Sarah Michelle Gellar looks back on filming the most heartbreaking scene of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Snuck into the show's season 5, before the conflict with the season's villain grew into a full battle, the Buffy episode "The Body" devastated audiences and its main character. Buffy Summers (Gellar) returns home in the episode's opener and she's in a reasonably chipper mood. She teases her mother, Joyce, as a "flower-getting lady" and wants to inquire about Joyce's new romance. It takes a few moments before Buffy spots her mother's lifeless body on the couch.
Those who have seen the Buffy season 5 episode will be able to recall how the slayer's voice gradually cracks, calling out to her mom with increasing fear and being unable to process what she sees.
In a series that regularly killed off beloved characters, Joyce stood out as she was killed by natural causes that Buffy couldn't fix. In a video for Buzzfeed UK, Gellar broke down what it was like to film the heartwrenching scene and why it was both personally and technically difficult:
My mom and I are super close and it was, really—a single parent just like Joyce was–, and it also meant that Kristine Sutherland was leaving which was really hard for me. But the hardest part about this… was this entire scene was shot as a Steadicam-oner, like a play. So we rehearsed a couple times with the camera the boom and, you know, because you have to walk through all of these sets; it’s about a four-and-a-half minute take and she had that performance all the way through and everybody had to get it right. So, like, even if I thought my performance was great but the boom was in or the camera got [in the way]… so we had to, like, get it all. We could only do it a few times so we just rehearsed it like a play and then we just went for it. I really give credit to the whole crew because that was, like, a team effort.
All The Little Things That Make Buffy's "The Body" So Great
"The Body" is routinely cited as a great hour of television for the way that it dispenses with the show's established formula. For a narrative that regularly deals with world-saving consequences, the scariest thing is actually the sudden loss of a parent. While that observation does help encapsulate the brilliance of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, it belies all the little details that Gellar points to with her remarks. There's how the scene after the opening credits is a flashback, both to illustrate the Scooby Gang's fondness for Joyce and to ensure that there aren't any distracting credits for the extended scene of Buffy absorbing her mother's death.
There's also the way the camera frames Buffy. She looks out at the street and it's sunny, with strangers going about their business. It's never verbalized, and it doesn't have to be, but there's a dissonance that Buffy feels because of the way the world keeps spinning while hers has come crashing down. The opener is a testament to its star's performance, and all the proof needed that Gellar could have had huge movie roles.
It's an episode that chooses to frame Dawn's realization in complete silence, as Joyce's young daughter had just minutes earlier been distraught over some mundane school gossip. It's an episode that gives its big monologue moment to Anya, someone who hardly has the most established connection to Joyce and Buffy, yet completely makes it work. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "The Body" is a relatively early example of what The Last of Us episode 3 reaffirms, which is that genre shows can leave the genre behind almost entirely and be completely transcendent.
Source: Buzzfeed UK