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:: DEATH BECOMES HER ::

She was the centrepiece of one of this year's bestest SF episodes, Paul Simpson and Ruth Thomas talk to Buffy's (dead) mom, Kristine Sutherland

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"I know of some rumours but I'm not really at liberty to say! Joss could wake up with a spectacular idea and head in a different direction..." So said Kristine Sutherland in mid-May 2000 when asked what lay in store for Joyce Summers during the fifth year of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Sutherland was just coming to the end of a year spent living in Italy, which had reduced Joyce's role in the fourth season to not much more than a cameo. The only thing that she would confirm was that she was definitely signed for the fifth year.

But Joss Whedon already had a "spectacular idea" in mind for the Summers family. During the fifth season, we were introduced to Buffy's "younger sister" Dawn, then Joyce suffered an aneurysm, but seemed to recover. Then, in one of the most shocking cliffhangers of recent years, Buffy came home to find her mother sprawled on the settee.

"I never asked Joss, but I got the impression that it had been planned for a very long time," Sutherland recalls from her holiday home in Italy. Whedon had informed her of his plans for Joyce when Sutherland announced that she was taking a year out to live in Europe. "I knew before I came to Italy at the start of the fourth season," she says. "I probably wouldn't have known that early, but when I went and told Joss that I was planning on going away for a year, he was like, 'But you have to come back - I need to kill you! And it's really important!' I said, 'It's okay- I'm coming back!'"

Understandably, Sutherland had mixed feelings about returning to the show. "Does anyone ever want to die?" she asks rhetorically. "Without my illness and without Dawn's storyline - which is what brought her home initially - what would have happened is that Buffy would have gotten older, grown up and moved away from home. I would have become so peripheral that there wouldn't have been much for me to come back to. I was actually very pleased, because I knew I was going to come back to a strong storyline and a much stronger fifth season than if I wasn't going to get ill and pass on. Generally at this point in shows that are about kids growing up and moving on, the parent become so peripheral that eventually they just disappear and nobody notices that they're gone! It was nice to go out with a bang and a strong storyline.

"I knew that Joyce was going to die suddenly," Sutherland adds. "Initially when we talked, before I went to Italy, Joss's idea was that Joyce adopted a five or six year old girl. It was interesting how that idea of adoption actually became The Key, and this whole other thing."

Personal experience assisted Sutherland in an odd way during the filming of the illness. Her own mother has had an aneurysm - precisely the medical complaint from which Joyce suffered, although the actress believes that Whedon wasn't aware of it when he wrote the scene. " At one point, after Joyce had the brain surgery, people had the idea that I would have my head shaved and wear a wig," she recalls. "All of this came up on the night before we were going to shoot that scene - it just happened to be the first scene on the first day of the next episode. There was no preparation time - and when I realised that they were going to put me in a wig, I was going, 'You can't do that!' I knew from my mother that that was not what would happen, given where the aneurysm had been. It was actually the same place on the same side that my mother had it, so I knew exactly what they would do - they just shave back a spot. It's so close to the temple that they just shave it back and go in. There wasn't time to do any more research, because I didn't find out until the day before about the exact surgery that they were going to do. It was kind of freaky - my mother was fairly young when it happened to her."

Joyce's illness added to the strength of the bond between mother and daughters. Sutherland was very impressed with the new energy that the actress playing Dawn, Michelle Trachtenberg, brought to the set, which allowed the new relationships to appear far more natural. "She was such an extraordinary presence on the set," she says. "She's so open and energetic and present that the relationship just happened. It was really nice - it was the kind of thing that you couldn't really script. It had to happen or not - and it did. It was really exciting. At one point I talked to Joss and he was so pleased that it was all working. Everything just became energised by Michelle's presence. It was so nice to bring in this whole new person, and the character and storyline. I think she just bonded with everybody. I certainly bonded with her straightaway - I enjoyed having two daughters, and it was so instant that once it was there, it was as if she had always been there."

The creation of a triangle with Joyce at the apex also gave Sutherland new challenges. "I only have one daughter," she explains, "so I had no sense of what it would be like to have two. It felt very different and I liked it. It became a triangle with a whole different kind of power and balance structure. Buffy was now the oldest child, and I was depending on her. With the illness coming up, we knew that there were things we could talk about that Dawn was too young to discuss."

Of all the scenes that Kristine Sutherland had to film after Joyce's death, the one that affected her the most profoundly was the very first, when Buffy finds her mother's body. "That was really emotional for me," she remembers. "I found that that was written so powerfully and Sarah did an incredible job with it. There were moments when it was so hard just to contain the emotion. : My identification was with her and what she was going through - not really with Joyce. I think that when you've lost a parent, it's forever a deep, deep wound, and any reference to it becomes so emotionally powerful. I was in my late twenties when I lost my father, so it resonated for me a great deal, both in terms of having lost a parent at a young age, and then also having my mother have an aneurysm and the whole scary surgery thing. It was a really emotional scene."

Once she had filmed that, Sutherland found the rest of "The Body" was more of a technical challenge. She appeared as Joyce in virtually every scene in which the corpse was present. "Most of the time it was me," she agrees. "I think there might have been some times during the fight in the morgue where it was so in the background that they put a mannequin under the shroud for some of it. For most of the scenes, the shot just moved in, so I did an awful lot of lying around dead. It really became about keeping my eyes open. I had to work so hard during those long scenes to keep them open. It was so painful - it took incredible concentration. It was really hard work just to lie there dead!"

Joss Whedon made some deliberate choices in the script for the episode, in particular stating that Joyce's eyes should remain open throughout. Sutherland understands why he didn't want Buffy to reach forward and close her eyes. "In closing a person's eyes, which is what we would naturally do, it's a way of telling ourselves that the person is asleep, and not really dead," she says. "I think Joss wanted to make it really clear that this was real death. This wasn't about vampires. I know some people have been critical of it, but I think that our society doesn't really grapple with death at all. We make up dead bodies so they look like they're still alive, and shove them off to funeral homes and pretend that they don't exist. Our chickens and turkeys arrive neatly packaged in the grocery store so you can pretend you're not really eating what you're eating. I've found Europeans don't have that same 'let's clean death up' attitude. You go to a butcher, and it's a lamb, it's a chicken.  It's got its head on and its feet on. I can only imagine that their reaction to human death is not quite as antiseptic as ours is, as well. At an Irish wake they lay the body out on the kitchen table and everybody comes to look at it and have a big party. Not closing her eyes was part of that."

The gradual physical deterioration of Joyce's corpse was also carefully monitored. "Todd McIntosh really structured the make-up so that it was this gradual progression until in the morgue, I was literally grey-blue," she says. "It took about an hour to apply - he's so fast. It wasn't as detailed as the vampire make-up, because there wasn't the whole prosthetic stuff going on, but basically all my arms and upper part of my torso and my face were covered. He used the airbrush and mixed colours. My skin tone kept trying to come through, so it had to be pretty heavy."

To ensure that the sombre mood wasn't broken, Joss Whedon filmed all the scenes in which Joyce appeared to be alive on the first day of shooting. "Interestingly enough, at the end, he said he should have ended filming with the Christmas scene," Sutherland remembers, "but it might have been too difficult to do it by then. By the time we did the scenes where I was waking up in the ambulance, the mood on set really changed. It was quite amazing really - I think everybody on it really had the feeling that this was about death in a way that nothing else had been."

Contrary to popular belief, Kristine Sutherland did not return to play the revivified Joyce summoned by Dawn in the next episode, but she did come back for the scenes set in Buffy's mind three episodes later. "It was bizarre to have been away and realise that everyone else had two episodes under their belts," she says, "because it felt like I hadn't been away that long. Luckily, though, I didn't have to go through everything that they all went through."

Any further reappearances will also be in the guise of flashbacks or fantasy sequences - "I know there are some plans for me to come back next year but there will be no real return, for sure," Sutherland says firmly. "I am dead."

One of the areas that she would like to have seen more of was Joyce's independent side. "I have always wished to do more of Joyce at work, and had a chance to explore her as a working woman," she says. "She had a job and another life, and provided the money for herself and the house and her daughter. They often explored her capabilities as a single mother at home, and I would have liked to have ventured into the work area a bit more."

The actress loved playing the role because of the constant opportunities to build on what she had been doing. "Not everybody gets to do a filmed television series for that many years," she points out. "It's a wonderful thing to keep building on the comfort level. It's fantastic doing a film, but it's such a totally different experience. It has a beginning, a middle and an end and you don't really see it all put together until the end in terms of understanding the vision and the style that the director has in mind. Sometimes there are things that you only see when the film comes out because you're just one part of it. The wonderful thing about doing a filmed series is you get to watch it, and you see it as it's building and evolving. Within a month you see what everybody else was doing in those scenes that you weren't in and so you've got this constant real sense of the whole. It was great to be in a series that was so well written and really about something."

Her current plans involve doing "nothing! I had some auditions before I left, and it was rather depressing because there's so much stuff that just isn't as well written as Buffy. But who knows? That's the thing about life as an actor: you just don't know what's coming next. That's the piece that you just don't have any control over. My modus operandi is always: don't sit home waiting for work, because it has its own rhyme and its own rhythm. Keep yourself busy, always look at your own interests, and keep expanding. Work has a way of coming when it comes!" SFX

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