Trivia / Buffyverse

• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Elizabeth Anne Allen auditioned for the role of Buffy Summers. She was the runner-up, but Sarah Michelle Gellar got the role. Joss Whedon was so impressed with Elizabeth’s audition that he gave her the role of Amy Madison, which became a recurring role due to the character's popularity.
  • Felicia Day auditioned for Fred in Angel. She would later play Vi in the final season of Buffy.
  • Christian Kane auditioned for Riley Finn on Buffy. He went on to play Lindsey McDonald on Angel. Kane says he played his audition for Riley "perhaps a little less than wholesome", which he feels resulted in Joss Whedon later casting him as a darker character.
  • Adam Busch auditioned for a part in Angel before being cast as Warren Mears on Buffy.
• Creator's Pest:
  • Joss Whedon named Adam as the most boring of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Big Bads, a sentiment shared by a lot of the fandom.
  • Cordelia was gradually phased out during seasons four and five of Angel due to friction between Whedon and Charisma Carpenter (he told TV Guide that it this was due to the writers running out of things for her to do). This became Harsher in Hindsight when Carpenter revealed in 2021 that Whedon had essentially written her off the show to punish her for getting pregnant at a time he considered inconvenient.
  • Vincent Kartheiser said that he quickly lost interest in playing Connor after about four episodes. He disliked that every scene would have him and Angel arguing, and he would then go into a corner to sulk. He said he wasn't surprised when he learned that Connor was hated by the fans as well.
  • To say that a decent number of writers on staff were befuddled and annoyed by Spike's popularity would be an understatement. Whedon was known to be particularly frustrated by it, as he believed very firmly that soulless vampires shouldn't be redeemable, and James Marsters has told several stories over the years of seeing the brunt of that frustration on-set. Other writers like David Fury were known to openly condemn Spike's fans on online forums while the show was running, likening them to people writing love notes to serial killers in prison. It had also been stated in several interviews that the point of the deeply controversial episode "Seeing Red" was to remind viewers that Spike was evil. Curiously, later down the line many of these creators have walked back on much of this, with Whedon admitting to preferring Spike with Buffy and David Fury trying to push for Spike to be the one to fulfill the Shanshu prophesy.
• Exiled from Continuity:
  • When Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved to UPN, Angel remained on The WB, and until the networks came to agreement a season later, no crossovers could be done. This made things extremely difficult when Buffy wanted to meet and talk to Angel after her resurrection. Neither series could use the other network's character, so the meeting had to take place offscreen between Sunnydale and L.A., with both characters' supporting casts fruitlessly trying to get juicy details out of them in the episodes that came immediately after.
  • For much the same reason, when the First Evil appeared in a scene at the end of the Buffy Season 7 premiere and took the forms of each previous seasonal Big Bad, Season 2 was represented by Drusilla although she had played second fiddle to Angel's evil persona Angelus in that season and logically the First would have appeared as Angelus if David Boreanaz had been able to show up on Buffy. Fortunately, the crossover arrangement was worked out during that same season, allowing Willow to guest star on Angel in a later episode and Faith to resurface on both shows.
  • By the time the Buffy tie-in novels set in season 3 were being released, Wesley had already left for Angel and that series had the rights to him. None of the season 3 set novels feature Wesley at all, only the episode novelizations do.
• Funny Character, Boring Actor: David Boreanaz is an inversion. Unlike the dour, brooding Angel, he was notorious for doing anything to get his castmates to laugh, up to and including exposing himself. There were even times when he and Sarah Michelle Gellar pranked each other by eating garlic and other bad-smelling things before kissing scenes.
• Hostility on the Set: In 2021, Charisma Carpenter went public with long-rumored allegations surrounding her time on both shows, which inspired the Variety article. She said that Joss Whedon played favorites with actors on set and pit them against each other to win his approval, she was overworked to the point where it caused her physical harm and she only stayed on for the steady paycheck, all while justifying his behavior in her mind because she didn't want to admit she was being harassed. The Variety article notes she was a network-mandated hire, which grated on Whedon who wanted complete control and would be dismissive of her performance. Whedon in turn was frustrated by Carpenter's tardiness. Long before this was revealed it was known that her pregnancy in the fourth season of Angel caused a lot of friction between her and Whedon, but he seemed to take the reveal personally (suggesting she get an abortion), which ended with Cordelia being written out of the fifth season in a manner that left a lot of bad blood, not least because Carpenter only found out from the press. She was eventually brought back for the fifth-season episode "You're Welcome", only for Cordelia to be Killed Off for Real after Whedon promised her he wouldn't do so. By her account, Carpenter was in tears when she realized how she was being written out of the show. Nearly every castmember from both shows (ranging from the stars to recurring actors) either corroborated her claims or lent their support.
• No Stunt Double: David Boreanaz did a lot of his own stunts for both shows.

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