NEED TO KNOW
Charisma Carpenter is setting the record straight on whether she’ll return for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot.
The 55-year-old actress, who starred as Cordelia Chase in the hit WB show and its spinoff series, Angel, revealed in a new TikTok video that her popular character will not be returning onscreen — as far as she knows.
“I am not in the reboot. I am not in the pilot. I don’t even know if the show has been picked up to go to series. I assume it will be,” Carpenter said in the video, posted on Saturday, Aug. 16.
She also noted that fans were commenting on whether the name of her podcast, The Bitch Is Back, was alluding to her returning to the show. However, she denied that was the case.
20th Century Fox/ Everett
“It was not intended to sound decoded in any kind of way, alluding to the fact that I was admitting to being in the reboot,” she explained. “People were also then commenting, ‘Oh is this… Are you saying?’ like it was an easter egg à la Taylor Swift. Not at all.”
“I have not had a conversation with any of the powers that be to include Cordelia at this point,” she added.
Carpenter’s TikTok video came a week after Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar was photographed on the Los Angeles set of the show’s reboot on Aug. 7. She will star alongside Kiera Armstrong, who is the newest Chosen One.
PEOPLE confirmed in February that a new Buffy series was in the works at Hulu that would star Gellar and be executive produced by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao. Nora and Lila Zuckerman are also writing, showrunning and executive producing.
While Carpenter isn’t confirmed for the new series, she has revisited the Buffy the Vampire Slayer world in recent years with Slayers: A Buffyverse Story, an Audible podcast that saw her character Cordelia take on the role of the slayer alongside Indira (played by Laya DeLeon Hayes).
BACKGRID
Other Buffy stars returned to voice their popular characters, including James Marsters as Spike, Emma Caulfield Ford as Anya, Juliet Landau as Drusilla and Amber Benson as Tara. Benson also co-wrote the series.
However, the series was canceled when Disney refused to allow Audible to produce future seasons. Co-writer Christopher Golden shared on X in February 2024 that they were provided no “explanation” for the cancellation from Disney.
