MARK LUTZ
(actor, Groo)
If you talk to a lot of actors, a lot of them will tell you the same thing: a fish out of water is one of the most fun things to play, which was particularly true when Groo came back to L.A. with the gang—there was an opportunity for comedy there and a silliness that I loved. Nonsense is the route to my very soul, so it was fun to play the dichotomy of Groo being this champion that has all these great, wonderful qualities on paper, but all this naïveté. A lot of people characterized him as being dumb, but I don’t think he was. He was naive and earnest and meant well. An innocent in a lot of ways. And besides being a fish out of water, he was also the pivot in the love triangle between Angel and Cordelia. You get to play the fish out of water and the guy who comes between the hero and the girl? Great, sign me up.
TIM MINEAR
We knew we wanted to do Pylea, and the question was whether or not we could afford to. It was incredibly expensive to do. Think of all the demon makeups, first of all. Shooting on location; creating a place to shoot it; creating a castle—all this stuff was expensive. We actually ended up going to this little Mexican village that’s not a real village. It’s sort of a back-lot thing out in the boondocks where film companies shoot sometimes. If you look closely, you may notice that Pylea is also China from earlier in the series. Same exact village but redressed. So that was a lot of location shooting and a lot of day shooting, which we didn’t normally do.
STUART BLATT
To make it Pylea, we put half timbers on the houses, which gave it a somewhat medievaly, English countryside look. We cobbled together whatever we could to convey the image of a sort of medieval storybook land. We built a stock in the middle of town, where their heads were put through a chopping block.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
It was fun to shoot outside during the day. It had a totally other feeling for us, because everything we did was usually late at night. But by the end of the week, we were always working until about 6 A.M. Thursday and Friday were always late calls going to work at five or six P.M. and be out by six A.M. the following day, so it was just nice to be able to shoot during the day.
MARK LUTZ
Pylea had that Old West feeling in a way, and that was the nature of the buildings there, which had probably been there since the ’30s. So there was a nice ring of authenticity. And I remember shooting the fight with David Boreanaz; it was like two or three in the morning. This was back in the day when it actually rained in California—I know it’s hard to believe—so it was pouring rain, and we were basically rolling around in it. It wasn’t warm. Not Canada cold, but it wasn’t warm, and I felt like Conan or something, going mano a mano with the main guy in the show.
When I came back in season three, we were running through Echo Park and I’m still in the full Groo garb. There’s crowds of people around that aren’t on set, just the public, and it was funny to see the looks when you’re running in your Conan outfit, with this broadsword, on a street. The passersby are, like, “What’s that guy doing?” Kind of a fun moment.
KELLY A. MANNERS
Pylea sounds like a gum disease. Those episodes were really challenging. The funny story about that is that we’re in a van and Joss was the character who did the dancing in Pylea. He’s all in his green makeup and his long red wig sitting in the van, and a stunt guy sits down right next to him and turns to me and goes, “Whedon’s lost his mind. This script is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever read.” I think the Host character was part of the Death Walk Clan, and we called this stunt guy the Dumb Fuck Clan. He’s sitting down next to Joss Whedon and doesn’t know it. Well, he wasn’t back the next season.
TIM MINEAR
What we wanted to do was basically give each of the characters an opportunity to live out their fantasies; they kind of get to express the part of them that is important to them. So Angel gets to be in the sun, he gets to be a hero, but then that has a flip side. Cordelia wants to be a princess and she gets to literally be one, but there is a dark side. Wesley gets to be a leader, but he has to lead people to their deaths in order to win the battle. And Lorne is like a classic story of a guy who is gay and is rejected by his family and has to go off to the city to create his own family.
We never said specifically that the Host was gay, or that Lorne was gay, but that was definitely the way we wrote him. When we went to Pylea, the idea was to make it the dimension that he escaped from. It gave him something to do; he had to go back and kind of face the family that rejected him and realize that he had made the right decision to leave. So everybody gets to express their most primary color.
DAVID GREENWALT
From a structural standpoint, Angel went dark from episodes ten to sixteen, but by sixteen he had begun to make his amends. He came back and worked for his people on a whole new footing. So it wasn’t the last part of the season in which he went all dark, but, instead, we went to Pylea for a romp in this Wizard of Oz–like place, but still a place where he turns into a horrible beast and had to, again, confront this whole, “I don’t want to be this thing that wants to kill my friends.” You have Wesley saying to him, “You’re not a demon with a man inside, you’re a man with a demon inside. You need to remember what you are.” We were always looking for ways for Angel’s dark side to come out and get a little out of control; that’s what made him interesting.
BEN EDLUND
(supervising producer, season four)
From Pylea we get Fred and had already gotten Lorne, important parts of the universe. To me, something like the Pylea arc has the breeze of standalone, because it’s omnivorous, it’ll go somewhere and eat that little delicious lighter fare of being in Pylea where you don’t have to weigh as much for at least a portion of it. But then you also get these profound characters that come out of it, profound in terms of they each have their own angst and their own plight and their own need. And they fold into the larger mythos. It’s, like, why the hell does Gilgamesh go out into the woods to meet Enkidu? Why? I don’t know. Maybe he wants to fight and fuck a hairy man [laughs]? He’s a real pain in the ass around town, but is it episodic or is it serialized? It turns out that after three thousand years it seems serialized, but it’s pretty fucking episodic.
TIM MINEAR
The fans were divided about Pylea. They were saying things like, “Where’s Darla? Where’s the angst? What’s going on?’ We brought in Darla and instead of Angel staking her and saving everybody and they’re off for pancakes and eggs together at the end of the season, Darla was demoralized and just went away. I think that people weren’t sure what to make of that. It didn’t seem like a resolution to them, and in fact it was not, as they—and we—would discover in season three. What people had to remember is that the season was about Angel, not about Darla. If you look at Pylea, and what we did there, it’s sort of a metaphor writ large for what all our characters had been through in the second season.
JOSS WHEDON
Pylea also gave us the opportunity to introduce what would ultimately be the final piece of the puzzle in creating an ensemble: Amy Acker.
TIM MINEAR
We felt that we needed another color for the show, and that was a character that Joss had been considering before we’d ever written an episode for her. He was actually reading actors for the part when Amy came in. He saw her and immediately saw the star potential there, and I totally agreed.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred)
I had had a pretty big awareness of Buffy. My college boyfriend, his roommate, and his roommate’s girlfriend, they hosted “Buffy night” at their house. Everybody came over and ate pizza. I was a theater major so wasn’t always around, but whenever I had a free night, I would see them and wonder, “Why are they so obsessed with this?” Then I got into it myself.
A native of Dallas, Texas, she was born Amy Louise Acker on December 5, 1976. Graduating from Southern Methodist University, she made some television guest appearances prior to Angel but subsequently was either
recurring or a regular on such shows as Alias, Drive, Dollhouse, Happy Town, and Person of Interest.
AMY ACKER
I had been a dancer and mostly done ballet growing up. I ended up having knee surgery and I had to take a credit in school for arts, where I had this amazing theater teacher in high school that was so good that when I got to college, I felt, like, “Oh, I already know all this.” She just really pushed everybody in her classes. You read Stanislavski and about all of these people . . . we did The Crucible, and Tony Kushner, and these great plays that were not dumbed down for high schoolers in many ways. I had always been supershy, but I found out that if I said words that other people wrote, and got to be characters other than myself, that it was sort of this amazing thing that I couldn’t imagine doing anything else after it started.
I think that’s part of the reason I’m drawn to this genre. I mean, all of my favorite roles that I’ve gotten to do have been in genre TV. Those roles really allow you to transform—sometimes from a human to an alien—but it also gives you a journey as a character that a lot of other shows don’t really always have. When I look back at Angel and think about the role of Fred, it was almost like I had seven different parts on the show. I had been to the crazy alternate dimension in a potato sack, and then head of the lab, then Illyria . . . there’s just so much room for a character journey.
DAVID GREENWALT
I knew Joss was going to love Amy Acker from the time we tested her. We were shooting something in a library downtown, a little scene with her, and right from the start she was like a Joss Whedon character. She’s a doll to boot and really talented and well trained and, of course, makes it look easy. You see Amy and she’s sort of a sweet Audrey Hepburn, but she has this whole other level that she can play with that sweet face and you really want to use all that if you can. We used her in Grimm and she was like a soccer mom who also was a spider woman who sucked out people’s innards. She was great and can do two sides of the coin really well.
AMY ACKER
I had moved to New York and then to Los Angeles, and I had only been there a month when I got an audition for the part. They were looking for this little three-episode part on Angel. So I went in and met the casting director, auditioned, and got a call back. I went and got to meet Joss, and then all of a sudden, when I was about to start, they said, “Well, actually we’re thinking of maybe having a new series regular,” and they were toying with the idea of characters that had already been on the show or introducing a new part.
TIM MINEAR
Joss wrote these very funny scenes that were not part of a script, just as audition pieces, and I remember how great she was in that stuff.
JOSS WHEDON
As we did with J., we brought her in for a little arc-let to make sure she would register and then brought her in as a regular.
TIM MINEAR
I don’t think it’s a mystery that the character of Fred is very much a Joss Whedon type; he likes those cute, frumpy, brainy girls who end up becoming knockouts. She sort of falls into the Willow mode of a brainy girl.
AMY ACKER
Joss, before I actually started filming, wrote that little Midsummer Night’s Dream–inspired scene that’s on one of the DVDs that Alexis and Jay and I did.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
That screen test was when we first met her even before she got the role. It was awesome. Joss really put her through her paces. He had a lot of notes, and she took everything like a champ. He was just trying to see how much he could play with her, and he can and he could. As you see with her ultimately becoming Illyria, he had great faith in her ability to change. It was awesome. Her being added to the show. It’s hard for me to even think of a time when she was not on the show.
AMY ACKER
When I started, I found out that I was actually going to be a regular on the show. And I was ecstatic! It was my first real TV job, so I was terrified, excited . . . all of those things. Looking back at it after so many auditions from that point to now, it just seemed like it all went way too easily. I guess it was just meant to be. Usually there are so many more hoops to jump through—it spoiled me for future auditions. There were definitely aspects of Fred I could easily connect to. I don’t know that they were even necessarily there to begin with, but being from Texas and a little awkward and shy . . . well, that didn’t take too much acting on my part [laughs].
For J. August Richards, season two represented an important turning point in his career and his life—and represented the first year he had ever spent as a series regular.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
In that season we were all finding out how to incorporate Gunn into the group and we found him, slowly but surely, what his purpose would be and how he would interact with everyone. One thing I remember was having a really great off-camera rapport with Alexis and us bringing that on camera. We invented a handshake that the characters would have, because we liked the idea that they were so different but they could be so close. Consciously I made the choice that Wesley was Gunn’s best friend.
I also think over the course of season two, it was about Wesley, Cordelia, and Angel becoming members of Gunn’s family. I feel like’s Gunn’s superobjective throughout the course of the five seasons never changed, which was to protect his family. Because he’d already lost his parents, every kid on the street, and ultimately Angel, Wesley and Cordelia would become his family, so it never changed. He would die for the people he loved. That was really the essence and the core of the character for me, that he was just someone [who] would give it all for the people that he loved.
JOSS WHEDON
In season two, again we sort of figured that our strength lay with the people we knew, so we started to have more fun with Lindsey and, of course, Darla. Darla was our big shocker at the end of the first season. Season two also aired at a point when we were still matching Angel up with Buffy, because they were on the same network and the same night. For example, we had an arc in season two that I love where Angel just got very, very dark and very into beating the bad guys. We deliberately set it up so that his epiphany—his return to grace, if you will—was aired the same night as the death of Buffy’s mom. We knew we could not do a depressing Angel after showing “The Body.” People would be killing themselves, including us. So the series still sort of matched.
TIM MINEAR
Season two took Angel to his own personal existential dark place that he crawled his way out of. He was able to be happy for a second in Pylea, and then the shit hit the fan when he got back to see Willow waiting for him, which was our way to tie in to the season five finale of Buffy when Buffy died. So we definitely go off on a cliffhanger. I will say the Pylea arc in and of itself had a beginning, a middle, and an end. That story gets resolved. And then when we come back to the real world, it’s a little bit like when you come back from vacation and you’re, like, “I had a great vacation, but now I have to go back to real life.” That’s kind of where we leave you off.
HERE COMES THE SON
“The father shall kill the son . . .”
By its third season, Angel had clearly differentiated itself from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel’s depth of storytelling, characterizations, and, in many instances, scope allowing it to go places far beyond its progenitor.
Behind the scenes, Joss Whedon’s time was divided between Buffy, Angel, and the then in-development Firefly; David Greenwalt remained show runner, Tim Minear became executive producer midseason, Marti Noxon remained consulting producer, and Jeffrey Bell, who had served as a writer for The X-Files, joined the staff as a coproducer.
JOSS WHEDON
(executive producer / cocreator, Angel)
Going into season three, we were dealing with that thing in your twenties when you’re waiting for your life to start, and you suddenly realize that it has. It was everybody sort of taking stock of their lives, and being sort of conflicted about where they are. The idea was they would stop and deal with who they are, where they are, how the
y deal with each other, what they’re doing, and at the same time they fought evil things. Also, seasons three and four, more than anything else, represented Angel at its most turgid, and therefore was the most beloved by me. Dark and strange and fabulous.
TIM MINEAR
(executive producer, Angel)
By the time we got to season three, I think we finally realized what Angel was in some ways, although we always knew to some degree. I mean, people would say, “The show’s just now finding itself,” and they were saying that since the second half of the first season. The secret about Angel is that it was constantly changing, so it was whatever it was at any particular point. It wasn’t like Buffy with the hard, fast, very clear metaphor. It worked best as a Douglas Sirk–like giant melodrama. The other thing is that people would ask, “Why can’t Angel ever be happy,” and the answer is because it’s tedious when he’s happy. And the other thing we learned is that pain, if it’s earned character-wise, makes characters compelling. After season three, Wesley’s no longer a guy who slips on coffee beans; this guy’s had his throat slit, and it makes him incredibly compelling even though he’s not a bad guy.
BEN EDLUND
(supervising producer, Angel)
Oh my God, look what happened to Wesley. That was actually very impressive, I thought, to go from Buffy to get that kind of tweed, sort of coded dude as hard-core as they got was amazing. And for Alexis to be as strong in running both ends of that portrait was great.
DAVID GREENWALT
(executive producer / cocreator, Angel)
We really didn’t give Angel a break, nor, in some ways, should he have one. As these shows go on, you have to keep conflict in the characters’ life and give [them] new stuff to deal with.
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