Do we like Nicholas Brendon?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words turned up and he stood by a co-star, but the court record and a messy final stoush leave the good-person side genuinely mixed.
Brendon was a Los Angeles kid who became the heart of the Scooby Gang. He played the lovable everyman Xander Harris across all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from 1997 to 2003. He later turned up in 21 episodes of Criminal Minds as hacker Kevin Lynch.
The ugly part of his record is the court one. In 2020 he pleaded guilty to misdemeanour domestic battery over a 2017 incident at a Palm Springs hotel bar, where he was accused of grabbing his girlfriend by the hair. The charge had been reduced from a felony, and he got three years of probation and a 52-week course. Back in 2015 he was arrested in New York after a hotel-room dispute, with police alleging choking, and he pleaded guilty only to misdemeanour criminal mischief.
His last weeks were messy. A contractor renovating his home, Stephen Britton, alleged in a court filing that Brendon swore at and threw objects at his workers and that an AirTag tracked him. Brendon admitted putting the tag in the contractor's bag but said he didn't know what it was, denied stalking or harassing him, and said “I don't threaten people.” A judge dismissed the contractor's protection-order bid, and Brendon had his own suit pending over the unfinished work when he died.
On the harm test, we found nothing. No attacks on LGBTQ+ people, no anti-vax or climate-denial slide, no culture-war grifting. When Joss Whedon was accused by his former co-star Charisma Carpenter in 2021, Brendon said “I mean, were there transgressions? Yeah, there were.” He also said he loved and supported Carpenter very much, though he still said he loved Whedon too. The record is thin rather than spotless, but there is no pattern of harm to point to.
Variety reported that after Hulu passed on a Buffy revival this March, he went on a Facebook livestream and criticised Sarah Michelle Gellar, saying she betrayed him by doing a sequel without him. Not his finest moment, but a hurt actor venting is not the same as harm. His family's farewell was warm: they called him “passionate, sensitive, and endlessly driven to create.”
The good stuff is real but short on hard detail. In recent years he turned to painting and art, which he shared with family, friends and fans. Co-stars including Alyson Hannigan paid tribute after his death. We couldn't confirm named charity work from the pages we opened, so that's honestly the whole list.