Which Stars Bonded for Eternity on the Set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“We do [keep in touch],” Gellar said on Watch What Happens Live. “I mean, you have to understand that Seth and I have been friends since we were 7 years old. Well, he’s older. So he was, like, 9.” She turned to the camera: “Yeah, that’s right, Seth. I said it—you’re older.” And “I’ve known Michelle Trachtenberg since she was probably like 5.”

Trachtenberg, who had already starred in 1996’s Harriet the Spy, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that, as a teenage girl, “of course I had a crush on Angel and Marc Blucas,” who played Buffy’s normal (minus the whole secret-ops thing) boyfriend Riley. “And I was really enamored with watching Drusilla [Spike’s sire, played by Juliet Landau] onscreen. She seemed otherworldly to me.”

Interestingly, as a fan she ‘shipped Buffy and Angel, like any warm-blooded human, but “as an actress on set and working with James,” she switched to Buffy and Spike.

Because there had to be rumors of discord during filming, there were of course whispers that Gellar and Charisma Carpenter, who played frenemy Cordelia, had issues in real life.

But like so many of those on-the-set feud stories, and regardless of what they might have felt from day to day as 20-year-olds, nothing was going on that would one day taint the memory of the show’s cosmic chemistry.