The Wild One by Matt Springer
Darla was back from the dead! An Angel Season 2 interview with Julie Benz, who also participated in a special photoshoot with Byron Cohen.

As a long-time inhabitant of the BuffyVerse, Julie Benz has seen and done some pretty scary stuff. She’s sucked blood. She’s slaughtered innocents with gleeful abandon. She’s served one of Sunnydale’s most fearsome villains, the Master.
    Benz is back and this time it’s not just in Angel’s guilt-ridden flashbacks, either. Darla has been yanked from the depths of Hell by the power-mad minions of Wolfram & Hart to terrorise the vamp she sired – the one who dusted her four years previously without a second thought.
    “It’s a psycho relationship that they have,” Benz says of Darla and Angel. “She’s his lover and his mother, and he killed her. It’s better than Jerry Springer.”
    Way back in the opening moments of ‘Welcome to the Hellmouth,’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s series premiere, Darla was the first vampire that audiences encountered, quickly establishing the stakes for the battles to come. At first a nervous young girl, she lured her prey into believing he had the upper hand. Within seconds, she had morphed into the vamp visage that would signal terror for the mortals of Sunnydale. One of the Master’s favourites, she appeared during Season One before meeting her end after attempting to frame Angel for biting Buffy’s mother.
    But as fans of Buffy have come to know, no one can cheat death like this series. Benz returned to Buffy for a guest spot in the second season, during the flashback sequences in ‘Becoming’. As Angel gained his own series, Darla followed him, popping up in more flashbacks to the early days of Angelus’ vampirism. Even from beyond the grave, Darla has made her presence known.
    “I tend to believe they regret killing Darla so soon,” Benz suggests. “I don’t think they thought she would be as successful as she is, or as popular as she is. I never imagined that either.

With her return to the mortal coil at the end of Angel‘s season one finale, Benz has now become the first vampire to suffer the indignity of a stake to the heart and defy her dusting to avenge her death. “It really was a surprise for me as well as everyone else,” Benz explains. “When they asked me to be in the season finale, they sent me the script. I got half-way through it, and I hadn’t shown up. I’m sitting there going, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ I got three-quarters of the way through it, and I still hadn’t shown up. I got all the way to the last page, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I was very surprised, because I never thought they could bring her back.”
    Darla’s return means that the deliciously evil vamp has, like Angel, literally been to Hell and back. Has her time down under changed her outlook on us walking Happy Meals? “I think coming back from Hell kind of affects you,” Benz replies with a laugh. “It takes its toll.”
    Based on Darla’s frequent appearances in flashbacks and her resurrection, it’s clear that the writers and creators of the series are continually drawn to the character, whether she’s corseted into a period costume or prancing through Sunnydale in her plaid jumper. “I think it’s a mutual respect between me and them, me respecting their work and them respecting mine,” Benz says. “I wouldn’t say we created the character together, but I was supposed to die in the pilot, and they came up to me and they were like, ‘We’re not gonna kill you. We came up with this great idea.’ To have that happen, they obviously liked what I was doing with their material, and I loved their material, which was making me able to perform it very well. I think she grew out of a mutual respect and love.”

    Benz has also benefited from the support of Buffy fans, who have awarded Darla with cult worship befitting a viciously evil vamp who has tortured both the Slayer and the Dark Avenger. Her notoriety for the show has given her the power to strike fear not just on the small screen, but in our world as well.
    “One day I was shooting a TV series on the Universal lot,” Benz says. “I was sitting at the commissary and this little 10-year-old girl, who was also an actress, walked past. I saw her give me this look, and then she just stopped dead in her tracks. Her mouth hit the floor, and she was like, ‘Oh my God! Darla!’ She knew right away and she freaked out. I love the little kids. They’re all a little cautious of me. They think I might morph right there. They’re not sure about me; they think I’m dangerous. There was this little 10-year-old boy who couldn’t even talk to me. He was really afraid of me.”
    That’s par for the course. Scary, and scarier.