When Nicholas Brendon, a star of the teen horror series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” died on Friday at 54, his former co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar took to social media to pay tribute.
“They’ll never know how tough it is to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight, and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes, because nobody’s watching me,” Gellar, who played the show’s title character, wrote on Instagram. “I saw you Nicky.”
Gellar, as it turned out, was quoting Brendon’s character, Xander Harris, a nerdy, sometimes clumsy underdog who beguiled fans with his rarely-in-the-spotlight, Everyman status. Brendon was hardly the world’s most famous actor, but his Xander, an average guy whose often exceptional qualities gave him agency in a world otherwise populated with vampires, demons and the like, reached a cult renown among the legions of “Buffy” fans. The show, leaning heavily into a high-school-is-hell metaphor, ran for seven seasons, from 1997 to 2003.
Xander “provided us in a very real and very authentic way, a glimpse of what it would be like to be an ordinary human being in this supernatural world,” said James South, a professor of philosophy at Marquette University and the editor of two books on the show. The character, he added, confirmed to viewers that humans could, in fact, have a place, maybe even prosper, in a superhuman universe.
Brendon might have played his character’s awkwardness to gleeful comic effect, but it was Xander’s quiet heroism that resonated with many of the show’s admirers. That a geeky sidekick could find his way to something like leading-man status blazed a trail for later nervous and ungainly characters like Seth Cohen on “The O.C.”
Take, for instance, a fan-favorite episode from Season 3 titled “The Zeppo.” It was the rare episode that placed Xander front and center, and it ends with his rescue of his “Buffy” pals from a potentially catastrophic explosion. Yet no one notices his efforts. After Brendon’s death was announced, calls to rewatch the episode reverberated in “Buffy” circles online.
To be sure, Xander evolved as the show progressed. Rhonda Wilcox, who has been an editor of the academic journal “Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+” for 25 years, said that initially “one of the things that people liked about him, of course, was the humor, and Nicholas Brendon was really excellent at getting that across.” She cited Xander’s “big heart.”
But in later years, she continued, viewers questioned Xander’s attitude toward the show’s female characters. He could be petty when his romantic advances were rejected, and he resented Angel, Buffy’s boyfriend. Wilcox pointed to superficial comments the character often made about women, as well as to his cowardly jilting of his fiancée at the altar in Season 6.
Many viewers, she said, felt that those actions “made him less than heroic in terms of his gender relationships.” This, for a show that had long been hailed as radically feminist.
Xander was widely understood to be an alter ego of Joss Whedon, the show’s creator and executive producer. As South put it, “Joss turned out to be, himself, a very complicated human being, a very flawed human being who was perhaps not always aware of good boundaries and relationships.”
Stars distanced themselves from Whedon in the wake of accusations that he had cheated on his former wife, the producer Kai Cole, and that he had abused actors who worked for him. Whedon disputed some of those accusations, and said Cole’s account included “inaccuracies” and “misrepresentations.”
The actress Charisma Carpenter, who played Xander’s girlfriend Cordelia, said in a statement in 2021 that Whedon had abused his power “on numerous occasions” while working with her, including by calling her “fat” when she was four months pregnant.
“He was mean and biting, disparaging about others openly,” Carpenter said, “and often played favorites.” (In 2022, Whedon told New York magazine: “Most of my experiences with Charisma were delightful and charming,” adding that he “did not call her ‘fat.’”)
Still, it is hard to deny Xander’s influence, in part because he expanded what it means to be an average man.
When thinking of “the old-fashioned notion of the Hollywood Everyman, which is this normal, decent regular Joe,” said Robert Thompson, who studies popular culture at Syracuse University, “Xander was probably a much more accurate depiction of the Everyman, because the Everyman is often petty and jealous.”
The “Xander type,” as Thompson put it, became a television trope. “He was a pretty complicated, worked-out example of a character that would then get picked up in other places,” Thompson said, adding, “He titled it and gave a name to it.”
For many fans, it will always be Xander’s role as a supportive, reliable friend to Buffy and her inner circle of friends known as the Scooby Gang that resonates most deeply.
Just a month before Brendon died, users on Reddit debated whether they would be friends with Xander in real life, despite his flaws.
“Like 70 percent of my friend group in junior high and high school was Xanders,” one person wrote, “and we’re still friends to this day.”
Describing the character as “funny, loyal, nerdy, insecure, brave,” the user added, “No regrets.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts.
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