EP#315 Actor Julie Benz ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Angel", "Dexter")

Kevin Lane's Spill Your Guts

We’ll be taking a couple weeks to get things ready for a very VERY big season 4. Just wait until you see what we have in store for every horror fans favourite month of year. I’m so excited I could just burst! Like that guy in “Scanners”. What are some other movies where someone just bursts? Anyway, thank you to our amazing team and our sponsors, Audio Process and Cinema 1, for another season of sitting down with horrors best and brightest and spilling guts.

Now, let’s get into it.

For any actor, playing a major character on a tv series that not only garners tons of adoring fans but also enters into the pop culture zeitgeist and becomes a phenomenon is a major achievement. Especially when their character is a particular fan favourite and ends up in video games, comic books, made into toys and more. Then you add the element of that series enduring the test of time to become inarguably classic television.

I’ll one up that now. How about doing that twice?

Our guest in this episode has a vast filmography of dynamic and versatile roles but her performance as vampire Darla on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and its spinoff series “Angel” and as “Rita”, the wife of everyones favourite serial killer on the Showtime sensation “Dexter”, have made her a true genre star.

In this episode we are joined by the radiant and brilliant Julie Benz!

Julie sat down to talk with me about getting her start working on the George Romero produced, Dario Argento directed segment of the film “Two Evil Eyes”, when she realized that Buffy was becoming an important series, the benefits of working on two shows back to back that both had stars, Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz respectively, that were also great leaders. We talk about the excitement of getting cast to work opposite a virtuosic actor like Michael C. Hall and be a part of a critical darling like Dexter but also the heartbreak and feeling of betrayal that came later when she was written off the show.

I have to say that personally I have been a longstanding fan of Julie’s being a hardcore Buffy/Angel fan and then later a “Dexter” devotee. Julie is the kind of actor and person that anyone who speaks to people about their craft as a profession dreams of having as a guest. As thoughtful as she is open and real and man, is she ever a lovely human being.

Ladies and gentleman, Julie Benz!

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