Alyson Hannigan Took A Chance In Her Buffy Audition That Changed Willow's Character Forever
On paper, Willow in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" pilot was fairly one-note. She was a straightforward nerdy, downtrodden character with a predictable arc of growing more confident through her friendship with Buffy. When actor Alyson Hannigan read through her lines for the first time, she actually found the character somewhat off-putting. "I was reading the lines, and it was just sort of depressing," she explained in an official 2017 Watcher's Guide for the show. "[Willow] was saying, 'Oh, boys don't like me, and this and that, and I can't really speak around guys.' I just didn't want to feel sorry for her. How are [viewers] going to like her if they're saying, 'Oh, look at her feeling sorry for herself?'"
It's a reasonable critique; as the Dawn haters of later "Buffy" seasons can attest, there's nothing more annoying than a seemingly whiny, self-pitying character, even if she technically doesn't do anything evil. Hannigan's solution to this potential problem was to take one of Willow's most depressing lines and turn it into something vaguely triumphant. There's a scene in the pilot where Willow's talking about her kindergarten relationship with Xavier, where they broke up because he stole her Barbie. When Buffy asks if she ever got the Barbie back, Willow says, "Most of it." As Hannigan explained:
"I thought, you know what, I'm gonna make that a really happy thing. I was so proud that I got most of my Barbie back. And then that clued in how I was going to play the rest of the scene. It defines the character. That was the one line that triggered it. Then I went back and said, 'Okay, now how can I play the whole scene like that?' And it really helped me."
From Willow to Lily
Hannigan's penchant for making potentially off-putting lines sound adorable is perhaps her biggest strength as an actor, and it's part of what landed her a gig as Lily in "How I Met Your Mother" eight years later. Her strength in the role revealed itself as quickly as the pilot, in a scene where Ted (Josh Radnor) is defending himself for not kissing Robin (Coby Smulders) when she was probably giving him the signal to kiss her. "Aww, Ted that's so sweet," Lily tells him, "So you chickened out like a little b***h." It's a line that should've been mean, uncalled for, and deeply judgmental, but thanks to Hannigan's delivery, it just sounds charming.
You can see plenty of Willow in Lily throughout the early seasons of "HIMYM," and that goes beyond how both characters probably would've been explicitly bisexual if they'd been written today. The things that made Willow so great in season 1 of "Buffy" shine through the most in season 2 of "HIMYM," when Lily is broken up with Marshall, stuck in a terrible apartment, and forced to make peace with how she's failed at her life-long dream to be an artist. By all accounts, this is one of the worst periods of Lily's life, but Hannigan depicts it all with that same unflinching optimism she gave Willow.
Hannigan's one of the most successful TV actors of her generation, and so much of it comes back to her early audition choice to improve on the script she was given. "It was a funny line, and [creator Joss Whedon] didn't even know there was a joke there," Hannigan recalled. "I made the right choice."