Vampires, demons and forces of darkness: Buffy cast reunite at Calgary Expo 2025

By Ansharah Shakil, May 4 2025—

Infamous vampires from iconic pieces of supernatural media had their metaphorical moment in the sun at Calgary Expo this year, with stars from Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Julie Benz, James Marsters and David Boreanaz appearing. 

28 years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer first premiered, it remains a pop culture phenomenon and one of the greatest, most influential television series of all time. Sarah Michelle Gellar portrays the show’s protagonist, Buffy Summers, the latest in a line of women known as Slayers, who save the world from supernatural creatures like vampires. Buffy is aided by her Watcher Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), and her friends, including Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg and Nicholas Brendan as Xander Harris. Michelle Tratchenberg, who passed away this year, played Buffy’s sister Dawn. 

Two of the main vampires on the show are Angel, a vampire cursed with a soul played by Boreanaz who is Buffy’s first supernatural ally and love interest for three seasons, and Spike, played by Marsters, originally one of Buffy’s enemies before later becoming her ally and lover. 

Benz played Darla, Angel’s sire and the first vampire ever seen on the show, in an appearance that turns the table on classic horror tropes by having Darla sink her fangs into the neck of the boy she’s with, rather than the other way around. On Buffy, Benz died in the first season. On the spin-off series Angel, she was resurrected for two seasons before dying again, but on both she left a permanent mark. Benz also played Rita Bennett on Dexter, and has appeared in films like Jawbreakers (1999), which has been gaining more recognition now. 

Boreanaz was a main character in Buffy before he departed to lead Angel, still making recurring appearances in Buffy. He is also well-known for playing the Booth to Emily Deschanel’s Brennan on Bones. 

Marsters came into Buffy during the second season in what was originally meant to be a short-lived appearance, but his popularity led to a major role in that season, an appearance in the third season and a main cast role beginning in the fourth season. After Buffy, he joined the Angel cast as a main character for their final season. In addition to his role as Spike, he played Victor Stein on Marvel’s Runaways.

Benz, Boreanaz and Marsters all had individual panels at this year’s Expo. Benz’s was titled Queen of the Vampires: Meet Julie Benz, while Boreanaz was called Blood and Bones with David Boreanaz and Marsters’ was Out for a Bite with James Marsters.

However beloved Buffy still is, its creator is no longer. His mistreatment of actresses like Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase, was revealed amongst numerous other allegations in 2021. Gellar and numerous other members of the cast, including Emma Caulfield who played Anya, Amber Benson who played Tara Maclay, Tratchenberg, Benz, Marsters and Boreanaz, expressed their support for Carpenter and denounced Whedon’s behaviour. 

Whedon’s career has since rightfully not recovered, but talks of a Buffy revival without his involvement have come to light. The revival is set to be directed by Chloé Zhao, with Gellar returning in a recurring role and in an executive producer capacity. It’s not known yet whether Angel or Spike would ever appear — vampires are, after all, meant to be immortal and ageless. In the meantime, the popularity of the original series reigns eternal.

During Benz’s panel, she spoke about how she’s advocated for female characters to exist without being in a relationship or centred around a male character. She also admitted that when she first got into acting, she wanted to be “a Meg Ryan”, and that she would love to do a rom-com, a role one can clearly imagine her in. 

In response to fan questions on which one of her characters she would want to meet, Benz said probably not Darla, only because you’d have to be careful to make her not bite you. She addressed her idea that Darla would kill specific humans for fashion, so you’d have to dress down if you hung out with her. 

Boreanaz brought a talkative, enthusiastic energy to his panel, where he won lots of laughs from the crowd with his discussion of the Calgary Flames, ginger beef and the Calgary Stampede. Well-loved TV couple Booth and Bones are still famous for their chemistry, and Boreanaz detailed the hard work by him and Deschanel that went into that. 

Boreanaz said Angel, too, involved lots of hard work, with the night shooting and stunt work that went into the role. He also shared with the crowd that someone had asked him this week how it feels to be someone’s gay awakening, which he said was the best question he’d gotten all weekend.

In accordance with Spike and Angel’s legendary rivalry over Buffy, Marsters said in his panel that one of his best moments on the set of Buffy was “kicking David’s ass on his own show.” Of course, unlike Spike would have for Angel, he also discussed Boreanaz’s friendly behaviour when he first arrived on set. 

The first response for Marsters’s best moment on set, though, was when Spike sees Buffy at the top of the stairs, the first time he’s seen her since she’s come back to life. One of the most moving, essential aspects to Spike’s character is his love for his sire Drusilla, for Dawn and of course, for Buffy. 

Marsters discussed how he’s put that into Spike’s character since the beginning, where he realised that if he wanted the character to stick around, he had to find the love and show that to the audience. In the fourth season of Buffy, he even wanted Spike to unrequitedly fall for Buffy. Instead, that happened in the fifth season, and to his surprise, it would become requited — enough so that an audience was now asking him what it’s like to kiss Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Marsters expressed his support for Gellar’s portrayal of Buffy, saying that without her, there wouldn’t have been seven seasons of the show. As he told the audience, the messages of Buffy remain universal and timeless today because they’re so essential to what it is to be human: to fight, to help others and, in the words of Buffy Summers, be brave and live.