Homecoming Queen by Mike Stokes
Written when Juliet Landau returned to Sunnydale in Season Five, here the actress talks about what she’s been doing in between shows and what it was like to return to haunt old friends…

Say what you will about those scumbag lawyers at Wolfram & Hart – when they want something, they go out and they get it. Sure, they sell their souls and break countless laws of man and nature to do it, but on a devious whim, those litigious leeches gave Buffy fans what they’ve been craving for nearly three years…
    They brought Drusilla back.
   It almost makes you want to send the ghost of Holland Manners and his crew a little thank-you note and maybe a fruit basket, doesn’t it?
    Almost.
    Drusilla’s debut on Angel and her return to Buffy marked the first time Juliet Landau has picked up Miss Edith since the finale of Buffy‘s second season. When a drunken Spike returned to the Hellmouth nursing a broken heart in season three, it fuelled rumours of Dru’s impending return as well. As time wore on, however, fans became just as shattered as William the Bloody when it seemed his deliciously delirious counterpart would be shacking up with the South-American chaos demon indefinitely.
    But now that she’s finally back, no one seems more pleased than Landau herself.
    “It’s been so much fun,” she says in a speaking voice that is neither eerie, insane, nor Cockney. “They’ve been writing such great stuff and it’s been so cool to just be back working with James and working with David. It’s been really inventive and really creative and really fun.”
    Landau says that slipping back into the mind and body of Drusilla came as naturally as visiting an old friend.
    “I’ve sort of gotten to where I really understand her which sometimes is a little scary,” she says, the thought evoking nervous laughter. “I understand the logic of her illogic. It’s almost like doing a run of a play, getting to live with a character for that length of time, yet it’s different because the text isn’t the same every time.”
    From her very first meeting to discuss the character with the creator, Landau has invested a tremendous amount of time developing and evolving her approach to playing Drusilla. And though the character was never the poster girl for mental stability, Landau seems to have tapped into a new reserve of insanity for the vampiress’ latest incarnation while sacrificing none of Drusilla’s evil.
    “I remember in that first meeting with Joss and he said a lot of different adjectives about Drusilla and they were all almost kind of contrary and diametric in their nature,” Landau recalls. “I wondered how I was going to put that all into one character, and then I worked on it and all the pieces kind of came together. It’s been a real joy in the fact that she has all these qualities that are very opposing in one person. People are like that.”
    Landau has woven those qualities into a textured performance that can be breath-taking to watch as Drusilla maniacally switches gears from calculating killer to little girl lost.
    “I work with a lot of different aspects of her personality,” she adds. “Initially, I worked in terms of the dialect and body language when she was weak and when she got strong. There’s so many aspects to the character. On one hand she’s kind of childish and then she’s also very sensual and womanly. You get to bounce between all these different things, and what motivates her to become very childlike in a moment or very evil in a moment. Any of those things are sometimes different than how other characters might react to things. When I’m working with James, there’s that whole bond and history, and when I’m working with David, there’s that other whole bond and history of his being a father figure to Drusilla as well as a lover. It’s got all that sort of dark, twisted stuff.
    “The other thing that’s really nice is that there’s also a lot of humour,” Landau adds. “It’s got a funny aspect as well as there being a dangerous aspect and a threatening aspect and an evil aspect. She’s a little lost sometimes. One of the elements of the writing that’s always been so great is that it’s very dimensional. A lot of times when you play a villain, it’s sort of one colour. Right from the beginning there was the other side to Spike and Dru that was really sort of a tender love affair, as well as all of the evil stuff that we did. Of course, it’s kinky as well, but there was this sweet, true love between the two characters that, in a way, humanises them.”

This time around, the actress also finds herself in vamp-face more than ever before. No longer weakened by rioting Rumanians, Drusilla has been feeding on the blood of lawyers, young lovers and townsfolk from her earliest days as a vamp.
    “In so many ways, the prosthetic does so much work for you,” she says. “It’s so scary looking. I was watching my last Buffy episode with my sister and my mom. When James and I go into the Bronze and we’re feeding on that young couple, everyone was freaked out by the sequence. It’s scary even when you’ve done it. You’re inside the character, then you see it from the outside and it’s pretty creepy.”
    In her return to the Buffyverse, Landau also now shares a bond among a growing list of former Sunnydale residents who’ve come to the dark side of Angel‘s Los Angeles. It’s company that Landau says she’s happy to keep.
    “Everybody that works on both shows are such strong actors,” she enthuses. “We had tried a few times to bring Drusilla back, but I had been working on other stuff and scheduling hadn’t worked out, so it was really nice at this time and come and do it. I knew I was going to hook up with Julie Benz and that we were going to quote-unquote wreck havoc on LA together.”
    Landau has also shared a stage with an Angel castmate, although their personal friendship couldn’t save him from Drusilla’s wrath.
    “I had done a reading with Sam Anderson, who played Holland Manners, at a theatre a couple of years ago,” she explains. “Then I was watching Angel and saw he was on and thought it was great. When they called for me to do the show, I really hoped I would work with Sam and we did. It’s a real joy to work with the whole group of actors that are there.”
    Although Landau is now back to working on her film career by shooting a new movie called From the Ground Up, the actress doesn’t intend to wait another three years before reprising her vampire role. “They’ve definitely talked to me about coming back and creating more trouble,” she says coyly. “Maybe next season.”
    We’ll be waiting.

Blaze of Glory by Matt Springer
Clare Kramer talks about her career and how it felt to join the cast of Buffy as season five’s Big Bad.

Everybody has to start somewhere.
    That’s as true an axiom as you’ll ever find in Hollywood, and Clare Kramer is no exception. She spent a whirlwind year eating cheeseburgers and waving endlessly in parade after parade as the officially endorsed Wendy for the Wendy’s Hamburgers fast food chain.
    “I hated the whole thing. They had a lot of parades where I’d have to dress up. I hated it. They gave me toys to throw off the car and I’d try to hit people.”
    Back then, Kramer channelled her anger into bombarding defenceless kids with toys. Who knew it would be perfect training for her performance as Glory, the manic goddess in search of the Key? She’s established herself as this season’s big-ticket Buffy villain – the kind of Big Bad that makes even Spike blush with envy. But to hear Kramer explain it, a classic baddie shouldn’t be judged just by her capacity for evil.
    “I think that what makes any character great is basing it in reality,” she says. “I’m not sure what makes a great villain, except you can show where that motivation comes from. As long as it’s not just some abstract – you can’t just be evil.”

Approaching Glory through her motivations has probably helped Kramer to develop the character, considering that in typical Buffy style, the details about Glory’s true nature didn’t reveal themselves until well into season five. In fact, when she first auditioned for the role, Kramer and Charlie Weber had a mysterious callback together, where she read for Glory and he read for Ben. It wasn’t until months later that she realised that the two had been auditioned together because they would share the same body.
    “I knew something was going on with matching us up,” Kramer recalls. “I wasn’t sure what they were looking for, or what the connection was, but they were definitely sizing us up. We were both like ‘Hmmm.’ We each went in separately and then they came out and said ‘Congratulations, you guys are hired!’ It was pretty cool. I’d never gotten a job quite like that.”
    It also took Kramer a few months to learn that Glory wasn’t just your average, run-of-the-mill demon – she’s a goddess. “Actually, the fact that I’m a goddess didn’t affect any of the choices I made as an actress,” Kramer explains. “The bottom line is that I’m not a god. Any idea I’d come up with about a god would just come from my head, and not be based in reality. I tried to anchor the character in reality, in terms of feelings and emotions, and let the perimeter of the story – the fact that she happens to be a god – fall into place.”
    For their part, the Buffy writers have given Kramer plenty of juicy dialogue to make up for any lack of character information. Although her origins and motives haven’t always been clear, her outrageous wardrobe and wild monologues have Kramer the chance to craft the most flamboyant Buffy villain since Mr. Trick and his flash suits.
    Glory is also known for kicking Buffy’s butt on a regular basis. That has meant plenty of stunt work for Kramer, who spent time training one-on-one with the show’s stunt coordinator before the season began. Even though her stunt double would be taking most of the difficult blows, she still had to be ready for on-camera fisticuffs with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stunt double – the two actresses never fight each other for safety reasons. So far, Kramer’s been able to keep herself and the stunt doubles she fights safe. For the most part.
    “I’ve only hit one girl,” Kramer says sheepishly, “I gave her two black eyes and a huge knot. It was two in the morning and we’d been filming forever. I just misjudged my punch and totally clocked her in the face. They called her ‘the unicorn’ because she had this huge welt on her forehead, and I felt so bad. At least I went home and thought, ‘If I do run into anyone in a dark alley, I know I have a good left hook!”
    Before appearing on Buffy, Kramer was best known for her turn as a cheerleader in the comedy Bring It On along with Eliza Dushku. Dushku didn’t have any advice on defeating the Slayer, but she did have advice about the world Kramer would be walking into.
    “I was the new person, so I didn’t know how people were going to treat me,” Kramer says. “Eliza basically told me, ‘It’s such a welcoming environment, there’s nothing to stress about. Just go do your job and have fun.’ Everyone’s so nice and so talented. There’s no department that lags behind any other department, and that’s rare.”

    Buffy marks Kramer’s first television work as a recurring character, and though she had difficulty at first, she now enjoys the continuing rhythm of series television. “At first it was challenging for me not to have the whole story in front of me and not to know what was going to happen,” Kramer explains. “I was like ‘How do I know how to arc my character?’ There’s all these dimensions and aspects that I didn’t know. But then I settled into the rhythm, and it’s been great ever since. It’s definitely easier being in LA. That’s been nice because I can live at home, and I have cats, so I don’t have to drag them around the country.”
    Dragging two cats across the country – sounds more like a kidnapping plot than the act of a loving pet owner. Maybe there is a dark side to Kramer. Catnapping may not seem too menacing, but even good villains have to start somewhere.

Interview with the Vampire! by Mike Stokes
Dracula himself, actor Rudolf Martin, on his turns as both the fabled count and the historical figure.

The dust never settles in Sunnydale. As soon as Buffy Summers plants a stake in some bloodsucker’s heart, another one seems to be clawing out if the ground looking to make a name for itself by slaying the Slayer. There’s one vampire, however, whose legend is already more storied than the Slayer, Angelus and William the Bloody combined. His name is Count Dracula.
    After four seasons without so much as a postcard, when Dracula finally visited the Hellmouth in the season five premiere, his arrival was an epic event. Even Buffy seemed impressed to be in the presence of the Dark Prince. But the excitement to play host to Dracula wasn’t confined to what fans saw on screen.
    “Everybody was in awe over finally having the vampire on the show,” says Rudolf Martin, the actor who played the notorious legend. “People were very excited, because Dracula, the way it was written, didn’t have to adhere to the same rules as all the other vampires. They have a very specific set of rules of how they behave and react to certain things like stakes and morphing and the crinkly foreheads and all that kind of stuff. Dracula was clearly above all that.”
    Being tall, dark and European made Martin a natural selection for the featured role, but one thing even Dracula wasn’t above is the make-up chair. Getting his hair perfectly coiffed, cape hung just so, and his skin a pleasant shade of pasty was a two-hour process. Of course, a vampire of Dracula’s stature also needs a manicure.
    “The longest thing was the nails. It took 45 minutes because they actually made them on set,” Martin recalls. “Originally there were close-ups of the hands, so the nails were a big deal and I had hand make-up. That kind of stuff took a long time.”
    Footage of Dracula’s hands, however, was left on the cutting room floor due to late changes in the script.
    “There was a point where Buffy dares me to put my hand over a candle, and then both of our hands go into the fire and mine starts catching on fire,” says Martin, “I took her dare, but somehow my powers left me. I guess the producers didn’t think it worked, so they changed it to what you saw in the episode. It was just a short thing towards the end leading into the fight.”

Playing Dracula on Buffy the Vampire Slayer completed a unique character study for Martin, who had just wrapped three months of filming Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula in Romania. In that film, he plays Vlad the Impaler, the man who inspired the myth.
    “The one I did in the film was the real person,” explains Martin, “It was a historically – more or less – accurate film that had really nothing to do with the vampire, except that in the movie, you see what led Bram Stoker four hundred years later to use Vlad the Impaler as a model for his fictional vampire.”
    During Vlad the Impaler’s Turkish reign in the 15th Century, he is said to have brutally executed anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 people in the most sadistic ways imaginable. His preferred punishment was impalement, however, and he’d often dine while watching his victims slowly die.
    “You understand why he became a vampire in the mythology afterwards,” says Martin. “There was already a lot of mythology surrounding him while he was alive, and especially after he died. Even before Bram Stoker used that mythology. It’s really interesting that most people haven’t heard about it. I think that’s what makes him more interesting than other figures.
    “It really gives you a perspective, because I think that Dracula the vampire has been used so much, it’s kind of taken on its own life,” Martin adds. “The way  he was originally written when Bram Stoker based him on Vlad the Impaler, he was a little more clean cut without having been used in so many films and jokes and stories. Maybe it’s watered down a little bit, but you do better understand where the mythology comes from when you read the true story.”
    After immersing himself in the legend for several months, it was a challenge for Martin to change gears and play a more traditional version of Dracula.
    “Originally when I first got the role, I wanted to try and use some of the Vlad the Impaler,” he says, “I thought it would be interesting to play Dracula the same way, because I had just come back from Romania. I quickly abandoned that idea and decided to do it more campy. Ultimately I think Dracula and all the vampires on Buffy are really just symbols for something else, and I think that’s what makes the show work. In the case of Buffy, he’s trying to teach her something about her dark side, so it worked better to play the campy vampire and try to seduce her.”
    And that seduction came natural for Martin. After all, he first seduced Sarah Michelle Gellar back in 1993 when they were married – as a fictional couple on All My Children.
    “It was like we never left,” he says. “It was a strange time warp. We were both laughing.”