The creators and cast of Audible’s Slayers: A Buffyverse Story sat down with me at New York City Con on Friday to discuss the new audio series telling a brand new adventure that takes place after Buffy The Vampire Slayer shared her power with young women around the world and the town of Sunnydale, California was turned into a giant crater.
Christopher Golden and Amber Benson
“So Chris [Golden] had been talking to our exec, Lydia, over at Audible and found out that they got the license to do this,” series Writer/Director and star Amber Benson explained. “And he was like, well, I want to do it, but if we really want this to, like, sing, we gotta bring in Amber Benson, my close, personal friend.”
”I said there’s no way to bring the cast back, any cast back, without her because the only way anybody is coming back in this scenario is with the trust and the respect that they all have for one another,” Golden said.
Golden and Benson had been writing collaborators before and Benson played the role of Tara on the original series. She also still was in contact with many of her former co-stars. She saw this as an opportunity to get justice for characters who may have been either underserved or were handled poorly in the end of the original show.
Charisma Carpenter and Emma Caulfield Ford
“Ten years after the end of that other show, we’re in a metaverse, so there’s multiple universes,” says Charisma Carpenter, who reprises the role of Cordelia. “Cordelia comes from a universe where she is the one true slayer and there was no Buffy Summers.”
Emma Caulfield Ford also returns as alternate universe versions of the Anya character she originated in the original show including also her vengeance demon alter ego and even a version that’s been transformed into a dog. “I just go from one to — back and forth — talking to you then talk to myself. It was very hard, but fun as f*ck.”
James Marsters and James Charles Leary
“I think at the very beginning, the audience is going to be very concerned about where Spike is,” says Spike portrayer James Marsters. “We left him a while ago, and is he going to choose the light or the dark?” Fortunately, Clem is there to help him choose. James Charles Leary reprises his supporting role as Spike’s good-natured demon poker buddy. “I’m like his Clem-iny Cricket,” Leary says.
Spike also serves as the narrator in Slayers. “He seems like he’s gone to the dark side at the very beginning,” says Marsters, “and then we find out that he hasn’t. He’s just as ornery and frustrating as he’s ever been, but he has a soul and he’s been using it properly. And now we see him try to help out a new slayer.”
Juliet Landau and Laya DeLean Hayes
That new slayer is 16-year-old Indira, voiced by Laya DeLean Hayes. “We’ve got Laya coming in just crushing it from the get-go. It was like, oh man! We really gotta step it up,” Leary says. “I was like, oh, Laya’s a little young; I hope she can keep up with us, and then we start, and it was like WOAH, I gotta get ready,” Marsters remembers. “She has more experience as a voice actor than any of us. She just brought the level up.”
“It was of course very nerve-wracking because I’m coming into a world that I’m not aware of,” Hayes says of the experience. “And also every cast member already had their character down. And each one is so distinct. I wanted to make sure that what I was bringing, one, was an addition, and, two, that it fit the tone that was already there. But what’s so great about Indira is she does add, like, this fresh perspective. And I think it was nice to kind of lean into my lack of knowledge on some things and kind of embrace that as something that was going to set Indira apart from the other slayers.”
For the series’ “big bad” — a term popularized by the original series — Juliet Landau returns as an alternate universe of her character Drusilla. “I have a really strong theatre background, and I feel like if you’ve been around a lot of either series television or a small run of a play where you inhabit a character for a long time, there’s something where it’s still in you,” Landau says. “Obviously, I don’t walk around like Drusilla — a bit scary — but she is surprisingly easy to access. And so it is like slipping into a comfortable, old shoe. What’s interesting about the material is she is not subservient. She has autonomy, and she isn’t an appendage to somebody else. She does drive a lot of the action.”
“It was so much fun,” Hayes says of the experience. “When you’re in a booth with other actors, you’re just able to bounce off of each other. And also, you get that feeling of actually being able to bond with the people that you’re working with, which is one of my favorite parts of being a part of this industry. Hopefully it translates, the magic that you get in your ear vis-a-vis audio podcast because there was a lot of magic in our booth.”
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