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
Everyone was just so warm and welcoming, and it just made me feel really comfortable and really at home very quickly. Obviously, I’ve made some lifelong friends from that show and from Buffy. We’re all as close as we can be. Everybody’s got their own lives, their own families, and things going on, but the admiration and the love is still there. Everyone on the crew was amazing. I’m still friends with so many people and have worked with them again. It was a really tight-knit family. Some sets are not like that at all. A lot of people say that, but not every set is what I experienced on Angel. I’ve experienced the opposite since and before.
DAVID FURY
Every new character is going to bring a different dynamic. The fact that you brought in Gunn, who is a street fighter but with a chip on his shoulder about vampires, was a way of bringing a different dynamic. What was great about Wesley was when he came onto Angel, he was not the same guy as he was on Buffy. He refashioned himself. He had his own midlife crisis and stopped being auspiciously British and suddenly tried to become something a bit more. It helped to have familiar characters coming on, like Wesley, but bringing Gunn [on] was something more specifically to add to the mix and create a bit more of a fighting force. A bit more of a dynamic between everyone. It was just a way of creating their own gang that they just didn’t have. It was a slow build finding the right mix of people, and J. was great, but there was always that trick of, like, now what do we do with him? But, again, the growing pains of once you figure that out, once you give them your own agendas, they become an interesting part of the mix.
DAVID GREENWALT
With Buffy we began asking, “Who of our characters can we bring back?” At one point they had something like forty-one people in the Buffy pantheon. We had a lot fewer people on Angel, but as time went on we began adding to the list. The idea was we wanted to get a great big mix that would give us more people to draw on and more arcs to build.
Another charming new character “tested” on the series was Krevlornswatch of the Deathwok Clan, who was first introduced as “The Host” and then as Lorne. Whatever name he goes by, he was the owner of the demon karaoke bar Caritas, who had the innate ability to “read” a person’s feelings through their singing and thereby to get glimpses into the future. The green-skinned, horn-adorned Lorne was played by Andy Hallett. Born August 4, 1975, in Osterville, Massachusetts, Hallett was actually an assistant to Joss Whedon’s then wife Kai when he came to the attention of Whedon himself.
ANDY HALLETT
(actor, Lorne)
I used to drag Joss into karaoke bars, and I think he was stunned by that whole scene. He got such a kick out of them and I think somehow, some way, he saw this vision of Lorne in there somewhere. So he asked me one day if I wanted to audition for this role. He said, “It’s inspired by you, but you still might not get the part.” He said he wanted me to audition for this part of the karaoke demon, and what did I think. I was, like, “Oh my God!” I thought it would be a couple of times, but I did fifty-one episodes as a guest cast member before he asked me to be a regular. That wasn’t until season four, episode fourteen. He called and said, “We want you to join the team. What do you think?” Luckily, I can say that I already felt like a team player, . . . like I was part of the family. So of course I accepted instantly.
DAVID GREENWALT
When Joss created that character of a guy who ran a nightclub, I mean, the character was Andy. Totally Andy. So as a lark, as we began to read and test people, we tested Andy, and, lo and behold, he was the best. I think he may have had some theatrical experience. He certainly was a theatrical personality. So we cast him.
ANDY HALLETT
The thing that I’ll never forget was when he said, “None of us know what the
future holds, and who knows what will happen with the show. I just wanted to have you have the opportunity so say that you were a series regular in case the show doesn’t get picked up next year.” I thought that was really wonderful on his part and really considerate, to think of me and my résumé and so forth. Having that on your résumé holds a lot more weight than saying you were a guest star. So I just thought that was spectacular.
TIM MINEAR
With Andy, it turned out he was great. We all just felt that he was so fun and so easy to write, so in a lot of ways the part just expanded and became less of a device and more of a character. And the truth is, I don’t think it took Andy long to get where he needed to be. He was pretty great from the beginning, especially for someone who had no experience and who had to act in all that crazy makeup.
ANDY HALLETT
It took three hours for makeup. Dayne Johnson also became a real dear friend of mine. He was head of the makeup department. He used to be on Buffy; then he came over to head the staff of Angel, and obviously he has a lot to do on the show. He did my makeup, and we got along great. I couldn’t imagine spending that much time in the makeup chair with someone you can’t stand. Getting up at 4 A.M., traveling to the studio, and then sitting for three hours without being able to move or do anything makes it hard to stay awake. It could be pretty boring. But Dayne went out and bought a DVD player, a TV, and a VCR, and it was wonderful, because then I could watch movies in the chair. I never used to watch movies, so he got me watching movies.
DAVID GREENWALT
He hated the makeup. I mean, passionately. It made him claustrophobic and he was not happy. Did we expect him to become as prominent as he became? I think you can apply that to any of our characters who became more prominent. You know, why not use people you’ve already cast and know? So when you’re breaking stories, you’re, like, “What if Andy did this? What if so and so does that? What if Christian Kane does this?” You use your stable, because you know them, the audience knows them, you can depend on them, and the fun of TV is you’re not writing short stories like you are in a movie; you’re writing big sprawling novels. I’m always happy to see people grow in a role in a show. It’s fun.
TIM MINEAR
In the second season we did an episode called “Happy Anniversary,” and what I liked about it was that it got Lorne out of the bar. Basically, it’s a buddy movie with Angel and Lorne, and I think it was really interesting that those two characters, wherever you put them together, are an intriguing pair. They’re so different, but Andy and David really complemented each other when they were on screen together.
In the season one finale, Wolfram and Hart brings Julie Benz’s Darla from the afterlife. (Darla had been dusted by Angel in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when it was revealed that she was the one who had originally turned him into a vampire). In Angel she is unexpectedly brought back as a mortal, with a soul, and is completely disoriented. Wolfram and Hart, largely through Lindsey, uses her to manipulate Angel, who thinks he’s losing his mind.
TIM MINEAR
The return of Darla gave us an opportunity to dig deeper into Angel. In the episode “Dear Boy,” we had a flashback to Angel’s first encounter with Drusilla. There’s a moment in the episode, during the flashback, where Drusilla’s cowering in the convent and Darla is saying, “I thought you were going to kill her.” Angel says, “No, I decided to make her one of us.” Darla says, “She insane,” and Angel responds, “Yeah, eternal torment. Am I learning?” There’s a look on Darla’s face that says, “This guy’s much worse than I am right now.” That’s the whole point of that. He’s the student up until that point, and after that he overtakes the teacher and becomes something that even she can’t quite grasp, which I think is interesting.
CHRISTIAN KANE
(actor, Lindsey McDonald)
I loved working with Julie. She’s such a talented actress. I looked forward to going to work every day when she was there. I loved that the fact that her story line brought me more into it. You’ve seen Lindsey confused and you’ve seen him have morals, but you never saw him with a heart, and that’s what I thought was so smart with the writing, was that when Darla showed up, you saw that Lindsey had a heart. He actually wasn’t a bad guy. He just worked for a bad guy. He actually loved this woman so much, and there was nothing he could do to ever make her fall for him.
DAVID GREENWALT
Julie Benz came back as Darla, and what a great actor and person. I had so much fun with both her and David; I directed them quite a bit. But you never know; you put a person in, they do one little thing, and later on you’re thinking, “What if that person came back and did this?” It just grows kind of organically, and that’s always fun. We’ve done that quite a bit on Grimm, and when it works, it works.
JULIE BENZ
(actress, Darla)
I was actually a little worried coming back. I was afraid that maybe I had lost Darla. I’d done a lot of work since Buffy and I thought my work had grown a lot in those four years. But what that did, I think, was enrich the character more, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to play her at that point rather than being given the story line back then. I don’t know that I could have handled some of the things I was required to do as an actress four years earlier.
TIM MINEAR
We brought Julie back as Darla as a human, and my feeling was, “What does that mean for her?” The best way to explore that would be to look at what she was as a human four hundred years ago before she was a vampire and do an origin piece of her. That’s what “Darla” was. You can only do that so much, because it should really be her story with Angel throughout the 150 years that they were together. But I wanted to show her as a person and what that means.
JULIE BENZ
Having a soul is like a cancer to her. To Darla, having a soul is the most disgusting thing in the world and for a while she is in denial of it. It’s really hard to live with a soul when you’ve been alive for four hundred years. She didn’t walk Angel’s path. Of course, with a soul you start having feelings, and she has very strong feelings for Angel because they were together for 150 years.
TIM MINEAR
I realized, “That’s a big fucking romance is what it is.” A hundred and fifty years of being with somebody, that’s what I call having a history. But at no time was I trying to play this as being Angel’s true love. It’s more like the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—this troubled old married couple with secrets. I wasn’t trying for her to take Buffy’s place in his heart by any stretch of the imagination. But here’s a guy who’s been around for a couple of hundred years before he ever met Buffy, and certainly he was shaped in some way. Having Julie allowed us to explore that a little bit.
JULIE BENZ
The revelation that she never made him happy kind of screws her up. I think if she was a vampire, that wouldn’t have bothered her that much, but as a human that rejection is real human pain. That’s something she’s never experienced before. She’s always done the rejecting. I think that was very hard for her. As a human you have more feelings and emotions, and she was having a hard time dealing with the fact that Buffy made him happy and she didn’t. He and Darla were together for so long, but Buffy was only with him for three years. There was also the disappointment that he’s not the man she loved anyway. He’s Angel and she loved Angelus. It’s this epic story, and when you get past the whole vampire thing, it really is a classic love triangle. I think that’s why the audience could relate to it. Darla was the jilted girlfriend or the ex-wife.
TIM MINEAR
What we needed was sort of the anti–Angel/Buffy relationship, and a lot of that actually made it into the episode “Guise Will Be Guise,” where T’ish Magev is talking about Darla and his relationship with Darla and he suggests that what Angel should do is go out and find another powerful small blonde and break her heart, and then he’ll get over Darla. Which is sort of me, with a nodding wink, saying, “Maybe the entire series of
Buffy was about Angel not being over his first love. Maybe it is more about Angel and Darla than it is about Angel and Buffy.” Which I think is a perfectly reasonable point of view to take when you are writing a show called Angel.
Indeed, there comes a moment in season two when Angel puts his life and soul on the line: he attempts to give Darla, who is dying from the syphilis that was killing her before she was first turned, another shot at life by participating in a series of deadly otherworldly tests. Although he ultimately passes these tests, the revelation that Darla has already been given a second life through Wolfram and Hart negates the possibility of his saving her.
In the end, Darla, moved by Angel’s willingness to sacrifice himself, accepts the fact that she is dying and takes Angel up on his offer to be with her until the end. Then Lindsey appears on the scene, using a Taser on Angel while Drusilla enters the room and bites Darla, turning her back into a vampire.
The following episode, “Reunion,” has Angel desperately trying to locate Darla’s body before her vampire resurrection can take place so that he can stake her, but Drusilla interferes, allowing the final transformation to occur. From there, Dru and Darla go on a killing spree. Angel, blaming himself for what’s happened to Darla, seems to go off the deep end, firing his crew and going this-side-of-Angelus dark, ultimately allowing the not-so-dynamic duo to feast on a bunch of Wolfram and Hart lawyers.
TIM MINEAR
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