There’s a new installment in the Buffyverse, and this one—co-written by Christopher Golden and Amber Benson, the latter of whom played Tara in the original series—is not only bringing back Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), Spike (Jonathan Marsters), Drusilla (Juliet Landau), Giles (Anthony Head), Anya (Emma Caulfield Ford), Clem (James Charles Leary), and ghost!Jonathan (Danny Strong), but also introducing us to two new Slayers—one of them being Cordelia!
“I want to live in the meta world where Charisma Carpenter is Cordelia, the Vampire Slayer. That was the pull for me,” Benson told Variety about why she was drawn to the project.
That project is an audio original from Audible called Slayers: A Buffyverse Story. It takes place in 2013 (ten years after Buffy ended) and has Spike narrating as he looks for a watcher for the latest slayer, Indira (Laya DeLeon Hayes). Doing so they run into another slayer from a parallel dimension where Buffy never existed, and Cordelia Chase became the slayer instead.
“One of the most important things to me about Slayers is that it is an opportunity to give the Buffyverse fandom permission to enjoy the show, enjoy these characters again in a way that is representative of perseverance, of work ethic, of the familiar,” Carpenter told Variety. “It has really been made clear to me how much entertainment in general and the previous show and what this future show will do to provide comfort, empowerment, self-belief and reminders of our purpose. I think it will be an opportunity to give credit and justice to Tara, to Anya, to Cordelia. Because that show involved hundreds of people to make, and it wasn’t about just one person. So I feel like it’s really a beautiful thing to have this opportunity to bring her back to life—Cordelia specifically—and have her live out a very empowering life, and share her wisdom from that battle. I just feel like it’s very poetic in a lot of ways.”
You can listen to the new tale yourself when Slayers: A Buffyverse Story becomes available on Audible starting on October 12, 2023.
