Charisma Carpenter is having something of a moment on TikTok, and if you have not been following along, you have been missing out.
The actress who played Cordelia Chase across six seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel has built a following on the platform that speaks to something beyond simple nostalgia. Carpenter posts with a frequency and candour that tends to catch people slightly off guard — she is funny, self-aware, and appears to be genuinely enjoying herself in a way that translates through a screen. Comment sections fill up. Clips circulate. The Buffy fandom, which has never entirely gone anywhere, has found a new rallying point.
Some of this is, naturally, tied to Cordelia herself. Carpenter has been revisiting moments from the show, reacting to clips, engaging with fans who grew up watching her and are now, somewhat improbably, adults with their own opinions about the Cordy-Angel dynamic. There is a particular kind of joy in watching an actor rediscover the affection people hold for a character they played decades ago. Carpenter seems genuinely surprised by it, at least some of the time.
There are also rumours — nothing confirmed, but rumours — that she is considering a Buffy rewatch podcast of her own. Whether this materialises into anything concrete remains to be seen. Juliet Landau has already launched Re-Vamped, which is doing impressive things with cast interviews, so the field is not empty. But a Cordelia-centred rewatch, or something in which Carpenter guides listeners through her time on both shows, would find an audience. That much is not in doubt.
The Slayers: A Buffyverse Story audio drama — released in 2023, featuring Amber Benson, Charisma Carpenter, and James Marsters among others — gave a hint of what it sounds like when these performers return to the Buffyverse on their own terms. The response was enthusiastic. Carpenter’s contribution was widely praised.
There is a version of the conversation about Carpenter that gets stuck on the more painful parts of her history with the franchise — her allegations against Whedon, the years in which she felt sidelined, the difficult public reckoning of 2021. Those things matter and should not be papered over. But they exist alongside a career, and a relationship with fans, that has continued to develop in its own direction.
What TikTok seems to have given her is an unmediated version of that relationship. No publicist, no press junket, no one deciding which version of Charisma Carpenter gets to appear in front of the audience. Just the person herself, evidently at ease, connecting with people who remember exactly what Cordelia meant to them when they were sixteen.
It is rather good to watch.
Leave a Reply