Do we like Amber Benson?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or company found, and she has publicly stood up for a co-star and for Tara's place in queer TV, though the record is thinner than a household name's.
Amber Benson is best known as Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the shy witch who became half of one of the first long-running lesbian couples on prime-time American TV. That role is why queer fans still hold her close, and she has turned up at LGBTQ+ film events like Outfest to talk about representation.
Tara's death is the nearest thing to a scandal in her story, and it is not hers. Benson has said the storyline had to happen but there was probably a better way to do it, and that the relationship mattered more than the manner of its ending. She has also said network standards people wanted the pair kept from touching and kissing, and that she and co-star Alyson Hannigan were upset by it.
The harm check came up clean. Searches on trans issues, women, immigrants, vaccines and the climate turned up no harmful words from her. What she has said on record leans the other way: at Outfest in 2019 she said she was “pro the reboot”, and she praised a woman of colour as showrunner and a more diverse cast. Nothing turned up on the company she keeps, either.
The big moral moment came in February 2021, when Charisma Carpenter accused Joss Whedon of abusing his power on the Buffy and Angel sets. Benson backed her on Twitter, writing that “Buffy was a toxic environment and it starts at the top.” Whedon has denied the accusations. Speaking up like that costs you in a small industry, and it counts.
She has been generous about Whedon on the Tara question too. In 2022 she said he realised he had “made a mistake” and had been short-sighted, but that she believed he never meant to hurt LGBTQ+ people. She said she didn't return to the show partly because she didn't trust Tara would be treated fairly. Reasonable people will read that as grace or as going easy on him, and it doesn't change the verdict.
Nothing new on her lately that we could verify. The latest big project we found was Slayers: A Buffyverse Story, the 2023 Audible series she made with Carpenter. She said the multiverse setup let them fix things they disliked about Cordelia's story, which is a neat bit of friends righting an old wrong.