Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air in 2003, but thanks to sequel series, tie-in novels, comic books, video games, conventions and endless rewatches, this particular story has never really felt over.
But one area in which the Buffyverse had not yet expanded is that of the audio series, which makes Audible’s new Slayers all the more exciting. Slayers: A Buffyverse Story is co-written (with Buffy book author Christopher Golden) and co-directed (with Golden and Kc Wayland) by Amber Benson, who played fan favorite character Tara in the original series and has gone on to be the popular and prolific author of the Echo Park Coven and the Calliope Reaper-Jones novels.
Slayers is an absolute delight, an easy step back into a beloved space. It feels endlessly immersive, not only due to the outstanding production by Wayland, but also because it so seamlessly recalls a world Buffy viewers know inside and out. It’s funny and thrilling and spooky, a perfect October listen for fans of the original TV show – especially as Benson is joined by Buffy alums Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia), James Marsters (Spike), Juliet Landau (Drusilla), Emma Caulfield Ford (Anya), Anthony Head (Giles), James Charles Leary (Clem) and Danny Strong (Jonathan) in voicing the series! (Along with a few surprise cameos I couldn’t bear to spoil here.)
Now, you might wonder how some of these characters have returned in light of their canonical deadness. Fair question. It’s been ten years since the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Spike’s working as a double agent, pretending to be bad again while still on the side of the ever-growing pool of Slayers. He meets a brand-new Slayer named Indira (Laya DeLeon Hayes, with whom you will become instantly obsessed), and he’s working out what to do with this upstart teen when an alternate reality Cordelia appears. In her reality, Cordelia Chase is the only vampire slayer (yes! Cordy the Vampire Slayer!), Spike’s ex Drusilla is the big bad, and (quoting Audible here) “through the years and the vastness of the multiverse, not everyone is who they used to be…”
I was thrilled to talk to Benson via Skype this week about her return to the Hellmouth, how she managed to get the gang back together, what’s next for the Buffyverse and more.
[Due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, Benson couldn’t speak about any struck work, including the original series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.]
I’d like to hear your perspective on how Slayers came about in the first place.
Christopher Golden is someone that I’ve collaborated with off and on for the last 20-plus years. And he was working with Lydia Shamah, who is the [Director of Original Content] over at Audible. She’s wonderful. Chris asked her, ‘I hear you’ve got this license. What are you doing with it?’ And she said, ‘We’re trying to figure it out.’ So he said, ‘What if Amber and I do it?’
He hadn’t even really talked to me; it was off the cuff. And she said, ‘Yes, let’s talk.’ So Chris called me and I felt like, I don’t know, to go back to that world, it’s a big universe. There’s a lot of stuff there. There’s a lot of emotional stuff for me. But we just talked about it, and I really trust him.
And Chris said, ‘This is an opportunity to do something really neat, and to give, if not closure, at least another sort of whack at the Tara Maclay stuff, and Cordelia and Anya, to give them a different life. And to sort of, not rewrite, but to redress what happened to them.’
So that was my way in, especially with Charisma Carpenter, who I love, and Cordelia, the idea of her being a vampire slayer. I was just like, ‘I want Charisma Carpenter to play the vampire slayer. That’s really what I want. That’s important to me.’
Was Cordelia the Vampire Slayer your entry point into the idea of this alternate reality storyline?
Yep. We knew the only way to do the things we wanted to do with Slayers was to create a multiverse story. And that’s how that came about. ‘Well, here are these characters that we want to play with, so we need to find them in a different universe.’
It works for so many reasons. It allows for some of these characters to come back, but also allows for the performers to give different, more nuanced performances. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I loved that Tara’s character was a little bit more complex here. How fun was it playing some of those darker beats than you played on the show?
For me, it’s super important to honor our fandom, and there are a lot of people that are very invested in this character. So Chris and I worked really hard to keep the baseline of Tara in there, the good, the kind, the empathetic, while also allowing her to, like you said, be a darker, more nuanced version of what the fandom knows. But with the caveat that we knew that because of this arc, we needed to land it and we needed the audience to trust us. The fandom needed to know that we were not going to do her wrong in any way, shape, or form.
We worked really, really hard to keep that balance. It was very important to me, but it was also so much fun. I mean, come on, you’re looking at Juliet Landau across the room from you at a mic, and she’s got the Drusilla thing going on in her eyes where she’s like, ‘I’m going to do naughty things to you.’ To get to work with her because of this darker place where we took Tara, that was really cool. She’s such a consummate performer. She’s so talented. She’s sexy and scary and funny and heartbreaking. She really runs the gamut. Drusilla is such an interesting, big bad goddess.
With the alternate reality, you managed to reclaim these stories for all these different female characters whose arcs ended too soon. With a project like this, do you start with casting or with the story?
So I got my Rolodex out, my old ’90s Rolodex, and I started making phone calls. These are the people that I personally see and hang out with. I reached out to Charisma and to Emma and to James, and it was this funny thing where Emma would be like, ‘So Benson, is this happening?’ Because we started the journey pre-COVID. Then six months later: ‘Benson, I’m going to work on a thing. Are you still doing this? I’m going to Atlanta. Benson, is this happening?’
For three years I would have to tell her, ‘Okay, it is happening. It’s just a little further down the line than we expected.’ It’s a giant process, because you’re not just working with something in your own head. It is a licensed product, so we’re talking to lots of different people and getting lots of approvals, and there are lots of cooks in the kitchen. We had notes from the different people involved, the corporations, and the development teams, and the ‘Is this okay to say?’ teams. But for the most part, we really were given freedom to find the story we wanted to tell, which was huge.
Buffy, the original series, always struck this unique tonal balance between horror and comedy, and Slayers does such a good job with the same balance. Can you talk a little about the conversations you had about tone in both the writing and directing process?
We really did want to balance the horror with the humor. And I think the thing that saves us is that we have this incredible comedic performance in James Leary, as Clem. He nails it. He’s so good and he’s so funny, so having those breathing points where the humor can find its footing saves us when it comes to the dark and frightening aspects.
The other thing that was great is we were all in the studio together for the bulk of it. So we’re in this place where we can look at each other and watch each other and really connect.
And then Cordelia, who as a character, she was very snarky, but there’s also now this depth and wisdom to her. So we wanted to maintain the humor that comes with the snark and the making these pithy one-liner dry sort of comments that Cordelia is so great at, with the emotion and the darkness that’s imbued in her now, in this multiverse character.
Did any of the performers inform their own dialogue at all? For instance, was James ever like, ‘Oh no, I don’t think Spike would say this’?
For the most part that didn’t happen, but I was totally prepared for it. The only real notes we had were from Juliet. Juliet went through the script, and she knows the continuity backwards and forwards. She gave us so many helpful things we were able to change and do justice to her take on this. It was super helpful, and I’m grateful to her for doing that. It made it so much better.
And Danny Strong, there were so many ad-libs. They were very mindful that we didn’t go overboard with the ad-libs, but the alternate universe Jonathan is so funny. We recorded Danny separately because he’s in New York. We’re on Zoom or Skype where you can laugh because you can mute yourself, so we were all laughing while he was going to town.
Juno Dawson recorded in the UK. Juno was incredible. The Miranda stuff is just so creepy and dark, and so much fun. And Tony Head obviously was in the UK. But we were able to have him record at the same time as us and be on a live link. So he’s on this big screen, and we’re all like [arms raised], ‘Tony.’ He’s like, ‘Everybody!’
I love Indira. As the only new main character, it must’ve been difficult to cast her. Tell me about that.
Laya DeLeon Hayes is a movie star in the making. She’s incredible. I don’t know how we got her. I don’t know how we got so lucky. She’s so good. And she won a BAFTA right after we finished recording.
If Indira’s part didn’t work, the whole thing didn’t work. Because there’s so much mythology that you have to get across. There are a lot of people who are going to listen that don’t know that there’s a history of fandom with this, so how do you give them mythology in a way that isn’t just like giant info-dumpy chunks?
Indira knows everything there is to know about vampires and how they work and the monsters and the history, and she’s just this uber-fan, so then we could talk about all these info-dumpy things in a fun way and get it across, and the audience is learning along with her. Trying to find someone who could do that was really difficult. Kc suggested her – he’d heard her in a video game that he was playing, and he was like, ‘I just thought she’d be amazing.’ And he was right, she was amazing.
And for us, it’s 2023. We wanted a diverse cast. We wanted a young slayer of color who could come in and kick some serious butt. And Laya does that. Indira is so much fun, but she’s tough.
I want a second, third, fourth season of Slayers. Is that something you’re talking about yet? Do you have any pie in the sky dreams of other castmembers you could bring back in the future?
We would love to do more, but it’s up to how well it does. And so far it seems to be doing really well. Obviously, there is a plethora of amazing actors involved in this fandom. So there are so many people I would love to be like, ‘Come and play.’ What was really crazy is we were recording in the same studio where Seth Green [Buffy’s Oz] was working on something else, so one day he just came and visited us in the studio. We would love to have Seth come and play. He’s wonderful and funny, and just such a good egg all around. And then Clare Kramer – I think having some Glory in there would be really fun.
Last question, since this is Fango. You and Christopher invented all these different magical and demonic creatures for the purposes of this story. Which creature was your favorite invention?
I think it was the Miranda character, playing with her and all the weird sort of stuff that she and her minions do. And Chris is way better about knowing the minutia of that stuff, so he was the one who said, ‘We need these hungry demons in there.’ So the hungry demon Miranda world, I think, was really fun to play in for me. I love Juno Dawson. I love what Juno did with this character. There was this sort of dark sexiness, but there was also this rage and anger, and hunger underneath every word. It was so good.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity. Listen to Slayers: A Buffyverse Story on Audible now.
