The Big Picture

The Audible series Slayers: A Buffyverse Story has received praise for its handling of characters that were previously given lackluster storylines in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Returning to the Buffyverse as a writer was both nerve-wracking and exciting for Amber Benson, who had to ensure that she stayed true to the established mythology of the series while adding her own unique spin to the characters with Christopher Golden. The series features well-developed female characters with their own wants, motives, and personalities, which was important to Benson and her co-writer Golden.

Last month, the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer reunited at New York Comic Con to celebrate the launch of Slayers: A Buffyverse Story, their illustrious return to the world of vampires and slayers. The Audible series has been lauded for the way it handles the storylines for a cast of characters that were previously handed down lackluster plots in the television series. In it, Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) is the Slayer from an alternate universe, who crashes into Spike’s (James Marsters) life with a do-or-die mission. In her world, he already is dead—and the big bad is his ex Drusilla (Juliet Landau) who has found a match made in hell with the powerful witch Tara (Amber Benson).

The immersive audio drama gives fans of the series a chance to return to a world they love, without all of the emotional baggage attached to it—something that also enabled the cast to comfortably return to bring to life Benson and Christopher Golden’s epic scripts. In addition to Carpenter, Marsters, Landau, and Benson, Slayers also sees the return of Emma Caulfield Ford as Anya, James Carles Leary as Clem, Anthony Stewart Head as Giles, and Danny Strong as Jonathan. It also introduces audiences to a brand-new Slayer by the name of Indira (Laya DeLeon Hayes) who looks to Spikes as a mentor, much to his chagrin. She is a breath of life in the series and a perfect inclusion to the ever-evolving Buffyverse.

Following the launch of the Audible Original, Collider had the opportunity to catch up with Amber Benson to discuss her return to the Buffyverse, how it felt to be writing for characters that she once wrote for in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books, the careful way they crafted the storylines, the bad-ass female characters in Slayers, getting the cast back together again, how hard it was to keep the Audible Original a secret for months, and her hopes for writing a Season 2 for Slayers: A Buffyverse Story.

COLLIDER: You have a very impressive career as a writer. You have a number of books and comics that you worked on, including a few that were within the Buffyverse. So I’m curious, what was it like for you to revisit some of these characters as a writer like 20 years later?

AMBER BENSON: Oh, getting old. Whoa. [Laughs] I don’t feel that old, but I am! No, to get back into this headspace where I was in this, like, Slayers world with this very specific mythology that everybody knows and is very detailed in their memory of things that I don’t remember, so, number one, there was like this fear. I was like, “Okay, between Chris and me, we’ll be okay.” And then having Lydia Shamah, who’s our executive at Audible UK, she’s a fan, so she and Ned Clark, the two of them made sure we stayed on the straight and narrow. So, once I sort of knew that we’d be okay on that front, that we wouldn’t, like, mess anything up and get harassed by fans going, “That’s not what happened. That character wouldn’t do that,” I felt a lot more relaxed as a writer. But there was a bit of a fear, like, “Are we gonna be able to do this?” This is a really big undertaking. This is a big universe that we’re playing in, and we’re adding multiverse to this.

And then, I think what was the most fun for me as a writer was to get to write Anya and Cordelia from an alternate universe. So even though they have the bones of Anya and Cordelia from our world, they weren’t. They were sort of their own unique people. That was really neat to sort of play in the sandbox, but then to also be able to put my own spin on it, and Chris to have his own spin on these very well-known characters that people are like, “Oh, I know all about these characters, and if you do it wrong, we’re gonna…” But they couldn’t really say that to us with those characters because they were from an alternate universe. So, that was freeing and very fun. And to get to have Cordelia the Vampire Slayer? I mean, come on.

It’s so cool. I love what you did with that character. What was it like to get to see Charisma come in and play such a badass, powerful Slayer?

BENSON: It was really cute. She was very nervous [on] the first day. She’s like, “Am I doing this right? I don’t think I’m doing this right.” And Chris and I are like, “No, no, no, you have this. You are her,” like, “You don’t need to worry about this. What you’re doing is perfect.”

She and I had worked together on a little independent film a few years ago, and I was blown away by how talented she is. We did this very emotional scene and she had me in tears, and I was like, “Whoa. Okay.” I think of her as being snarky and funny and tough, but there’s a real depth and a darkness in there, too. And to be able to play with that and to write that character so that we got to see all the multifaceted sort of Cordelia-ness was really wonderful. She’s amazing in it. There’s a scene with her and the new Slayer, Indira, that, like, everybody in the studio was in tears. It’s so powerful. She’s a powerhouse in this.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer A young woman, destined to slay vampires, demons and other infernal creatures, deals with her life fighting evil, with the help of her friends.  Release Date March 10, 1997 Cast Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Michelle Trachtenberg, Emma Caulfield, James Marsters Main Genre Action Genres Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi Rating TV-14 Seasons 7 Creator Joss Whedon Production Company Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television
Storytelling has come so far in the last three decades for female characters in particular, and that’s something I really appreciated with Slayers because all the female characters, even though we don’t have a long time with them, we have this kind of limited window with them, they all feel fleshed out. They all feel like they have likes and dislikes and wants and motives. How much thought went into it for you and Chris as you were working on building these characters, some of them with completely new twists to them?

BENSON: It was very, very important that we write the kind of characters that would inspire our actors to want to come and play with us. As an actor, you read stuff, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s gonna be really hard to make that work.” And then sometimes you read stuff, and you’re like, “Wow, this is well put together. I get this person right off the bat. I know how to do this. It’s on the page, and all I have to do is just bring my talent to it and it’s gonna sink.” And so that was what we were really trying to do is to create a series of episodes where everybody had an arc of some kind, everybody went through something, everybody had a trial that they had to go through, and I hope, I feel like we got very close to making that happen.

But I spent three years harassing everybody. You know, I would call Emma and be like, “Okay, so we’re gonna do this thing for Audible. Do you think you would want to come back?” And she’s like, “I don’t know. Maybe for you, Benson.” And then she called me, like, “Is this happening? What’s going on? I’m getting ready to go do something. What’s happening?” I’m like, “Well, we’re still working on it.” So for three years, I’m like calling and being like, “Are you sure you wanna…? Just make sure you wanna do this, we’re gonna send you a script soon. I promise it’s happening!” And then, “Is this happening?” So yeah, I knew I had to give them something good, or they were all gonna kick me in the butt. [Laughs]

Three years is such a long time because we only really recently found out that Slayers was even happening. What was it like to keep that secret as you’re working on building it and drawing everybody back into the fold?

BENSON: It was so hard not to talk about it. You know, three years – three years – of keeping quiet. Ugh. The worst! Because you’re just so excited about it, and you’re proud of it, and you want to talk about it, and it’s exciting, and then you just can’t because the minute you talk about it, it changes. It’s like quantum physics. Once you see the particle, it’s stuck in what it is. So I was like, “Well, if we talk about it, then people are gonna talk about it, it’s gonna be a thing, and everyone’s gonna have their opinion. By the time it comes out, people are gonna be disappointed, or they’re gonna be annoyed, or they’re gonna be over it.” [Laughs] So, keeping mum was really important. It was really, really hard. And then forcing everybody else to be quiet once we had recorded because we recorded in March of this year.

Oh, wow!

BENSON: So it’s been, you know, months and months where people wanna do interviews and talk about it on social media, and we’re just like, “You can’t say anything. Shh! Silencio!”

And the strike helped, I’m sure, too. It lined up just perfectly. “Don’t talk about it until it’s announced.”

BENSON: Yes. Yeah, for sure. It’s been a few crazy months, but I know that everybody involved, all of our actors, are very union-proud. So we felt very much like, “Well, whatever we have to do to talk about this, but also be very respectful of the rules around the strike…” Yeah, we’ve been very mindful of that.

During the process of writing this for you and Chris, how soon did the plots come together? What was the format like? Was it after you assured yourself that you could get each of the cast back? Were there plot lines that you played with that you just kind of set aside? What was that process like for you, exactly?

BENSON: Well, we knew when we wanted to do Cordelia as a Vampire Slayer that the only way to actually do that and to bring her character and Anya and Tara into the fold was to have an alternate universe because of, you know, some past stuff. We very much wanted to give all three of those characters not closure but a new, like, whack at the piñata, you know? [Laughs] We wanted them all to have a different path. It felt very important to Chris and myself to sort of really give those characters their due.

So, with that in mind, it was, “Well, we have to have this multiverse; we have to find a way to bring them in.” And then I think it was Chris that was like, “Well, having Drusilla as the big bad…” How much fun. The Drusilla thing was never its own thing. It was always, like, in service of others. And so to have her be her own big bad with her own agency, I think, was really, really important to both of us. So once we had that in mind, it was very clear how we were gonna play with the Spike and Dru-ness of it. Just to get the two of them in a room together is like magic. Oh my god. Getting to record with everybody, the synergy of that was incredible to be in a room with each of these amazing actors doing their thing. It was pretty awesome.

And to the Dru of it all, the Tara and Dru dynamic is so deliciously fun. What was that like for you as an actor getting to explore this relationship and also just a super badass Tara?

BENSON: [Laughs] We very much wanted to be mindful that there were a lot of people who are very connected to this character—me being one of them—and we wanted to be very respectful of that. So, having her have this sort of darker arc, we knew that we had to make sure that the goodness that is inherent in who Tara is as a person needed to be there. If we had that as the baseline, always, and we really were mindful of that, always, then we could do other things with her, with the caveat that we would have a story that ended well. And I think—I hope—we did that.

But yeah, to get to work with Juliet, who, you know, we’ve never really done anything together, it was wonderful. She’s so incredible. She’s such a talent and such a sweetheart. And when she looks at you across the room, even though there’s, like, mic stands and scripts and all kinds of things in between you, when she looks at you like she’s gonna do naughty things to you, it’s pretty hot. I have to say I got a little sweaty. [Laughs]

Image via Audible

What has it been like to see fan reactions, too? I did some perusal online, and fans are just so excited to see these characters living these really exciting lives. What has it been like for you all to see this and this reaction?

BENSON: I very much like to work in a vacuum. I don’t really go online to look at stuff. I learned very early on that for every wonderful, glowing comment, there’s going to be the inverse, which is the, “I hate you, and I hate what you did, and you’re horrible.” So, I try really hard not to get involved in that. Then it allows me to create, and I don’t have those preconceptions.

People’s voices in your head.

BENSON: Yeah. I know that Chris and Lydia have definitely perused, so they’ve told me that everyone’s very excited and that everyone’s very happy. And sometimes, you know, I’ll look on my Twitter occasionally because it gets very full, so you kind of have to, like, look at it so it clears, and I’ll see little, you know…But I try not to. I’m like, “Eh, I don’t wanna look! I don’t wanna look.”

But for Chris and for myself, we very much wanted to make this a new beginning for the fans of this world. We wanted to clean the slate a little bit and to tell people that it’s okay to love this world, to want to play here again, and to listen and to be involved in these characters. Having a safe space was important for us. And creating a world that is very 2023, where it is not just, you know…It’s a diverse world that we live in, and that was very important to us to make sure that this world reflected that, that this Slayer’s world was a diverse world.

I love that the Buffyverse feels like it’s been coming back because there’s been a young adult book series that came out during the pandemic, and there’s been a couple of those that are exploring different takes on the future of these characters and where they’re going. Has this made you want to continue exploring the Buffyverse in either comics or books or more audio stories?

BENSON: We are hoping to do a Season 2. We are in the process of trying to make that happen. Chris and I just have lots of ideas. Literally, every actor stopped one of us during our time at New York Comic-Con, going, “Okay, so I have some thoughts about what my character is gonna do in Season 2,” [laughs] which means that everybody is excited and wants to get on board. That is, for me, the most important part of this, personally, is that Chris and I have created a world that the actors are still safe in and they wanna come and play. I feel very protective of that. Sometimes you can’t make everybody happy all of the time, but we’re trying to be as thoughtful, and compassionate, and empathetic as we can be as people creating this world. We didn’t create the world, we are creating this audio version of a world.

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