Charisma Carpenter on leaving Angel

[meganbmoore]

Part of a DragonCon panel in which Charisma Carpenter is a class act under pressure in a room full of Whedon fans (I wouldn't want to have to try to honestly but diplomatically answer those questions), and Julie Benz heroically rescues her in an awkward moment. Felicia Day also talks a bit about filming Dr. Horrible, and poor Kristy Swanson (aka,

Comments

[lyssie]

Wow, do not care about Dr. Horrible. But Charisma and Julie are lovely--

And Kristy is blocked by the person in front and to the left of the fan doing the video-taping. (DC charges for copies of panels iirc)

[meganbmoore]

Yeah. Every once in a while, you can see them trying to scoot over to get Kristy on the frame, but not quite managing it.

[meganbmoore]

Sadly, I don't think it's actually from anything. The maker is valo_queen. I think it's a stock image or artbook image, but I don't know from where.

[curlyjo1]

I liked the Buffy movie. I tried to get into the series, and it just didn't grab me.

[meganbmoore]

I can honestly say that I never would have gotten into the series if I'd started with s1 of Buffy. But I stumbled across a rerun of the final arc of s2 of Angel, and ended up catching Angel reruns and that's how I got into the franchise.

[foenix]

Add me to the list of people that like the movie. =)

[cerusee]

Oh ouch. What is it with fans, that they just HAVE to ask the awkward questions, knowing they're likely digging into uncomfortable personal issues? Even if they were totally disconnected from the rumor pool, anyone with a grain of sense should have been able to guess from the nature of the way Cordelia was written out that it was probably not an amenable departure for her actor. And they should consider it would be a sensitive subject to the person who was probably fired.

Props to Carpenter, for being so diplomatic about a subject that obviously was and still is very upsetting to her.

[meganbmoore]

Yeah. I mean, some of it is likely a "one side of the story" thing, but I don't think anything would make learning she'd been fired from her job of 7 years from a reporter, or being promised Cordy wouldn't die and theie reneging on it once she'd legally agreed to do the episode any better.

[cerusee]

Yeah. Sadly, that rings true to me. Her whole story rings true. I don't know why--maybe because it sounds a lot like what I'd suspected happened (something was going on in her personal life that was resulting in some very shitty work on her part; she was having some sort of conflict with Joss, and her pregnancy was part of it, she got fired or let go or against her wishes, did not have her contract renewed and was written out of the show as practically an afterthought). It isn't necessarily any more flattering to her than to Whedon and the other producers, but at the end of the day, she was the one out of a job, and being jerked around by her bosses. (Wil Wheaton has some similar stories about the producers of Star Trek who took over after Gene Roddenberry died. He was much more explicit and scathing than Carpenter is here; then again, he no longer relies on acting to put bread on the table. And he was a kid at the time, which makes the way that the producers fucked with him just that much more disgusting

[lady_ganesh]

It certainly falls into a pattern of lead actresses getting screwed over when they got pregnant.