I scanned two of the photos they used - one a close-up version of a season 6 publicity shot, the other of Amber in character which I hadn't seen before:
photos.yahoo.com/bc/ty2che/lst?.dir=/Buffy+cast+photos+2&.src=ph&.order=&.view=t&.done=http%3a//photos.yahoo.com/
Quote:
What Amber Did Next...
As the stuttering lesbian witch Tara Maclay, Amber Benson [gained] a legion of fans on ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. Sadly, though, Tara’s days were numbered and she died after being shot through the heart. Shame. But it’s far from the end for the actress, as Mark Wyman found when he spoke to her about her projects in comics, films and online webcasts...
“Oh no, is it really Sunday? Did I lose a day?” It’s a grey December morning in London, and inside Soho’s splendid Curzon cinema Amber Benson seems slightly nervous, not to mention a little tired. Which is completely understandable, for while she’s best known to the selected audience for playing Tara on ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, today she’s introducing the UK premiere of a courageous little indie film. ‘Chance’ stars Benson as the unusually named title character, whose flatmate happens to be her fellow ‘Buffy’ star James Marsters. The reason she feels so personally responsible? Benson wrote and directed this spiky romantic comedy - while she was still a regular in Sunnydale - financing it on the proverbial shoestring with the support of her family, plus many of the fans she’s gained from appearing in almost 50 episodes of ‘Buffy’.
“Hi, I’m Amber Benson, I’m an actor, and on ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, I play a stuttering lesbian witch.” That’s the kind of introduction Benson gave herself a year or so ago during a photo-shoot for glossy American magazine ‘Stuff’. But during 2002, having left the role of Tara behind her, she’s been hard at work in post-production on ‘Chance’, while also developing ‘Ghosts of Albion’, a groundbreaking internet drama she’s just directed for BBCi, the interactive and online division of the BBC. Which is the other reason she’s spending much of December in London.
More about that later: first, Benson reflected on the impact of her long stint among Sunnydale’s finest. Tara first appeared in the super-spooky ‘Hush’, the standout episode midway through season four, as the UC Sunnydale student who befriends Willow. What a way that was to start: “I love that episode, it’s one of my favourites”, agrees Benson. With Tara being revealed almost immediately as a powerful witch, did Benson ever research the magical elements of the scripts? “I didn’t really do any research for ‘Buffy’ aside from getting the phonetic spelling of Latin words for the invocations! But I’d always been kind of interested in the occult and the supernatural. Lots of people are curious about what happens when you die, and whether another supernatural dimension exists. I’d done lots of reading on the subject, just for myself, long before ‘Buffy’ came along.”
Although blessed with considerable power, the shy Tara was one of the gentlest, most empathetic characters in Sunnydale. Whereas Willow bought chaos into season six, Tara had by then become something of an inspirational figure, especially to women who were Wiccan or lesbian. Although Benson doesn’t replicate Tara’s lifestyle, she does echo the empathy that made Tara special.
“The whole idea of Wicca and goddess religion - I think that’s wonderful. It’s not dark or about making money or trying to hurt people, it’s really about caring for the Earth and how we’re all interconnected. If people would stop being terrified of the term witch or Wicca, they could really learn something. These people practising it are doing it because it appeals to their sense of environmentalism or community”, says Benson.
So for those with such beliefs, Tara ended up being a positive role model - rather as she and Willow were, as long-term lovers, for the lesbian community? “Definitely. But you know, I had no idea that Willow and Tara were going to be having such a fling when we started. We’d done a couple of episodes together as friends and then one day we were taken aside and told ‘By the way, you guys have chemistry. We’re going to put you together!’, which I think was wonderful because we became the first long-term lesbian relationship on network TV in the States. It just needed to be out there and woven into the status quo, so that it doesn’t matter what kind of person you’re sleeping with. It’s silly to make a deal out of that.”
One special highlight from Benson’s time as Tara was her exquisite song to Willow, ‘Under Your Spell’, on the musical episode ‘Once More With Feeling’. “I had such a blast doing that song - I did not want to stop recording it, I kept going, ‘I can do it again!’”, recalls Benson, who first showed a talent for the stage during her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. “I did get some training as a singer too. I sang with the children’s opera in Orlando, Florida for a while. We lived there for a couple of years [during Benson’s teens]. But I hadn’t done anything for a long, long time, and I never intended to pursue it professionally.” Benson, and, indeed, James Marsters, can also be heard contributing to their ‘Buffy’ co-star Anthony Stewart Head’s 2002 album ‘Music for Elevators’.
Ultimately, Tara met a sudden and brutal death during season six. How long before Tara’s death did Benson know that her character was doomed? “About a season-and-a-half ago - Joss Whedon always has these things mildly planned out”, explains Benson, with no trace of rancour. “He said something like ‘Well, Willow’s going to go bad, and the only way we can bring her back is to drop her to the bottom. And the only thing that would do that is to kill her lover.” The episode sent shockwaves through ‘Buffy’ fandom in May 2002; it remains one which Benson has chosen not to watch herself. “It was so sad filming ‘Seeing Red’ last winter - I haven’t seen it.”
Thankfully, as her other work demonstrates, Benson’s not turning her back on the genres that dominate cult media. “I’ve always loved science fiction and fantasy. Growing up I was reading Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley, all that amazing stuff... You can address much deeper issues through science fiction without preaching from a soapbox. That’s how Joss has done it with ‘Buffy’; he’s taken on some very hot topics, and woven them into his storylines. If you want to just take them at face value, you can do that, or if you want to dig deeper, there’s subtext and underlying meaning.”
The scripting on ‘Buffy’ has always been the backbone of its success. Since Benson’s written and directed her own film, and was co-writing comics featuring Willow and Tara while in the ‘Buffy’ cast, has she ever tried to persuade Joss to let her write an episode? “Oh, but we have so many wonderful writers on ‘Buffy’, I wouldn’t ever have presumed to do that. Seriously, I’m a huge fan of the whole staff: those people do such amazing work, I would have been completely cowed...”
Was there a writer whose work Benson particularly enjoyed on ‘Buffy’? “I was so blown away by Doug Petrie’s Spike episode ‘Fool for Love’. That was a beautiful piece of writing, because Doug felt passionately about creating that character’s history. I read it out loud in the car to my mom, when I got it, and the two of us were crying. It’s a wonderful TV episode, yet it’s not as good as that script - there was no way you could have captured everything in that.”
As it happened, her move into writing comics followed that of Marsters, who co-wrote the 1999 ‘Spike and Dru’ comic with prolific ‘Buffy’ novelist, and the series’ official ‘Watchers’ Guide’ author, Christopher Golden. Subsequently, Golden and Benson collaborated on the Dark Horse comic ‘WannaBlessedBe’, published in Spring 2001, followed by the two-parter ‘Wilderness’ in 2002. “Chris had written that Spike comic recently with James, which went down really well, and I think he wanted to tweak the genre again by collaborating with someone else from ‘Buffy’. It’s a bit crazy to have someone who plays a character working on stories for the character, but we were both really drawn to the fun of that. The driving force in us meeting was a girl called Ally, who runs several ‘Buffy’-related websites [working as ‘Little Willow’], including one dedicated to me and another for Chris. We all went to dinner and it ended up being a singing-from-musicals evening, but Chris and I really wanted to work together. We had a ball writing the comics, and then a ball doing this...”
‘This’ being the special online story which BBCi is set to begin broadcasting in a few weeks. How had that come about? “‘Ghosts of Albion’ is a supernatural period drama set in early 19th Century England. It came into being when producer Rob Francis over at BBCi approached Chris about doing something period. Chris and I had already written three Tara and Willow comics, and I think Rob realised that we had that self-referential sense of humour that ‘Buffy’ has [on TV]. But anything ‘Buffy’-oriented, well we couldn’t use that, plus creatively I wouldn’t want to. Joss Whedon has raised the bar so much that you couldn’t touch it. I think we’ve come up with something different that’s funny as well as meaningful. It’s a little ‘Pride and Prejudice’-y with a bit of sci-fi thrown in. We wanted to hae a bit of the vampire feeling in it, but really went more towards a fantasy magic base.” Along with demons, vampires and ghosts of course...
Like the BBC’s previous ‘Doctor Who’ webcasts ‘Death Comes to Time’ and ‘Real Time’, Benson and Golden’s story will be available in weekly instalments, either as audio files or enhanced with illustrations, animated this time by none other than ‘Danger Mouse’ creators Cosgrove-Hall. “In the first instalment we’re setting up our story and our mythology: it’s like an animated TV show on the internet, in four instalments. Hopefully people will see it and really enjoy it.”
Writing ‘Ghosts’ did present some practical difficulties, with Benson and Golden living on opposite sides of the US. “Chris is on the East Coast, and I’m on the West. Plus, we were dealing with the BBC’s wonderful Fictionlab here in England who were putting it together, so it was a chore at times to keep going round in a triangle”, admits Benson. “Like Chinese water telephone torture”, she adds, launching into a high-pitched gabble of voices going ‘Change this!’ ‘No, what are you doing, change that!’ ‘Why are you changing this?’ - and so on. “Luckily”, she assures us “everyone involved is wonderful and really has the good of the project in mind.”
The casting for ‘Ghosts of Albion’ also seems to augur well for its success under Benson’s direction. After the death of their famous magician grandfather (a cameo for Leslie Philis), Tamara and William Swift (Jasmine Hyde and Rory Kinnear) discover that the old man had some magical powers offstage too. It seems they’ve inherited that sorcerous power themselves... There are also roles for ‘Star Wars’ Anthony Daniels as Lord Nelson, ‘The Crow Road’ Joseph McFadden as Byron, and ‘Dynasty’s Emma Samms as Bodicea!
Meanwhile, back in 21st century London, it’s nearly time for the screening of ‘Chance’. So how is Benson feeling? “I don’t think I’ll be able to watch it. I’ll just go outside and pace”, she laughs. “I’ve seen it a few times already, but it’s overwhelming to watch with an audience - they’re either going to love it or absolutely hate it.” ‘Chance’ was filmed in spring 2001 - while the fifth season of ‘Buffy’ was in production. How on earth had Benson achieved that? “Because we were psychotically stupid! No, I knew it was the only time I was going to have the finances available while everyone was around. When ‘Buffy’ breaks up [for the season hiatus] people go their separate ways. I’d asked James to be a part of it, and we had to get it done then or it wasn’t going to happen.
“We shot in 10 days over five weekends and it was while Tara’s brain had been sucked out by Glory, so I didn’t have much to do. But James was inundated: he had a really intense schedule and was an angel to do this for us. James is such a talented guy, but away from ‘Buffy’ he’s not really given his due. He really is under-utilized in Hollywood - and he’s a very nice guy too!”
Did Benson have to plead with producers Joss Whedon or Marti Noxon not to schedule Marsters on any conflicting days? “No, everyone was really supportive of what we were doing. I think they thought it was kind of funny - I was running around in my glasses pretending to be Director Girl.” Recalling this, Amber adopts a slightly posh and imperious voice: “I’m going into my director mode now, excuse me!” Well, to hear the results of Amber Benson going into director mode, just go to www.bbc.co.uk/ghosts from March 27th onwards.
at: 3/8/03 11:52:36 am
Could I fall in love with Amber, even more than I already have? I just love her! 
at: 3/8/03 12:54:15 pm
at: 3/9/03 12:28:31 am
had been telling her and what he and his writers have later stated publicly and that is that the only way for Willow to hit the bottom was to kill Tara, because there was just no other way, it wasn't like they were halfway there when Tara left Willow and she continued to spiral out of control. Nope. Could it be that he twisted the story and characters to fit a certain bloody vision whether it made sense or not? Could it be that whatever arguments he was using to justify and glorify that story made sense or not? Surely not, I'm sure he never ever contradicted himself, nor has he ever told anything other than the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Right? 