Nicholas Brendon RIP

Best known as Xander Haris from Buffy.

Born in Los Angeles, Brendon began pursuing acting in his mid-20s, in part to help him overcome a long-time stutter. Although he scored a few parts as an extra in TV shows (and as a production assistant on CBS comedy Dave’s World), Buffy The Vampire Slayer was his first regular gig in the industry. As Xander, Brendon served as the frequently invoked heart of the show’s ensemble: A regular guy fighting off vampires and demons despite having no abilities of his own to speak of, other than a dab hand with a self-effacing quip. (Brendon himself would note in interviews that he thought he often got the show’s best lines because his character was clearly modeled on creator Joss Whedon’s own high-school self.) Appearing in all but one of the show’s 144 episodes, the character was a fan favorite, and Brendon himself a regular on the fan-convention circuit in the 23 years since Buffy went off the air…

His struggles were well-known in the community:

During this same period, Brendon began to draw more attention for his personal struggles than for his acting work: He made headlines with a rehab stint in 2004, a pattern that would continue throughout his life. In 2010, he began accruing a series of criminal charges to go with these public missteps, including for public intoxication, resisting arrest, and trashing hotel rooms. In 2015, he was charged with felony third-degree robbery, criminal mischief, and obstruction of breathing after reportedly strangling his girlfriend—although those charges were later pled down to criminal mischief. In 2017, he was charged with felony corporal injury to a spouse (in an incident with a different girlfriend) before making a plea deal that saw him receive probation and an order to attend a mandatory domestic violence course. In the 2020s, Brendon began suffering serious health issues, including undergoing a number of back surgeries; he was also diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, and suffered a heart attack in 2022.

It’s undeniable, for anyone who watched the series, that Nicholas Brendon was not just present for, but integral to, one of the most beloved TV shows of all time. Buffy doesn’t work without Xander, for all that the character sometimes fumbled for meaning in its later seasons, and Xander wouldn’t have worked without Brendon, and his ability to find charm and sweetness in a character sometimes written as wallowing in self-pity. It’s equally undeniable that the actor’s life after the series has been one of (if, admittedly, not the only one of) its sadder legacies, as whole generations of Buffy fans have been forced to wrestle with the distance between a beloved character, and a performer clearly suffering a long series of very public troubles.

Buffy ended shortly before this blog began, and so was never part of our club in the same way as the Sopranos or Mad Men or Battlestar Galactica. Nevertheless, I think that in ways that I can’t quite articulate Buffy created rhetorical space for the early Blogosphere, especially with respect to the Whedon-esque repartee that emerged from the show and that was so common to early Blogospheric conversations. Whedon evidently based Xander on himself but the resemblance seems… superficial in the way that so much of Whedon’ work now seems superficial; Xander was not accomplished in the same way that Whedon was accomplished but at the same time was a far warmer and more generous character than Whedon has turned out to be.

Of course everything looks different (not least Whedon himself) with the distance of 23 years (22 years for Buffy’s companion series, Angel, which literally ended two weeks before this blog’s inception). I suspected at the time that much of the cast would struggle, in part because the TV landscape was changing so rapidly, and Brendon certainly struggled in ways that hurt the people around him. Nevertheless, I will probably try to fit The Zeppo into my schedule sometime this week, because when Buffy was good it was truly, truly memorable, and Brendon was part of that.

Photo Credit: By NicholasBrendon – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85137342