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By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of my more persistent middle-aged traits is that I’ve never really been into TikTok. Every time I try to use it, I can practically feel it giving me ADHD. Because of that, it took me a hot minute to discover that one of the biggest stars Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been busy taking over social media, and now she promises something that will please her biggest fans. Charisma Carpenter, who played the famous role of Cordelia Chase, is now conducting a survey of her TikTok fans to see if they would be interested in directing her. Buffy re-watch a podcast.
Carpenter Carpenter On TikTok
In case you share my hostility to TikTok, you might not realize how busy Charisma Carpenter has been keeping Buffy entertain fans. She entertains everything from wild fan questions about how David Boreanaz smells to fan adoration for “bad…potty mouth.” However, her content hasn’t made as much of a splash as her asking if fans would like her to do a rewatch podcast, and for good reason: should she be willing to spill the tea, a few actors in the vampire slaying universe Joss Whedon have a more compelling story to share.
One reason for this is that Charisma Carpenter has managed to walk the line between two major franchises, serving as a main cast member on Buffy the Vampire Slayer before transitioning to the moody Angel spinoff after Buffythird season ended. To put it mildly, Angel completely different in setting, cast, and overall tone, and I’d love to hear more about how Carpenter adapted her party-girl character to a new, noisy world of “whodunit” mysteries.
For example, AngelEarly episodes often seem to treat Cordelia as someone in her early 20s rather than an 18-year-old recent high school graduate, and we’d love to hear how much of that was intentional and how much was accidental. As for the show itself, Angel it evolved so quickly and so dramatically that each season feels very different from the previous one, and it would be worth learning how Charisma Carpenter navigated this after leaving Buffy (a show that remained largely the same until, ironically enough, her departure).
For those of us who enjoy hearing about messy, behind-the-scenes drama, though, the most compelling reason to listen to Charisma Carpenter’s drama Buffy podcast rewatch (assuming he ever gets things off the ground) is to see if she learns more about the creator of the franchise Joss Whedon. Whedon once enjoyed a reputation as Hollywood’s most prominent feminist, and one of the reasons that changed is that Carpenter took to X (formerly Twitter) and described the man as having “a history of being occasionally brutal.”
She claimed he called her “scary” after she got pregnant, questioned whether she would keep the child, blamed her for her pregnancy ruining the show, and then fired her after she gave birth. The actor was understandably looking forward to motherhood, but she claims that this joy was “sucked straight away,” and she knew exactly who to blame: “Joss was the vampire.”
Long story not very short, I’m here for Charisma Carpenter to revisit her Buffy glory days on TikTok, and I’m especially down about her hosting a rewatch podcast. She clearly has a great passion for her character and this entire fictional universe, which is evident from her hilarious online videos as well as her role in the amazingly excellent audio drama. Slayers: A Buffyverse Story. And if she wants to spill a whole gallon of tea about all the behind-the-scenes drama that went into the most ambitious urban fantasy shows in network history, that’s just a Cordelia-shaped cherry on top of her absolute dominance on the social media.
