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:: MOVE OVER, DARLA ::

Julie Benz, Angel's twice-turned vampire Darla, tells Anthony Brown why she's over-joyed she lasted this long...

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WE'VE ALL seen it happen. There's this perfect couple, been together for years, and then one of them changes. They try to carry on, but it's just not the same, and so they go their separate ways, and get on with their lives. At least, one of them does.

"She just can't get over the guy," comments Julie Benz about her vampiric alter-ego Darla's obsession with her ex-love Angel. "She can't get over the relationship, and she can't get over him. He'll always own her heart, whatever heart she has. She is the quintessential jilted ex-wife, and the husband has moved on, and she's still trapped in psychotic obsessiveness over him and can't get past. I think it is perhaps that she made him, so it's a mother-son relationship - it's not just that they were lovers. In a way she thinks that he should love her unconditionally, and he doesn't.

"And then there's the soul thing..." the actress continues. "I mean, a vampire with a soul, it's just wrong, it shouldn't have happened, even though it's her fault [for bringing him the gypsy girl whose family cursed him]."

Nevertheless, Darla did try to put her revulsion for Angel's soul behind her during the Boxer Rebellion, as shown in last year's Buffy-Angel double event Fool for Love/Darla, and save their hundred-year-old relationship, as did the vampire with a soul himself. But why? "Yes, he tried. I think he missed the whirlwind they had together. She did offer him a sense of fun, but that's probably about it. I mean, Darla is a fun girl, she's someone you would always want to have at a party." But not, presumably, a wine-tasting? "Oh no, exactly," Benz agrees, recalling Darla's slaughter of the Wolfram & Hart lawyers in Reunion. That episode began the 'dark Angel' arc which culminated in his Epiphany a few months later, after which Darla suddenly disappeared from the show as the staff of Angel Investigations went over the rainbow to The Host's home dimension. So is there any truth in the rumors that the producers were forced into this storyline simply because Benz and the other semi-regulars they wanted to use were pre-booked for other work?

"Yeah, my avalaibility got really screwed up in that I've been doing a bunch of projects and I don't think they realized that. They run the risk of that when they don't give you a commitment or book us far enough in advance."

So Darla's return to the show - with a little companion under her belt - was delayed till the start of season three, when her first appearance triggered a flood of speculation about the identity of the father. Speaking just before the crucial episodes are due to be screened, Benz is careful about what she gives away, but says "It's Angel's. Obviously, it's Angel's. There isn't anybody else it could possibly be. Everybody has these fantasies that maybe it's Lindsey's, but no."

So how early do the actors get to know? "We find out the way the audience finds out - we know a couple of weeks before, when we get the scripts, but we don't knowa whole lot."

But then, Benz goes on to explain, she rather suspects that the writers like to see where a storyline leads them rather than following some grand masterplan. "I don't think, especially last season, they knew! I don't think the writers knew in what direction they were going to take Darla. I remember the first day of shooting season two last year, and Joss Whedon came up to me and said, 'Well, she might be human, she might be vampire, we're not sure...' and I was, 'Oh, no..."'

Some actors might find it difficult to play a character without knowing such basic points about them - it would certainly frustrate a devotee of the Method! - but Julie Benz rather enjoys the uncertainty. "Yah, it actually makes it very exciting. I mean, we pretty much jump on every script we get: 'I've got to see what happens'. I worked on Roswell as well and played a character, Topolsky, who we weren't sure was good or bad, and you just had to play it out because I had no idea what side she was working for. It means everyone on set has to think about it, and take it seriously, and I like working that way. I like the surprise."

Considering the way that Spike's background as 'William the Bloody' was subverted in Fool for Love, one particularly big surprise will surely come if we ever found out who Darla, who can't even remember her real name, originally was. The actress has a few ideas of her own. "I've always seen her as... well, she was very young, she was a prostitute, she'd clearly been treated very badly by men from a very young age... I imagine she was born into a poor family of some sort where abuse was happening, and I don't think she had a really long life prior to dying of syphilis. But then every time I think I know something about her, the creators pull the rug out from underneath you and do something different. I mean, she could have been a wealthy woman who contracted syphilis because her husband betrayed her, there's all sorts of possibilities."

So what's been the biggest surprise of all? "I think the fact that she's been around this long! She started out as just being vampire girl, and I was supposed to die in the Buffy pilot. Then to go from just being 'vampire girl' to being Darla and then all of a sudden to this character... just her longevity alone has surprised me, her ability to stay alive."

A wry question comes to mind when recalling how Benz mentions that everyone seizes the next script - are they really reading the entire thing, or simply counting their own lines as some of the more competitive actors in the business are rumored to do? Benz laughs at the thought. "I've never met the kind of actor who only reads their own lines - or actually admits to that! I read absolutely everything- it's important to know the role you play in the script, it's important to know the role you play in the overall theme of the show."

Until now, Darla's role on Angel has been pretty much limited to her relationship with the lead himself, and of course Lindsey, as she barely met the rest of the Angel Investigations team during the second season. This year round, that's all changed. "I've actually got to work with the whole cast this year," Benz comments, revealing a spot of female camaraderie on the set. "Charisma [Carpenter] and I used to joke about how we were the only two girls on the show, but I only really got to know Charisma this year. I mean, I met the whole of the cast last season, but I had maybe one scene in total with them. And it's really a kind of weird thing: you're all on the same show but you don't all work together."

So is there anyone the actress has particularly sparked with? Julie Benz's eyes light up and she reveals that there could be some unexpected chemistry between Darla and Gunn if people aren't careful on set. "J [August Richards] and I always joke around about how we can't look at each other in this scene or it would be a whole different show. I just adore J, he's just a really, really great guy, a really big person. So there's this joke that we daren't make eye contact!

One of the oddities of the Angel cast is the fact that almost everyone started out as a guest star, either on Angel itself or on Buffy. "Yeah... that's how David started on Buffy. Charisma was a series regular, but we've all been through that growing together." There are distinct advantages to getting a part this way, it seems. "It's really great to have a character who gets to do so much, "Julie comments. "Sometimes series regulars just stand there and act as the line feed, but I've never had to do that, so I'm definitely not bored."

But it does mean you're not always on the show, so does the actress keep up to date with it while Darla's off terrorizing South America? "I'm a big fan of the show itself. It is a very well-made show, this season especially when they're being shown in letterbox and I love that. But I am a huge fan of David's and J and Amy, you know? Every Monday night round about at nine o'clock I watch the show."

However, the actress isn't much of a horror fan in general, despite being married to John Kassir, the actor who provides the voice of one of horror's most iconic figures - the cackling Cryptkeeper. "It's just a very strange coincidence I started working on the pilot of Buffy the first year we started going out. "We laugh about it all the time, look at each other and giggle over how bizarre it is that we've become this Hollywood sci-fi couple, with trading cards of us, and action figures... It blows our minds that it worked out that way." It also means that the couple are kept busy around the end of October, when people are in the mood for ghouls and spooks. "Oh yes, Halloween's always a very, very big time around our house. But we haven't dressed up in a couple of years. It's harder when you dress up every day at work to then dress up for Halloween!" Not that the actress needs to dress up to pass herself off as a Halloween character. After all, she just needs to do the 'Darla stare' and suggest she might be about to vamp out. "Yeah! I do that to little kids. Keeps them in line. I tell them that's not make up I wear... that's me without make up, when I'm angry!"

While the actress might not dress up at Halloween anymore, she does tend to spend a lot of time in period costumes for flashbacks. "Well, not this season, but last season. You know it's so great to be able to dress up and be in a period when there were completely different criteria," she says, before going on to describe the downside. "But they had me wearing an original 18th Century corset and tying it really tight... I'm still having digestion problems from it! It became a nuisance - I couldn't get through the doors of a trailer because of the size of the dress, I couldn't get into the bathroom; I couldn't even go to the bathroom!"

"The problems are the little things. Like, everybody sits, but I couldn't sit in a chair, so they had to get me a box, and there was one time when I really had to go '10-100', and we had to hold up the camera for 20 minutes while I got completely undressed, and then dressed again. But it's fun. I think it's every girl's dream to dress up and look Elizabethan and Victorian and so on. My favorite was the Boxer Rebellion stuff. I absolutely loved that... I was wearing flats though, and you can really spot the heights of us in those sequences, 'cos the rest of the time I'm in super-high heels but in those scenes I look like a midget next to David. He's such a large man, and I look like a midget."

Though we'd often been told how Angel and Darla used to hang out with Spike and Dru, we'd never seen them together until the flashback scenes in Fool for Love and Darla, which gave the actress a new perspective on Darla's position as matriarch of the whole evil brood. "The last season, when we delved into how they were made, and what relation they have to me and Angel, I started calling her the 'Mothership', as everybody else was spawned off of her... I was actually watching the show the other night, in this little cluster with some fans, and they have these little, little kids, and they asked... I was playing the James thing and I said 'That's my great grandson on the show', and these kids had no idea... it was very funny."

In effect, Julie Benz has now played three different versions of Darla: the historical vampire, the present day bloodsucker who got staked in season one of Buffy, and the reborn human with a potential for redemption of Angel's second season. But now she's a vampire again. . . so is she any different this time round? "No. Once she was made a vampire the second time, she pretty much forgot the feelings she had of redemption. She's just a little more ticked off, and a little more angry at the realization that Angel doesn't love her. In the way that they love, because vampires don't really love," she laughs.

Except, it seems, when they're pregnant. "Well, I mean, this season she has hormones!" Benz explains, understandably a little cagey about the then as-yet untransmitted episodes which would reveal the truth. "It's like an emotional rollercoaster - one moment she's in tears, the next she's laughing hystericallly. I think a lot is going to be revealed this season about Darla and whether she's going to stick around or not. And this baby has a lot to do with it."

And when the day finally comes for Darla to meet a stake with her name on it? The actress becomes reflective. "I honestly believe that this role has spoiled me for future parts. They've given me so much and Darla is so active... You come to the realization that this may be the greatest character I get to play, and then it's learning to live with that. I mean, I read a lot of scripts and I do a pilot every year, and every pilot I've hoped would be just as good as Buffy, and eventually they don't get made... so you can never tell. But Darla is definitely a very special character. She'll always be part of me.".

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