Date: December 2002
Price: £2.80
Page Count: 52
Editor: Darryl Curtis
Stake Out
With eight episodes wrapped and completed, production continued on Buffy‘s seventh season. While there was yet more speculation on the show’s future (more on that in a second), details had been released about the next three episodes scheduled, namely Help, Selfless and Him.
All three would be very different episodes. It took us back to when every week had a new demon and a new lesson to learn, a new challenge to overcome. In ‘Help’ Buffy, in her new job as counsellor at the new Sunnydale High, was determined to save Cassie Newton from her own predicted death. While she wouldn’t succeed, Cassie would be memorable enough to return a few weeks later, when another cast member proved unavailable.
‘Selfless’ would take a look at Anya’s origins, and would bring back fan favourite Olaf the Troll, played once again by Abraham Benrubi. The episode would also feature the return of Halfrek, played by Kali Rocha, in what would prove to be her final appearance, and also, reportedly explain why Anya was so afraid of bunnies.
We never did figure out that last bit.
‘Him’, finally, would bring back shades of season two’s Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, as Dawn dealt with a high school quarterback who had the supernatural ability to be irresistible to women!
Back to the show’s future and the magazine urged everybody not to ask Michelle Trachtenberg is she was being groomed to take over from Sarah Michelle Gellar and headline the show in a potential eighth season: “People ask me what do I see as the future of Buffy,” the actress recently told the Sci-Fi website. “Honestly, I view the future of Buffy as every next episode. Whatever they decide, I’ll be here. I’ll be thinking about Dawn and having fun.”
Producer Marti Noxon had similar notions. “Nobody is sure that the show should or will continue without Sarah Michelle Gellar. Nobody wants to do a show that is just a pale imitation of what came before it, and Sarah is certainly tremendously important in the Buffy universe. That’s why it’s called the Buffy universe.”
It’s an argument that would last until 2024 when New Sunnydale would be announced, and sadly, it’s one we continue to have now. #BringBackBuffy
Finally, allaying any worries or concerns fans may have had about last minute issues, this month, they finally confirmed that Faith would be returning, and updated us, quite rightly so, on Eliza Dushku‘s latest career move…
Angel Love by Darryl Curtis and Ruth Thomas
It’s been an eventful year for both Charles Gunn and Winifred ‘Fred’ Burkle. As well as dealing with their growing feelings for each other, there have been major upheavals at Angel Investigations to contend with. Actors J. August Richards and Amy Acker clearly enjoy working on the show and with each other and when they sat down with Buffy Magazine just after Season Three had wrapped, their enthusiasm was contagious…
Amy, for a while it seemed that Fred was going to get together with Wesley. Were you surprised by what happened?
Amy Acker: I was, I was kind of playing it that whole time that Fred likes Wesley, then all of a sudden they were like ‘and Fred likes Gunn’. Okay, I like him, too! They had written all of this flirtatious stuff with Wesley, and then what happened was a really nice surprise. There had been convert stuff, but it made it more exciting when all of a sudden Gunn and I were kissing on the floor!
J. August Richards: Wait a minute, though – Fred has liked every man on the show so far! She liked Angel first, then she liked Wesley, then she liked me…
Amy: I was more vocal about Angel, but after he trashed me I was more secretive about it. We were trying to keep it quiet at first, but now we are not, obviously. Except there’s been so much drama, we haven’t really gotten to do much, have we? Everything happened right when we’ve got together so it doesn’t feel like we’ve gotten to really just have a relationship and be happy as a couple. But in Angel Investigation Land, you can’t really have a normal relationship!
J.: They had said that it was going to happen but I never really expected it to, because when I do, sometimes it doesn’t happen. I thought, okay, I ‘ll wait and see, and then when it happened in that episode I was surprised.
Fred and Wesley seem to have a lot in common…
Amy: I think that was the plan. Wesley and Fred are such good friends and like-minds. Fred liked all the things about Gunn that were different. The whole woman thing of liking the challenge!
J.: It’s great – and I’m not just saying this because she is here – because I love the fact that I get to work with her so closely.
Amy: We have a lot of fun and we’re the fastest!
J.: Yeah, we’re pretty fast; when we work together we make it very easy. It’s so enjoyable to work with Amy…
You’ve both recently cited ‘Waiting in the Wings’ as your favourite episode. Now that the season’s over, is this still top of your list for this year or do you have other favourites?
J.: For me personally it is.
Amy: I think so, but there’ve been so many great ones since then, too. But nothing about that episode was wrong! People were saying: ‘You want to go to work early? Let’s stay; let’s do a 24-hour day!’ Everyone was so excited. I think that ‘Billy,’ where these guys are chasing me around, was great fun too. We had about three episodes where we just had a lot of stuff to do. Wesley was off giving us grief, and Cordelia and Groo were on vacation and so we just got to do a lot of really great scenes together. The episode where they go to the hospital [‘Forgiving’] was one, and then the next episode [‘Double or Nothing’] where he breaks up with me and is mean to me was another!
‘Double or Nothing’ must have been a difficult episode to do – can you tell us more about it and how important that show was to Gunn’s character development?
J.: I knew that if she knew they were coming after my soul to kill me, she would step in and try to help me. I had to break up with her in order to protect her. And that’s Gunn’s whole deal: he’s always doing something awful to somebody, but to protect them. It’s for a good reason, so it’s kind of my motive everywhere. It’s my code!
How do you feel about the cute aspect of the relationship between Fred and Gunn – portrayed in scenes like the one where you talking to each other on cell phones?
J.: That’s funny, because if you could see us shooting that episode you wouldn’t have thought it was cute at all!
Amy: I missed a step and fell down the stairs!
J.: I was talking about how great California is and she goes, ‘Man, it’s not the ground that swallows you whole’ – and then she falls down the stairs! It was completely hilarious. The camera wasn’t on her at the time, so you wouldn’t get to see that, but it was pretty funny.
Amy: We’ve had some cutesy stuff. It’s fun because you wouldn’t expect Gunn to be like that.
J.: It’s totally fun for me. It’s great because I never got to play anything like that. I probably smiled once in the entire second season. So this is a whole other opportunity for me to just play a whole other note, a whole other colour, which has been fantastic. I love it.
So, be honest. How long do you give Fred and Gunn’s relationship.
J.: I feel like we’ve got a good summer coming up. [Laughs]
Amy: The only thing that Joss has said is that once people are happy, it gets boring. And we say that we haven’t gotten to be that happy, since all this bad stuff is happening. But I don’t know how long it’s going to last.
J.: Thinking about some of the other relationships on both shows, I can imagine something pretty interesting happening. Willow and Amber was the longest-relationship. The season ends with so many balls in the air. Fred and I are the only ones in the hotel, so we have no idea what’s going to happen next season, who is going to survive, who is going to be good, who is going to be evil. So it’s like everybody is questionable, really, except us. We have no idea what their agenda is going to be by the time we come back next season.
Has being the newest recruits to Angel Investigations made the two of you close friends on set?
Amy: I think we’re close, but not really because of that. After you’re on set for two days you feel best friends with everyone Everyone’s so welcoming: Alexis, Charisma, David. I just feel like our cast has a special relationship: each person has a distinct relationship with each cast member, and people who come on our set are always amazed that we get along so well.
What would you both like to see happen on Angel in the future?
Amy: I’d like some sort of magic power, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen! Just something cool.
J.: Yeah, Cordelia just got some magic. She can levitate. It seems like she’s got a lot of miscellaneous powers. But they are totally uncontrolled. At the end of the season something happens to her and she doesn’t have any control over it or any understanding of it.
Anything else?
J.: I think I want to grow some hair!
Adam Busch: In the Flesh by Abbie Bernstein
From relatively harmless beginnings, Warren and his nerdy companions soon emerged as formidable enemies for the Scoobies in Season Six. Buffy Magazine met up with the actor who portrayed the Troika’s leader, Adam Busch.
Warren Mears may have only been a human villain, but the consequences of his actions proved far more devastating than those of Buffy’s many enemies. Thanks to him, Willow (along with Buffy fans everywhere) lost Tara, accidentally shot by Warren’s gun. He subsequently became the first human to be magically killed by the enraged Wiccan – as she sought – and won – a bloody revenge
Despite all this, actor Adam Busch feels some compassion for Warren: “I probably see him as much more tragic than I think anybody else would,” he notes with a laugh. “I just feel like he keeps getting hurt and it keeps making him angrier and sicker until he loses his sense of what is really right and wrong.” Adam sees Warren’s accidental murder of ex-girlfriend Katrina as the turning point. “That’s really what sends him over the edge,” he says. “To justify killing the only girl he ever loved, he’s going to have to keep taking it as far as he can possibly take it, just to make that seem right to himself. He won’t even think about the loss that he suffered from his own hands.”
As Warren suffered at Willow’s hands, Adam suffered at Nicholas (Xander) Brendon’s too, when a blow accidentally connected during filming. “There’s dialogue, you punch and say a line, and then he punched and my jaw snapped right down, and I’m thinking ‘I’m sure it looks really good and I should just keep going.’ I knew enough not to break the scene, but I was in such shock, I couldn’t remember what my line was. I think I just stood there with a dazed look on my face until they said, ‘Okay, cut!’”
Warren also went head-to-head with Buffy, and Sarah Michelle Gellar proved to be an educational fighting partner. “I learned a lot about professionalism from Sarah,” says Adam. “She’s a wonderful leader, setting an example that it can be done and it doesn’t have to be so hard. For someone to remember the fight choreography and to play it with conviction and to be careful not to hit me and sell the lines and sell the punches is really, really difficult. She learns that stuff so fast and does it so well, and the way she can just say her lines so confidently while doing those fight scenes – I was scared for her. I don’t think for a second she was scared that I would hit her or come anywhere near her, but she seriously looked like I was going down.”
Stunt coordinator John Medlen gets high marks from Adam too: “He’s just the nicest guy and makes you feel so confident about what you’re doing,” Adam praises. “He’s so quick to show you anything, and so concerned with safety without making you paranoid – which is – I think – a really great gift. I do a lot of stunt fights just because I like taking falls, and if they can see my face, I think it’ll look better.”
Firing a handgun was a new experience for Adam. “I’ve never shot a gun before. And I learned a lot about myself in doing so. In ‘Seeing Red,’ it’s a real gun with blanks in it. I didn’t want to shoot it, because Warren isn’t necessarily somebody who has a lot of experience with guns, but for safety reasons, they insisted that I go into a prop truck and just fire a couple rounds so I could get used to it and not lose control. Honestly, when I shot it, the first feeling that came to my head was of power. It wasn’t even a real bullet, it was just a blank, but that sound feels very, very powerful. It didn’t want to make me want to do it again, it’s certainly not something I’m going to explore, but it was definitely one of those things you really don’t know until you try it.”
Playing the consequences of Warren’s actions was hard work. “My shirt gets ripped open, through a wave of Willow’s hand. It was very simple, but it was surprisingly difficult in the woods with two clear pieces of string to be pulled on cue and have the buttons pop open. I’m tied to a tree with my legs spread and it takes so long to get out of it, to take your hands out of the branches and out of the vines and to get your legs out and to be lowered back down to the ground, You’d have to stop in the middle of all this emotional work you’re doing, go all the way back to make-up, sit there for an hour, have a bullet hole or a wound done, and then go back and continue right where you left off. Episode director David Solomon had built an elaborate rig to let me lean back, but when we got to Griffith Park, I said, ‘You know what? I don’t need it. If I look uncomfortable, it’s probably best.”
Although the stunt double handled the shot where Warren is on fire, Adam still had to have a body cast taken so that the make-up people could create a skinless Warren. “They’re spreading this clay of some kind on your face, somebody’s brushing it past your nose so that you can always breathe, because your mouth is completely sealed. I was absolutely fine until that last five seconds, when you feel it start to harden. That’s when you’re like ‘Oh, my God. If they don’t get this off of me, this is going to seal to my face and I’m not going to be able to breathe.’”
Will Adam miss Buffy? “Even when I just had a break, I missed being there and working on it,” he admits. “The back and forth with the producers and the writers in terms of what I’m giving them and them writing to my character – I’ve never felt that much a part of something before, in terms of television. I’ve gotten to carry episodes and fly and die and be a robot and do sex scenes and violent scenes and comedy – I’ve gotten to do everything, and I don’t think that there’s another show on television where I could do so much.”
Casualties of War by Kate Anderson
A cool article given us a list of dead characters, some good, some evil, some just plain missing, but all part of the story of the Slayer so far…
Episode Spotlight
Doppelgangland.
Comic
This strip is labelled as The Death of Buffy (Part 2), with material from Buffy the Vampire Slayer #43.
Poster
A composite poster of Angel and Fred.
The Watcher's Guide 