Danny Strong’s career is nuts. Starts out as a glorified extra in Buffy’s first season, becomes a recurring tertiary character, then ends up with one of the most tragic arcs in the series. Goes on to show up in various guest roles while learning to write. His first produced script is Recount, which gives him an Emmy nom. Returns a couple of years later with Game Change which does nab him an Emmy for writing. Then he moves on to co-creating and directing Empire. Crazy career for a guy that started out almost getting eaten by a mummy exchange student.
Speaking of acting starts, that’s Amy Adams in the season 5 as Tara’s cousin, and Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones’ Oberyn Martell) in season 4 as Eddie.
I don’t think I’ve shown y’all these photos. Back in 2006, the Torrance Historical Society did a walking Buffy tour around the parts of town where the show was filmed, which included some houses, the high school and culminating with a tour of the actual home they used for interior shots during the first season, and the exterior in later seasons. Beautiful home owned by an elderly couple at the time.
I love spotting actors learly in their careers like this. Eion Bailey and Clea Duvall had early season appearances as well as I recall.
Jessica Chastain has a part in an episode as a neighbor of the Mars’ in Veronica Mars. Eventually Veronica has to help her escape her abusive boyfriend. Adam Scott plays a teacher that seduced and got a student pregnant; Leighton Meester plays the student’s best friend who exposes him (by lying and claiming they hooked up). And Veronica spots him preparing to put them moves on her.
Amy Smart is in a couple episodes in the first season, most notably the pilot. She plays one of the better cheerleaders during tryouts. As far as I can tell this is an uncredited role, missing from her IMDB page etc. But it’s unmistakably her.
And Flo (from Progressive commercials) has a one-off role as some basement-dwelling librarian (or something) at Angel’s evil nemesis law firm on the Angel spin-off.
There’s actually a bunch more I remember seeing during my (first ever) run-through of the two shows last year, but none spring to mind at the moment.
Ah. I thought you heard something juicy. I know the explanation she gave on Twitter was that she wasn’t invited because she was never a series regular, but that couldn’t be correct because neither Kristine Sutherland nor Alexis Denisof were ever more than guest stars. I think EW/People just screwed up.
Oh yeah, nothing “juicy”, just a thing I noticed this morning. Personally I think both Wesley and Joyce were FAR more critical to the Buffyverse, so I saw their inclusion as much more natural.
I know how Denisof got an invite, it’s just weird to exclude Faith. She’s a pivotal Buffyverse character and she was on both shows. She arguably had more of an impact on Buffy’s growth than Wesley ever did.
Shout out to Brian for the Torrance / Buffy mentions.
Torrance High School (not to be confused with West Torrance or South Torrance or North Torrance… seriously) was my very own high school. Buffy was after my time, as was Beverly Hills 90210 (the two most cited TV shows filmed at THS). When I was there “The Wild Life” was filmed; Cameron Crowe’s lamentable follow up to Fast Times and the movie that introduced the world to Christopher Penn.
Oddly, no parts of “Unbroken” (The Louie Zamperini Story) were filmed on campus at THS although he is unarguably our school’s most famous alumni.
A few years back I drove my kids and their friends up from San Diego to L.A. for a Wonder-Con and I took them on a tour of Torrance as they are all big Buffy fans.
Really interesting how many of the men in that shoot seem to have aged far more/worse than the ladies. I recognized neither Nicholas Brendon nor James Marsters until they put the names on screen there. And of course SMG and Alyson Hannigan seem to be effectively ageless.
