Joyce Summers - Creation and Casting

Creation and Casting

The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (often simplified as Buffy) was created by Joss Whedon, who originally used the concept of a teenage girl who is given superhuman powers to fight evil, in a screenplay that became a film in 1992. Unhappy with the outcome of the film, Whedon created the series, which picks up shortly after the events of the film and is loosely based on its ending. At the end of the film, which was set in Los Angeles, Buffy fights and defeats a gang of vampires in her school's gymnasium. At the start of the television series Buffy and her mother Joyce, who has divorced Buffy's father, move to a new town named Sunnydale where Buffy is to attend Sunnydale High School, which, unknown to her, is situated on a portal to hell, called a Hellmouth. The series explains that she has relocated from Los Angeles after burning down the gymnasium, marking her as a trouble-making student and a worrisome daughter. The series regularly employs the elements of dark fantasy and horror to represent the real problems regularly encountered by adolescents, with many situations also reflecting adult fears and anxieties.

Buffy's parents are barely seen in the film, but her mother Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), plays a prominent role in the series. Sutherland, a fantasy fiction fan who dislikes the horror genre, had recently moved to Hollywood from New York City in 1996 and was not actively looking for acting jobs when her agent called her with the opportunity to play Joyce. Sutherland auditioned the same day as David Boreanaz, Buffy's romantic interest Angel, and was impressed with how naturally she felt at ease with the material in the readings with the writers and casting agents. Sutherland stated in an interview that she felt she identified strongly with adolescents. Her empathy for them made her protective not only of the actors, but their characters as well. However, a storyline that has Joyce possessed as the mother from hell was one of Sutherland's favorite possible scripts, but it was cut.