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Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans are pretty tough — and many built up a tolerance to death after hero Buffy Summers took down one vampire after the next from 1997 to 2003. However, one death is still haunting viewers 25 years after it aired.
The surprise passing of Buffy’s (Sarah Michelle Gellar) mom, Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland), during season 5, episode 16, “The Body,” shook fans — and the entire Sunnydale Scooby Gang.
The episode aired in February 2001, bringing grief to the forefront of mainstream TV and rocking the Buffy universe for decades to come. The ripple effect of a human death on a supernatural show is still one that TV lovers talk about.
“It was really heavy,” Sutherland exclusively says in the latest issue of Us Weekly of the pivotal moment the slayer discovers her mother after she’s suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.
Scroll down for a look back at the memorable Buffy episode — and why “The Body” still resonates with Us and actress Sutherland — 25 years later:
Who Was Involved?
Creator Joss Whedon cowrote the episode with Rebecca Kirshner and Steven S. DeKnight. Of the cast — which also featured fan-favorite characters like Buffy’s sister, Dawn (the late Michelle Trachtenberg), and one of her BFFs Willow (Alyson Hannigan) — only Kristine Sutherland was in the loop ahead of time.
“Joss asked me to tell no one, so I told no one,” Sutherland tells Us, adding that the exact timing of her character’s death was even a mystery to the actress. “Knowing that I was going to die but not exactly when, it made the whole rest of [my time filming] so bittersweet.”
Why We Remember It
Buffy fans were used to death — the entire series revolves around Buffy taking out bad vamps with stakes — but Joyce’s passing was sudden, unexpected and personal. The human death left a lasting mark on everyone involved.
“I tried so hard to talk him out of it,” Sarah Michelle Gellar told Entertainment Weekly in 2017 about her reaction to Joss Whedon’s decision to kill off Joyce. “I was not happy about it.”
Kristine Sutherland tells Us, “It felt like somebody had died” on set when the time came to shoot Joyce’s death scenes. “There was this real heaviness.”
Key Details
The episode begins with Buffy coming home and finding Joyce’s lifeless body on the couch. “It was just so emotional,” Kristine Sutherland remembers about that opening scene, noting that it was “really freaky” when actors playing EMTs lifted her into a body bag and transported her to the morgue.
Sutherland was also spray-painted with grayish-blue makeup to give her that just-died pallor, she says. The “toughest part emotionally” for her, however, was having to lay on the couch and hear Buffy “come in the door and go, ‘Mom.’”
“Tears were running down my face,” Sutherland tells Us, adding that the sound of silence used throughout the episode powerfully reminded viewers that for the characters, “the world just stopped” when Joyce died.
Handout/Getty Images Earlier this week, Us Weekly confirmed the cult classic television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in talks for a revival, and now, Sarah Michelle Gellar who played the titular role of Buffy Summers more than 20 years ago, is breaking her silence. Gellar, who has been adamantly against a reboot for years, confirms […]
The Aftermath
Kristine Sutherland recalls having a sense of “honor” about being part of a TV episode that went on to “reverberate internationally.”
The story was personal for her: “I lost my boyfriend when I was 16,” she says. “I remember those feelings so clearly because I had no concept of death. It was such an enormous thing to grasp as a young person.”
She’s since seen how episodes like “The Body” can help with grieving especially at a young age. “All these young people over the years have come up to me and gone, ‘I lost my mother, I lost my father, and this episode helped me to deal with that and understand it,’” Sutherland shares. (Rolling Stone ranks “The Body” as one of the top 10 best Buffy episodes of all time and The Guardian has it in the top five.)
A New Perspective
At the time of the episode’s airing in 2001, grief and loss weren’t such common themes on hit TV shows. Now with series like Six Feet Under, This Is Us and A Million Little Things in the rearview, it’s easy to see the impact of “The Body.”
“It gets me every time,” Kristine Sutherland says of the bone-chilling installment. It’s “every bit as relevant today,” she adds.
Where Are They Now?
Joyce appeared in flashbacks and dream sequences during seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy, appeasing fans who missed her. Kristine Sutherland, for her part, continued to work in TV and film following her role as one of TV’s favorite moms of the ‘90s, including starring on One Life to Live in 2010 and Russian Doll in 2016. She’s also a proud grandmother who “really looks forward” to showing Buffy to her grandkids.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, meanwhile, is currently executive producing a revival for Hulu — Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale — alongside Dolly Parton and Oscar-nominated Hamnet director Chloé Zhao. “I feel very lucky,” Gellar exclusively told Us about the project in 2025.
Sutherland is also proud of how far her TV daughter has come, calling Gellar a “fierce warrior.” She recalls how the actress would “command the set” even as a teenager. “I learned a lot from her. I really did,” Sutherland tells Us.
