Posted in: CW, streaming, TV | Tagged: angel, buffy, buffy the vampire slayer, charisma carpenter

Buffy Star Charisma Carpenter Shares Great Look Back at '90s Con Scene

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel star Charisma Carpenter took to Twitter to share some looks back at the '90s convention scene.

With Sarah Michelle Gellar starring in & executive producing Paramount+'s Wolf Pack, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star has had a lot of opportunities to reflect back on the popular and influential series. But this time around, we're giving Gellar a break to shift our spotlight onto Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase on both "Buffy" and the David Boreanaz-starring spinoff, Angel. Except this time around, Carpenter is sharing a visual trip down memory lane – and it comes at the start of a year that Carpenter describes in her tweet as "a very busy year at in-person cons." So what better time than now for a little look back at what the con experience was like in the '90s?

Here's a look at Carpenter's tweets from earlier this month, taking us back nearly 30 years for a chance to check out the "Buffy" gang working a live convention event:

And here's a look at a tweet from Carpenter of her, co-star Seth Green (Oz), and… well… you'll see:

Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter Discuss "Buffy," Angel

As fans are aware, the end of the show's third season brought a wave of change to BtVS, with perhaps the biggest change being the departure of Boreanaz's Angel and Carpenter's Cordelia to Los Angeles for the spinoff series Angel (along with the late Glenn Quinn's Doyle), which would run for five seasons, from October 1999 to May 2004. In Evan Ross Katz's Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts (you can purchase it here), we learned how Gellar felt about the show moving forward without Angel (a question that Gellar says she was never asked before), and Carpenter's initial concerns about joining the spinoff.

"Joss [Whedon] told me [early] on and coming from soap operas, you know that there's nothing worse than a happy couple. And at a certain point, it gets very hard to maintain that," Gellar explained, seeing the move as a way of keeping the couple's bond fresh, even if it would be from a distance. And as Gellar saw it, it was a no-lose situation since Boreanaz always had BtVS to return to. "I was just really happy for David and excited to see what the next chapter was. And as David and Joss and I sued to joke, if 'Angel' doesn't work, he'll just come back. It was never such a closed-door," she explained. As for Carpenter, she admits that Cordelia's popularity among the fans wasn't something she was really aware of at first. "I didn't know what was going on, on the message boards. I didn't really know until one time I was protesting a Cordelia moment and the producers said something like, 'Calm down, this is why America loves you,' and you're going, 'Oh, America loves me?' It was like new information for me."

But playing a popular character is one thing. It's quite another to take that character from being part of an ensemble to being a lead in a new series. "To hear that I was being invited to go onto the spinoff show and have the opportunity to just be on a cast of three people instead of five-plus, I was very terrified by that responsibility," Carpenter reveals. "I was kind of insecure and not sure that I would live up to the task. I had a lot of anxiety. I still am a pretty anxious person. And I was simultaneously in a lot of fear because I didn't know what kind of economic responsibility or insecurity that it could bring on [if it wasn't a hit]. My first response was, 'Thank you so much. If it fails, can I come back?' [Joss] said yes, and I said, 'Great, let's go.'"

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