Slayers and Vampires
Page 44
As things played out, Angel brought the baby—named Connor—back to the hotel and began mapping out plans on raising him. At the same time, Holtz (along with Sahjhan) develops a plan that convinces Wesley—via an altered prophecy—that Angel is destined to kill his son. In response, Wesley steals the child; heads to the park, where one of Holtz’s minions, Justine, slits his throat; and gives the child to Holtz, who, following a shoot-out with members of Wolfram and Hart, is actually allowed by Angel to leap through a portal to a hell dimension that Sahjhan has opened, hoping it will give Connor a greater chance for survival. What he doesn’t expect is that a couple of episodes later, Connor would return at the age of eighteen, ready to take down his father. Holtz, now elderly, manipulates his “son” against his actual father.
JOSS WHEDON
Angel having a son brought out a lot of colors in him that we would never have seen. Then, of course, we had set up Holtz in the season before and him stealing the son and the son coming back as a teenager who hates nothing more than, oh, say, his father. There was just a huge amount to play with and the show was firing on all cylinders. So you could say, “The show is about a bunch of twentysomethings with emotions” and it’s, like, “OK, good.” But if you say, I’m a vampire and I’ve created a son,” your response is, “OK, better.” A lot to be mined there. I only regret that that season was two years before I had my own son, because when we were breaking this story, I was going, “Yeah, I guess Angel would like this.” I couldn’t feel an emotion toward it. Then when I had my son, I was, like, “Can we do that season again?”
DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
Having a baby on the set was interesting. We would do rehearsals without the child. When we were ready to roll, we would get the kid and it would change the whole dynamics of the scene, because there are laws that there are only certain times that you can have a child work on the set. It was so time-consuming, but very calming, because when you have a baby in your arms, it’s eating off your energies. You have to be kind of in tune with the child and still do your work as the character on a show. It was difficult. But it was very good practice for me, though. I’d been living vicariously through my sisters, with my niece and my nephews. When I had a child of my own, it definitely enhanced that practice.
TIM MINEAR
“Sleep Tight” is where Wesley takes the kid to give him to Holtz but realizes that he had to get out of town with the kid himself, which is exactly what Holtz was hoping for, putting Wesley in a very vulnerable position while he’s keeping everyone at the hotel busy. Then, of course, Justine cuts Wesley’s throat and takes the baby, and Holtz jumps through a dimensional portal with Connor and there’s pain for everyone. With “Forgiving,” we were really trying to figure this fucking story out, because, basically, what we had was Cordelia’s out of town, Angel has just lost his son, and Wesley is lying in a field someplace, but we knew where we wanted to end it. We wanted it to seem like Angel has realized why Wesley did what he did and has gone to make some kind of bridge between them at the hospital and instead tries to smother him with a pillow. That we knew. What we didn’t really have was an engine for the story to keep it going, which is why we brought back Sahjhan, because we knew we had to play off his character in some way.
Things build up to the episode “The Price,” which is the setup for Connor’s return. Because Angel had gone through all these extreme measures to try to get the kid back, we wanted to answer the question of, Did he do the right thing? And our answer is, in fact, he did. Even though Angel messed with things he probably shouldn’t have been messing with, when it comes to certain things, you have to try whatever you have to try in order to know that there’s no hope.
That whole story is about how we think that this dimensional thing that he opened to get Sahjhan back, is the terror of these mysterious slugs that’s appeared in the hotel when, in fact, it is not. It is something breaking through from the other side, which is Quor’toth. And, at first, we think it’s these little slug monsters that are escaping, and, in fact, they’re running away from something that’s even scarier, which turns out to be Connor, who’s now seventeen or eighteen. When Fred is possessed by the slug creature, she says, “The destroyer is coming,” and then in the next episode, “Benediction,” Holtz says to Connor, “It was brilliant the way you found the cracks and a way to get out,” and Connor says, “I scared the slugs into fleeing and they went straight to the holes and I followed them.”
“A New World,” which Jeff Bell wrote and I directed, is something we wanted to do kick-ass action in. You know, the minute that kid comes back we wanted to do kick-ass action. We wanted to show a complicated fight scene that we don’t usually spend enough time on. I wanted to come into a fight that was so big that there wasn’t an opening credits until well into the first act. The very opening of the episode is those CGI stakes with the CGI axe, and then we come back in and there’s a big fight, and then Connor runs outside and jumps on the back of a bus and is driven away. You know, we’d gone to Pylea and then we wanted to show what it was like for someone who came into this world from another place and didn’t know it. Part of the story we were following from Connor’s point of view, following him into the dirty underbelly of Los Angeles. And it all culminates with Angel and Connor confronting each other. It was Angel trying to be a dad.
BEN EDLUND
Being born in an alley after Darla stakes herself makes Connor, in a sense, the bastard child of his own gestation. What came afterward was this thing of how trackable is that? How much can you understand about that as a person trying to understand the plight of Angel? How much better do you understand your main character because he’s had a son who’s disappeared, went to hell, was born from vampires, and returned in his teenage years as a troubled “child,” because he was raised on a demon plane? So Angel went from being a parent to being the parent of a teenager. It’s like an illegitimate child story, basically.
TIM MINEAR
In “Benediction,” Holtz is back, looking terrible in a rubber face. Had we known it was going to look like that, we would not have done it. But we ended up using foam or whatever that crap is that makes him look like he has a giant rubber face. But, thankfully, Keith is so good that he acts through all that crappy makeup and I start to forget about it. But the story is about the resolution of Holtz, and if you look at the episode you’ll see that he never lies. He never says a single lie in the whole episode, even though he is completely tricking Connor into thinking that Angel murdered him. Everything he says is true. He realizes that Angel and Connor are destined to somehow be together. That the kid found his way here, and if that’s the case, they have some kind of a destiny. That he really has to let the kid go. The only thing he cares about is the fact that Connor loves him. And the only way to ensure that is to make sure that he hates Angel, and so he does what he does.
KEITH SZARABAJKA
All of that is, I think, tied into the fact, again, that he never really trusted that Angelus was completely Angel or that he was going to remain Angel. And then he felt that he owed something to his murdered family. He had to do something. And from Holtz’ point of view, this was more justice than vengeance. This was a man who could articulate his feeling and his emotions, but I think that the loss of his family was something that was almost too deep for him—I think it would be too deep for anyone. As a father, I don’t know how I would cope with one of my sons being murdered or both, God forbid. My vengeance might know no bounds. You don’t know how you’re going to respond until that actually happens to you.
TIM MINEAR
The final moments between Angel and Holtz have Angel pinning him against a wall, and when I was writing the episode, it was all about that moment. It was all about Angel accusing this guy of kidnapping his son and then the guy saying, “And you murdered mine.” There’s nothing Angel can say to that. The whole notion of Angel saying, “You want me to say I’m sorry, but it would mean nothing.” And the guy whose
family you murdered, saying, “It wouldn’t mean much, but it would mean a little. So I think you have to say it.”
KEITH SZARABAJKA
Sometimes when I find a script is poorly written, it’s difficult to memorize, but I never had a problem with any of the scripts for Angel, and I had some long speeches in that show. It was so good, and the character always made sense to me. There were a couple in the middle there where I went, “OK, we’re sort of into a jogging mode here as opposed to really doing something,” but that happens in episodic TV. I think that there was a good character arc all the way through the thing, and it followed up and landed. It started somewhere and landed somewhere else, which I thought was great.
Cast as the teenage Connor was Vincent Kartheiser, a Minneapolis native who trained at the Guthrie Theater there. When he was six, he performed in a number of stage productions, including A Christmas Carol. Other stage roles followed, and he also appeared on an episode of ER. After Angel, he went on to his critically acclaimed role as the obsequious Pete Campbell on Matt Weiner’s brilliant Mad Men.
VINCENT KARTHEISER
(actor, Connor)
The project was sent to me by my agent. Originally, he wasn’t even called Connor and he wasn’t even Angel’s son. I was actually just booked as “street kid.” So I went in and they told me it was a good role, but they couldn’t quite tell me what it was. They did say that it was going to be three episodes and the end of the show’s third year and that they might pick me up for season four. So I went in and auditioned with a very basic script. Nothing too special, nothing giving away the identity of my character, and I got the part. Then they told me who the character was, and I was excited.
At the same time, in those kind of circumstances, I’m rather shy, and I was really, really nervous. I showed up and there they all were, seven actors
all sitting round the couch, telling inside jokes with one another and laughing. Amazingly, within a couple of weeks I really felt welcomed by quite a few of them, and really part of their family. Halfway through the next season, I was one of the gang. The cast was extraordinarily nice and there was such a great ambiance on the set.
DAVID GREENWALT
Angel was that kind of show, where a baby can go into another dimension and come back out and is suddenly nineteen. We got to play out some great father-son stuff with him. God, he was so good on Mad Men and he was great on our show. He comes out of the Guthrie Theater out of Minneapolis, and he was pretty damn well trained for a young person. He did such amazing shit on Mad Men. He brought a lot of oomph to our show.
VINCENT KARTHEISER
Doing Angel was very different to film. The process is very different. On film you have much more time, there’s much more collaboration, and you know what you’re getting yourself into. You read the script and that’s the script you’re going to do. Whereas on TV you get a new script two days before you’re shooting, so you don’t know what your character’s going to do until you get the new script, and then there’s really no rehearsal. Collaboration is there, but, depending on the director, it can be a lot of collaboration or it can be very minimal. I have a lot of respect for people who do it well. I have a lot of respect for David Boreanaz, for the amazing job he’s done for years and years. I take my hat off to anyone who can continually work those kind of hours day after day and still come out with amazing performances.
KEITH SZARABAJKA
I didn’t actually have a lot of scenes with Vincent. I actually got to know him better after going to conventions. He’s a nice kid. A little diffident, and I think he’s changed now that he did Mad Men for so long and had a lot of success with it. But on Angel he was a late adolescent. I never had a problem with him.
VINCENT KARTHEISER
There’s some of me in that character, but I’m a very lighthearted person in most circumstances. I should say, on the exterior I’m a very light person. I tend to like to make jokes and I’m sarcastic, and I’d like to think I’m witty and funny and don’t take myself seriously. But I also have that other side of me when I feel I’ve been improperly treated, or if I feel I’m not happy with something I’ve done and I’m not happy with myself. I think everyone has more than one side to him.
Proving that not everything was dire in season three, some humor (and pathos) was worked in with the return of Mark Lutz’s Groo, who came to this world from Pylea to be with Cordelia, whom he had fallen in love with, and who, they both believed, had developed feelings for him as well.
MARK LUTZ
There came that moment where Groo, trying to fit in, dressed like Angel and had his hair cut the same way—oh my God, that was so much fun. And that was the thing about Charisma: we had a funny rapport going between us. As an actor, doing those scenes [was] easy; it didn’t even feel like work.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
Honestly, I hated that relationship between Cordelia and Groo. I don’t know why; I just didn’t think it worked. I suppose it served a purpose for the story; obviously, it had to be sort of that level of hero to compete with Angel, so it made sense on that level, but I didn’t like it. I guess as a character sometimes you have to go away and have a certain experience to bring you back to the right place.
In the season finale, “Tomorrow,” Cordelia, having broken up with Groo, is on her way to a meeting with Angel to confess her feelings for him but is elevated to a higher plane of existence, while Connor and Justine—in what they believe is a final act of retribution for Holtz—are in the midst of sealing a tasered Angel in a waterproof box and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean (ironically, a cliffhanger that was identically co-opted by The Vampire Diaries years later).
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I liked the fact that a relationship was building between Angel and Cordelia. I thought that a relationship that grows out of friendship and loyalty is probably the best relationship to have, and so when that occurred it sort of made sense. As she grew and she got deeper, they’re fighting the big fight and they’d been through so much, and seeing everything they see, and having visions and knowing who he is, it made sense. His love for Buffy was a love of passion and it was a great, great love. Like a first love, it’s never going to go away and it’s always going to be special. But first loves always end, so I feel with Cordy and Angel it was a mature love, a love born out of friendship and circumstance, and it was really beautiful. When she goes to her ascension, it’s, like, “How can the Powers That Be take me now? Like, I have to have this conversation. I have to tell him how I feel; he has to know I love him.” I get emotional just saying that, because I can’t imagine just discovering that, oh my God, this person who has been here all along and I didn’t realize it . . . and then you can’t go to him and you can’t tell him how you feel.
DAVID GREENWALT
One of my favorite things with Charisma was that bit where she ascends, which I directed. She was really game, because she went up probably sixty or seventy feet on that thing. I was always a big fan of hers.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I wish I knew what they originally had in mind with this whole ascension idea. I don’t know if it’s bullshit or not, but they said they didn’t know what to do with the character; how to service her, but I don’t think that was it. I think I was having some personal issues and they were feeling like I was a wild card, and they didn’t know how to cope with it or deal with it, or how to make it work at that juncture.
TIM MINEAR
“Tomorrow” was our first cliffhanger. I mean, we generally went out on something that set up the next year, but we just decided it would be cool to leave things the worst possible way they can be. So that’s what we did. We wanted some real questions and it worked, because, deep down, it’s terrific. It means that season four hits the ground running; there was no revving anything up and it was just about touching it to the ground and letting it go.
At the end of season three, both David Greenwalt and Tim Minear left Angel, but for two very different reasons. Greenwalt�
��s was contractual, while Minear was moving over to Whedon’s new space opera, Firefly.
DAVID GREENWALT
I left Angel after the third season due to a major contract dispute. I had gotten a couple of nice overall deals with Fox, first to do Buffy and then to do Angel, and things were very copacetic, but then Fox was, like, “Nobody’s getting a raise. As a matter of fact, everybody’s taking a cut.” I remember going to meet with Dana Walden and my then agent Bob Gummer, saying, “Look, I don’t know that you understand what I’ve given to Buffy and Angel. I would be there at 7 A.M. on a Sunday figuring out all my stuff if I was directing. I gave a lot of blood to those two shows and gracefully, given nobody squeezed it out of me. I’m perfectly happy to not take a raise. I understand tough times; we cut the budget by 2 percent. But I will not accept you actually taking away some money.”
Joss was deep into Firefly and a bunch of other stuff, and he kind of missed this whole thing that was going on with me. It was kind of a sad chapter in our story together, because I kept saying, “Joss, they’re not making the deal and if you don’t call somebody . . .” He was deep into stuff and by the time he got around to it I finally made my move, and also the show Miracles had offered me a pretty lucrative deal, which I really liked. I didn’t really want to leave, but I was sort of offended about this whole idea of taking money away as opposed to not getting a raise. So I had to leave, and Joss kind of woke up and it was just too late. At that point he said he could cobble money together from Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, but it was too late. It really was not about money anymore. And so we kind of parted ways. But we stayed close.
Those three years of Angel were good. I would’ve been happy to stay, and in retrospect maybe I should have stayed, because I went off to do a bunch of other shows that didn’t succeed, like Jake 2.0 and Miracles.