“At least when she was burning stuff down I knew what to say.”

Played by Dean Butler

First Appearance: Nightmares

Hank Summers met Joyce in high school, and after ditching his original date, he accompanied her to a dance that marked the beginning of their relationship. They married soon after, and Buffy was born in 1981. By 1996, however, their marriage was strained to breaking point. Buffy’s increasingly erratic behaviour — the result of her secret life as the Slayer — placed enormous pressure on the family. Convinced her father was having an affair, Buffy watched as Hank left the home a year before the Summers women moved to Sunnydale.

Despite the divorce, Hank remained part of Buffy’s life for a time. She visited him in Los Angeles, and they maintained a semblance of a father‑daughter relationship. Over the years, though, Hank grew more distant. His contact with Buffy dwindled, and when Joyce died, he did not return or reach out, choosing instead to remain in Spain with his latest secretary. His absence became one of the deeper emotional wounds in Buffy’s personal history.

Years later, Hank resurfaced with a new life in Silicon Valley. He had left Francesca and become engaged to Paige, a woman with two teenage children who had moved in with him. Buffy and Dawn reconnected with him in San Francisco during monthly reunions, attempting to rebuild a fractured family dynamic. Hank presented himself as stable and successful, but the emotional distance of the past lingered beneath the surface.

During one of these reunions, Hank announced that he and Paige had decided to exclude Buffy from their wedding “for safety reasons,” citing her public reputation as a Slayer. The decision devastated Buffy and angered Dawn, who saw it as yet another rejection — a continuation of the pattern that had defined their father’s behaviour for years. Hank framed the choice as practical, but its emotional impact was unmistakable.

Despite this painful setback, Buffy and Dawn continued to maintain contact with their father. When Buffy later departed for the Safe Zone, she asked Dawn to “fill Dad in on everything,” a small but telling sign that the connection, however strained, had not been severed entirely. Hank remained a distant but present figure, orbiting the edges of their lives rather than inhabiting them.

APPEARANCES

Buffy SEASON 1