Where Are They Now? by Tara Dilullo
He’s the King of Vampires, the Prince of Darkness, and, as Buffy proved in Season Five’s ‘Buffy vs. Dracula’, no girl is safe from his charms. Buffy Magazine caught up with the man behind the infamous count, Rudolf Martin, to find out about his time on the show, his career since tempting Buffy to the dark side, and romancing Sarah Michelle Gellar not once, but twice…

Is it possible for a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer to exist and not have the most iconic vampire of them all, Dracula, eventually show up? Of course not, and although it took a while, Dracula finally appeared in the Season Five premiere, ‘Buffy vs. Dracula’, in all his vampiric glory. The Dark Prince of Transylvania made quite the commotion in Sunnydale during his brief stay, culminating in the vamp working his full thrall mojo on Buffy, all so that he could take a sip from the Slayer’s neck.
    The man behind the accent, fangs and long black cape is German-born actor Rudolf Martin, who was no stranger to the classic role when he was cast on the show. He was fresh off playing the man behind the legend, Vlad the Impaler, in the film Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula, when he got the call for Buffy. As he explains, “I think the reason they brought me in and hired me was because I had just played Dracula in that film.”
    Rudolf went in for the audition, read for Joss, and was quickly cast. “They liked my audition and thought I was on the right track,” he says. “They let me do what I was doing with a few slight variations. I didn’t get a lot of direction. It was all tongue-in-cheek on Buffy and more about the symbolic value of vampires. I had fun with it.”
    Having played Vlad, Rudolf approached the role as a combination of reality and fantasy. “I did a mix of my image of a vampire and romantic hero and tried to anchor it with the real Dracula, since I had more knowledge of the real man.” As for other performances of Dracula that inspired his interpretation, Rudolf offers, “My favourite Dracula was played by Klaus Kinski in the 1979 remake of Nosferatu. His is the one that has really stayed in my mind.”
    A big perk of the job for Rudolf was reuniting with actress Sarah Michelle Gellar. “My second professional job was a contract role on All My Children with Sarah,” he elaborates. Rudolf played Anton Lang, the red-hot love interest of Sarah’s character, Kendall, on the daytime serial. “We had a lot of time together. We were on at exactly the same time, she got on a couple of months before me, so we were always together. After she left, we kept in touch.”
    But Rudolf’s part on Buffy was the first time the duo had reunited on camera since their days on All My Children. “It was great to see Sarah again,” he says. “It’s strange when you have chemistry already and you know each other in real life and you’ve done so many scenes together, but you are doing it again playing a totally different character. Yet underneath it all. there is the same exact energy, which is fun.”
    Despite only working on Buffy for one episode, Rudolf enjoyed his time on set. “It is a tongue-in-cheek kind of show. The scenes were short and there were fight scenes and stuff, which was different. The atmosphere was really great and they were working very hard. They were always trying to get it exactly right. During the shooting, they rewrote a couple of scenes after we filmed them and then we shot them again – so they were playing around with variations for the character.”

Rudolf continued to work on other films and television shows after Buffy, without hearing much about the fan reaction to his role. “I wasn’t so much aware of the popularity of the show until about a year after the episode aired, and I was invited to a Buffy-related event in Europe. I was really surprised by that because I only did one episode, so I felt like it was a mistake that I was invited,” he laughs. “I then realised the show was huge in Europe, especially in England. I went to the event because I figured it was a great way to spend Halloween – at a vampire ball. I was totally convinced nobody was going to care about me being there, but I was surprised to find that my character and the show was so popular.”
    “It’s always kind of weird when a couple of years after you do something, you get invited to something related with it and you see how much people are into it,” he continues. “It’s not even that many people watch the show – because the ratings were always small – but those that watch Buffy are much more committed to it than a show like CSI, which I was also on. People love that show but they aren’t into it as much as Buffy fans are into their show.”
    These days, Buffy isn’t the only thing Rudolf is well known for, and having appeared in films like Swordfish with John Travolta, and a variety of guest appearances on television shows like Sliders, Enterprise and 24, he is quick to name favourite characters. “The Dark Prince was one of my favourites.”
    Yes, for Rudolf, there will be no escaping the Prince of Darkness. He admits people still recognise him for his Drac-related roles, and chuckles. “Once in a while people will recognise me, but I look very different in my everyday life, which is a good thing.”

The Mummy Returns by Ian Spelling
After her shocking exit in Season Five, it was great to see Joyce Summers’ subsequent reappearances in Season Seven – in whichever form she may have taken. Actress Kristine Sutherland discusses her most recent work on Buffy…

Kristine Sutherland had an inkling. “It’s going to sound strange, but it doesn’t surprise me that we’re still talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer after all these years,” says the actress, who played the title character’s mother, Joyce Summers. “I don’t know why, but I always sort of had a gut instinct. It just felt that way. It wasn’t a rational thing, where you go, ‘This show is about such and such, and its time has come and this will hit a nerve.’ It wasn’t like that. It was just a gut feeling that this was a really special show. So in a strange way, to be honest, I never doubted that it would keep going for so long.”
    And keep going it did. For seven years – a long time for any TV show. And Kristine has kept going, too. Even after series creator Joss Whedon killed Joyce off, he brought her back from time to time, and more so in Season Seven. Though there’s never been a question that Buffy is the show’s lead, Joyce/Kristine was always the matriarch. “I think oftentimes parents on television are more stereotypical cardboard cut-outs. It’s not an easy thing to be someone’s parent on a show when the focus isn’t on the parents. The adolescents – I certainly can’t say children – on Buffy are the focus. But I’ve enjoyed playing Joyce because I felt like she was a real, live person who was there as a parent, who made mistakes. I’ve also liked that she’s been a single parent. She’s never been a sitcom widow. Joyce was a real person struggling to make it on her own and struggling to make sense out of her relationship with her teenager. Their relationship went through a lot of changes over the years. It was a pretty amazing thing, as an actress to be able to play that all out over a period of time. It’s not been like a film, where everything that happens to the characters is condensed into a roughly two-hour period. The relationship between Joyce and Buffy was played out over the course of almost real time. Everyone got older in life as well as on screen, and I think that added even more depth to it.”
    Kristine enjoyed the work so much that she wanted more. She’d be lying if she said anything other than, “Of course… not,” when asked if the actress in her got enough to do on the show. “What actor or actress worth his or her salt wouldn’t want more?” Kristine asks. “Especially on a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But, as we were saying, I do understand that the show is called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are times, though, when I wish they’d explored other aspects of Joyce as a single mom more. She was a single mom who supported the family, and I’d like to have seen how she did it, how hard it was for her.  The writers kept going, ‘Ah, we just never do that, do we? We kept meaning to get into that art gallery.’ And they never did. I think it would have been nice to have seen her more as a working woman.”
    Joss Whedon told Kristine two years in advance that he intended to bring about Joyce’s demise, and he delivered on his promise with ‘The Body’, (although some fans might argue that the deed was actually done in ‘I Was Made to Love You’). Regardless, ‘The Body’ examined, in painful detail, the fallout from Joyce’s demise and the reactions – sad, scared, and lost – of those who loved her. “I thought ‘The Body’ was an incredible episode,” Kristine says. “It had a lot of personal reverberations for me because I lost my father when I was in my late 20s. At that time, if you’re in that situation, you’re probably one of the few people you know who’ve lost a parent. So it’s a very, very lonely journey and you have all these incredibly intense feelings about it. Death just isn’t that big a part of your landscape when you’re that age, so you go on this journey very much alone.”

    “Only as you get older, much older, and your friends’ parents start dying do you feel you can talk with somebody about it. But even then it’s different, because you’ve already experienced it and already been on the journey alone. So I had a lot of personal feelings invested in how ‘The Body’ played out and in what Joss was trying to do. It was amazing to me because I remember when my father died, trying to figure out what I was going to wear to the funeral. I was at such a loss that I painted my nails hot pink and wore a pale blue flower dress. It was just the only way I could deal with it, going against the grain. I felt so raw and far too young to go out and buy some black dress. That was my reaction to death, bringing in bright colours. It was my rebellion against death. So, when I read ‘The Body’ and Willow just gets herself completely overwrought because she doesn’t know what to wear to the funeral, I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ It just rang so true with me. That’s not the kind of thing you think about if you’re over 30. You’re thinking about other things. You get out your black outfit, put it on and go to the funeral. And at the funeral you’re thinking about a lot of different things. But when it happened to me, I wasn’t 30, and so I didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what was appropriate or how to behave. You don’t know the rules yet. My parents were divorced and my mother was ill at the time, so like it was for Buffy, my journey was very lonely. There were no adults around to sort of tell me what to do. So that episode hit home for me, and I think it hit home for a lot of people, probably each in his or her own way.”
    But this is Sunnydale. As Kristine herself says with a smile “Nobody worries too much about death in Sunnydale.” Sure enough Joyce turned up in Season Six in ‘Normal Again’ and last year in ‘Conversations With Dead People’ and ‘Bring on the Night’. “I thought that ‘Conversations With Dead People’ was such a great episode,” Kristine enthuses. “It was really terrifying and Michelle did a great job of being in the centre of all that and really creating the terror of that situation. For me as an actress it was just sort of strange being a ghost. That’s when you’re not quite sure who you are. I knew I was mom, but I also knew that The First, the evil one, was speaking through me. It also felt kind of brief, because we did it with me in front of a green screen. So I was standing alone with these enormous lights shining on me. It was strange to do, but I know a lot of people really like that episode, so I was pleased. And ‘Bring on the Night’ was interesting too. Buffy just sort of went into a dream state, but it happens so subtly that you’re not even aware that afterward that that’s what’s happening. Joyce was bopping around like good old mom is back at home. ‘Can I get you some tea? How was work today?’ They were these little brief blips of passing through as the old Joyce.
    “Going back to Season Six, I liked ‘Normal Again’, Kristine adds. “I loved the concept of that episode, and it was really fun to play. It was interesting to explore, even mentally through the whole process of shooting, the idea of this alternate reality and what it meant. It was brilliant. Joyce would be a totally different person, in a way, if she had stayed married and if this had happened to her daughter, if her daughter was mentally disturbed rather than really a Slayer. It’s totally different to the mother of a young, ripe superpower than the mother of a child who’s institutionalised.”
    So what does the foreseeable future hold for Joyce and, indeed, Buffy? “I don’t know,” replies Kristine, who spends her off-time with her family and pursuing a passion for photography. “Joss isn’t one to write a million episodes ahead. I can only say that whatever I think it will be I know it won’t be, because Joss never does what anyone would expect him to do.”