By Chris Snellgrove
| Revealed
On the earth of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hair colour serves as a simple strategy to inform who’s who. For instance, out of the present’s preliminary trio of feminine characters, main woman Buffy is a daring blonde, Cordelia is a brashy brunette, and Willow is a reserved redhead. Nevertheless, Willow actor Alyson Hannigan later revealed that each one three women initially had the identical shade of hair and she or he jumped at Joss Whedon’s provide to provide one member of this tantalizing trio purple hair.
Willow Selected Her Hair Shade
Whedon hadn’t run any reveals earlier than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however he was savvy sufficient even again then to know that audiences wanted straightforward methods to tell apart characters from each other. In response to Buffy star Alyson Hannigan, her Willow character solely bought her iconic purple hair colour after Whedon expressed issues that she, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Charisma Carpenter all had, “form of the identical shade” of brown hair. He requested “Does anybody wish to be purple,” and Hannigan says that she, “went for it.”
Whereas the Buffy showrunner could not have been considering this far forward, giving Willow purple hair colour was an ideal selection for her character. Culturally talking, purple hair has usually been related to being wild, uninhibited, and even surprisingly violent. Within the early seasons of the present, although, Willow was nothing like this, along with her character coming throughout because the archetypal wallflower geek of the collection.
Why, then, was the Buffy showrunner’s determination to provide Willow a purple hair colour so excellent? She mainly comes out of her shell all through the course of the collection, one thing foreshadowed by a Season 3 episode the place she encountered a vampire model of herself from a special dimension.
That model was a seductive leather-based mommy who used intercourse as a weapon, and whereas entertainingly over-the-top, this incarnation of Willow was a lot nearer to the persistent stereotype of redheads as seductive enchantresses. Willow’s auburn mane made her vampire model’s persona and wardrobe that rather more convincing, and her hair colour was that rather more excellent as her human self slowly grew to become a bit extra like her vampire self.
Whereas Buffy the Vampire Slayer by no means put common Willow in her vampire model’s domme outfit outdoors of that one episode, her purple hair additionally helped promote a few of her later, vampire-adjacent plot developments. She jokingly tells her girlfriend Tara that she’s “not massive with the butch,” however of their relationship dynamic, Tara turns into extra of the mousy lady that Willow was in Season 1, and Willow turns into a take-charge witch reveling in her rising energy. And people stereotypes about redheads being violent actually appear borne out when Willow turns into the Huge Dangerous of Season 6 (although in equity, her hair turns black when she’s totally evil).
Does this imply that Buffy the Vampire Slayer Joss Whedon deliberate all of those character moments and plot developments when Alyson Hannigan jumped on the likelihood for purple hair colour? After all not. Even the largest followers of the present can admit that a lot of this was developed on the fly, which is a big a part of why Season 6 was such a sizzling mess that was barely saved by the musical episodes and Willow’s witchy heel flip. Nonetheless, the purple hair ended up being excellent for her character, and it’s solely becoming that all the things magically labored out on the subject of our favourite onscreen witch.
