By Chris Snellgrove | Published
While Buffy the Vampire Slayer There have been many shocking deaths, but none as emotionally devastating as the murder of Willow’s friend Tara near the end of season six. This death motivated Willow to become the big bad. It also rubbed salt into the wounds of fans reeling from a season that saw our titular character deal with everything from being kidnapped from heaven to nearly being raped by her vampire enemy, Spike. As it turns out, showrunner Joss Whedon actually wanted to resurrect the fan-favorite character in Season 7, but avoided doing so because actress Amber Benson didn’t want it to happen.
How Buffy would bring Tara back
If you need a little Buffy As a reminder, Tara died at the hands of Warren, a murderous nerd who didn’t even aim at her when he fired a gun at Buffy’s house. She died and could not be revived, prompting her friend Willow (who had become more or less addicted to channeling dark magic) to transform into a black-eyed villain who skinned Warren alive. She later put the world in danger before being held back from the brink by childhood friend Xander.
Buffy Fans were upset by Tara’s death because it was senseless and because she was an LGBTQ+ icon. While Benson later confirmed that Whedon did not mean to offend the gay community, she also confirmed that she had rejected his offer to reprise her character. So how did the showrunner plan to revive the character who otherwise couldn’t be magically brought back to life? In short, there was an aborted Season 7 storyline where Buffy was given the chance to fulfill her every wish, and after carefully weighing her options, she would bring Tara back to make Willow happy.
Amber Benson had a trust issue
On paper, BuffyThe audience would have been overjoyed to see the return of Tara. So why did this never happen? According to Amber Benson’s interview in the book In Every Generation There’s a Slayer Born: How Buffy Risked Our HeartsOne reason was her own career: the return to Buffy Even just for a short time would have kept her from directing the 2003 TV miniseries Ghosts of Albion: Legacy. What’s more interesting is that she also didn’t want to come back because she didn’t trust how Joss Whedon would handle her return.
In the same interview in which she confirmed this Buffy The showrunner never “intended to harm the LGBTQ+ community,” the Tara actor said. “I didn’t really trust what would happen to the character.” She claims that she spoke to other actors whose characters were revived by Whedon, and that they told her, “Yeah, I came back… and then he just did whatever he wanted.” More specifically, Benson said that these unnamed actors confided in her, “Even if he told me “If he knew he wouldn’t kill me that way, he killed me that way.”
Because of these problems, the beloved Buffy Star “just didn’t have a lot of confidence in the situation” and declined to return as Tara. Elsewhere in the interview, she also mentioned that she had previously “had some issues with someone on the show” and that “it had kind of come to a head as I was getting ready to leave.” She never named names, but it sounds like it seems like she’s afraid of the drama from both the showrunner and at least one of the series’ main cast members.
For Buffy Fans, these revelations add a crunchy complexity to Tara’s problematic death… Despite all the blame Joss Whedon received for killing her, he seemed very keen to bring her back and only avoided doing so because Amber Benson refused to return. But despite their thoughts on Whedon’s motivations, there are still suspicions that he only wanted to bring the character back to silence the loudest critics of Tara’s death. Unfortunately for Whedon, fan resentment is a bit like vampires: they refuse to die and always come back.