They did want Buffy to be in the next-to-last episode, tho, to confront Angel and Spike over the whole Rome thing, but Sarah was still in Japan finishing up "The Grudge".
Nuh-uh. Quotage:
Interviewer: Speaking of returning characters, could you comment on all the ballyhoo at the end of
Angel about having Sarah come back for one of the final episodes and then not coming back and all the speculation that followed?
David Fury: Could you rephrase the question? You mean about speculation as to whether Sarah was coming back?
Interviewer: I heard that you planned on having her come back�
David Fury: We had approached her about doing the 100th episode. Buffy was going to appear in my episode, the episode that I directed, so we put out the offer to Sarah and she politely declined which, I will say, she had her reasons. I think there might have been a death of an aunt or something that she was dealing with, but, regardless, I guess Joss kind of felt a little bit put off about the way it was done. There was a perceived notion, on both sides, I can say, between Sarah and Joss of ingratitude for both parties. Joss doesn't feel like Sarah's ever shown the proper amount of gratitude for what he's done for her and her career, and I think she feels the same way. That she feels she was never afforded the credit for Buffy's success and the gratitude from Joss.
I think they're both crazy. (laughs) They were the right people at the right time, it was a great partnership and it created a great series, and I truly think they both recognize this to some extent. But for whatever reason, I think the fact that she declined to do that put a damper on her coming back later. It provided us with an opportunity, though, because if we couldn't get Sarah, we thought, "why don't we get Charisma back and do that", which turned out to be a Godsend because Charisma was fantastic.
Interviewer: That was a brilliant episode.
David Fury: So, that was a lucky thing. A lot of the things that fall-out with us actually turn into gold. Like you think, "Oh, this is a disaster, she won't do it", or, "we don't have him", or, "Seth is leaving", and we go, "Oh, but this gives us this great episode that we wouldn't have otherwise."
As far as Sarah returning later, there was talk of her being in the finale but Joss decided -- and I get it -- that it's sort of unfair to our cast of characters to bring Sarah in, suddenly, at the end. Angel's [cast and crew] have sort of created their own world at this point and to suddenly infuse Buffy into it�
It's one thing if she appeared in the middle of the season as a guest star, but to appear in the finale sort of diminishes the importance of all these other great actors and characters that we have and I concurred with him. I thought he was right.
Interviewer: But wasn't there talk of her being in
The Girl in Question?
David Fury: There was very, very little talk about that. No, she was never going to be in that. The missed opportunity to see Buffy was always going to be the joke of that. It's the tease of, they're going to see Buffy, and they can't quite get to her. It's sort of the
After Hours kind of craziness where it's like, I can't get to her, I can't see her, and that was always pretty much decided.
The person we expected to get and didn't get was Michelle Trachtenberg. We had expected to get her for that episode but she was tied up prepping a movie, I believe, and wasn't able to do it, which is why we brought Andrew back again.
But, Sarah, no. We never expected Sarah to be in that episode. We did think she might be in the second last episode,
Power Play, just like Angel appeared in the second last episode of
Buffy's finale. We thought we'd do that but wound up not.
Joss's comments on Charisma leaving, by the way:
Interviewer: Why was Charisma's name removed from next season's cast list?
Joss Whedon: Mainly because we felt like we had taken that story -- just like
Buffy for seven years -- about as far as it could go. The Angel/Cordelia [love story] had gone pretty much as far as we wanted to take it. Their romance was definitely not a popular move on our part, and I think with most fans. It just seemed like it was time because we were revamping the show, and then paring it down... it just seemed like a good time for certain people to move on. Not completely, obviously. I'm hoping that we'll get Charisma to do some episodes as Cordelia sometime during the year. She's a new mother, so, like Sarah, I'm waiting to hear what her schedule is like. But it just seemed creatively like... I once said that I finally got to tell the story of Buffy that I tried to tell in the movie, and I did it with Cordelia. Which was the story of someone who was completely ditzy and self-involved becoming kind of heroic. But the way the series was different from the movie was that I didn't know where you go from there. So, I felt like we spent seven years playing that very arc, and it had played. Like
Buffy itself, it's time to look at something new.
Interviewer: Isn't that a disservice to fans who invested all those years in the character and her redemption? It seems an odd thing to do to the show's leading lady.
Joss Whedon: That's a fluctuating concept, the leading lady thing. And it
is a little odd. Some choices are ultimately kind of controversial about who stays and who goes and who we focus on. But obviously, we had to have her out of a bunch of episodes toward the end of the year because she was having a baby... so what we had [leading] up to it wasn't a dynamic I wanted to play out that much. The fact is, this is not the end -- unless Charisma herself says, "You know what? I don't feel like doing any recurring episodes." But when you have an increasingly large ensemble week-by-week, and you come in in your [fifth] year kind of having to revamp the show and trim the budget and also think creatively, "How am I going to service all of these people?", sometimes the people who have been around the longest, you've done the most with them.
Interviewer: Some are speculating that she was a casualty of James Marsters's cross over as Spike next season. Like, there wasn't enough money in the budget to pay for them both, so she got the boot.
Joss Whedon: That's a hell of a thing to lay on James. It was a creative decision that we made before Spike came over to the show, and like I said, I don't intend to leave Cordelia in a coma for the rest of the Buffyverse. But the creative decision to have the character step down happened long before negotiations with James [started]. It should not be laid at his feet.
Interviewer: Were things left on good terms with Charisma?
Joss Whedon: Yeah, but that's also stuff between us and not stuff that I would talk about in an interview.
I disagree with the suppositions that he no longer cared about Charisma or her character by Season 5 of
Angel, though. David Fury talks about how Joss wrote most of that last Angel/Cordelia scene in
You're Welcome and how important it was to him in the episode's commentary.
