How did you come to cast Buffy?
Gail Berman - now president of the Fox Network, still my boss, and the executive producer of Buffy - sent me the script of Buffy and asked me if I'd be interested in casting television, which I'd never done before, and casting this particular project.
I actually wasn't interested, because I didn't want to come to LA. I'm a New Yorker and that's where I wanted to stay. But I read the script, and I was so excited by it - I thought it was brilliant. The funny thing is, when she conceptually pitched it to me, it was not something I felt would be interesting to me.
This sounds very funny, but I've always been very intrigued by vampires, and I was the associate producer on a movie called Vampire's Kiss, starring Nicolas Cage? I always felt vampires were part of my life, [so] I read it, and was inspired by it.
I came to LA, sat in a room with Joss - and we really clicked. We both had a very historical sense of who these [characters were]. I talked to him about casting ideas but all the people were dead, because they were such classic characters in a sense. Even though I knew he wanted to make it all very hip and modern, the prototypes were very classic for us, and we had the same prototypes. Considering these were dead actors, that was pretty extraordinary.
So he hired me right then and there and we went to work. Buffy really completely changed my life because I went from casting and producing films to casting for television, becoming the Head of Casting at Twentieth Century Fox studios, and then becoming the Head of Casting for the Fox Network - and it's all because of Buffy.
A meteoric rise.
Well, you get to work with good material and a great creator and it's a little bit easy. I loved the material. It was fresh and fun, and it was also the beginning of the WB network, so we had nothing to lose, except do the best we could do, and I think we more or less pulled that one off.
