Melanie Lynskey Reveals She Auditioned For Willow On ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’: “I Just Wasn’t Super Into It”

Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey recently revealed that Joss Whedon approached her to play Buffy’s trusty best friend Willow on the hit series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Ironically enough, the Emmy-nominated actress said she initially passed because she “was not sure about television” at the time.

“It was very early in my career. I had a very old-school agent who was like, ‘TV? That’s for has-beens!'” she recalled in a recent interview on Shut Up Evan: The Newsletter. “I was like, ‘I don’t think it is anymore.’ Certainly now things have really changed, but I just wasn’t super into it at the time.”

She explained, “I had a dinner with Joss [Whedon] and I don’t remember if it was an offer or if it was like, “Would you come read for it?” or what it was, but we stayed in touch after that.”

At the time, Lynskey was fresh off the success of her debut role in Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. Though it would be a couple of years before the actress got her start in television, Lynskey enjoyed a successful run playing supporting, yet memorable, characters in movies such as But I’m a Cheerleader and Ever After. She later made her name as the zany neighbor on Two and A Half Men, years before she landed her fan-favorite role in Yellowjackets.

Willow was initially played by Riff Regan in the Buffy pilot, but the role opened up again, leading Lynskey to throw her hat in the ring.

“I guess they were replacing the person from the pilot at a certain point and I had stayed in touch with [Joss], and he said, ‘Now do you think you would want to do it?’ And I had seen the pilot and I was like, ‘Oh, this is good,’ and I kind of took my agent into it. And then, it became this whole thing of, ‘Well, now you have to audition.’ So I auditioned,” she said.

The role ultimately went to Alyson Hannigan, who received the highest honor of the 2000s for her performance: a Teen Choice Award.

And the Yellowjackets star thinks the show picked the perfect Willow in Hannigan.

“Alyson Hannigan got it, who was absolutely wonderful and all was [cast] as it should have been,” Lynskey said.

She later added, “When I was younger, I used to kind of get pressured into talking about things I’d auditioned for or decided not to do and I was trying to be a good interview subject, and now I really passionately feel that if you didn’t do the job, it was never your job.”