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Taken from the UK Buffy magazine November 2004
That's why the Lady is a Vamp

Drusilla may have made her final appearance in the Buffyverse, but that doesn't mean things are going to be less busy for the actress who played the vamp for seven years. Buffy magazine caught up with Juliet Landau to discuss Buffy, Angel and what the future holds from now on.
Juliet Landau likes to keep herself busy. Whenever Buffy magazine catches up with her, she always has a wealth of new projects to talk about, and usually an appearance or two in the Buffyverse to discuss. As we sit down in the green room at the UK Starfury Fusion event in Blackpool, the actress is bubbling over with as much enthusiasm as ever about the work she's doing. Although she is upset that Angel has come to an end, Juliet is very pleased that she had an opportunity to make some more appearnaces on the show before it finished. Her final episode, "The Girl In Question", has aired, and she's more than happy to discuss it. "It's still flashback stuff,"she explains. "It's set, I believe in Italy in 1894 and then in 1950. What's fun about "The Girl In Question" is that Julie benz, David Boreanaz, James Marsters and I were back playing together again. Julie and I- or rather Darla and Drusilla- have supposedly had this torrid affair with this power called The Immortal. The boys come in, and are very jealous becuase we've engaged in a threesome with The Immortal, and we've never done that with them. They have the banter back and forth between them about us not ever having let them do that-it's quite a funny scene actually." Of course, everything has been filmed so as not to offend the audience. "Nothing was shown,"Juliet reveals, "although Julie was changing in the scene. It's all very tastefully done- you just see her from the back." Juliet admits that it remained a joy to return to the Buffy and Angel universe right the way to the very end. "It really is so much fun," she laughs. "I would have loved to come back to the modern day, but it really has been especially lovely and so much fun doing the period stuff. I had all these wonderful long hair extensions and a beautiful night gown for the 19th century scenes, and then for the 1950's stuff, we did a great hair-do, and I wore pedal pushers." By the time she filmed "The Girl In Question", everyone on the cast and crew was well aware that the production on Angel would be finishing a few weeks later. Juliet admits that she was surprised when she heard that the WB wasn't continuing the show. "It was a bit surprising becuase of the fact that the ratings hadn;t sipped," she points out. "And it had just hit the 100th episode mark." As far as she is concerned, there definitely are avenues that the series could have gone down, both in terms or production and creativity. "It certainly seems like it," she says. "There's been this whole campaign in terms of saving it, and possibly having it moved to a different neetwork, and all of that, but separate from that, there's been this whole buzz of whether they'll do a few "movies of the week" or whether they could possibly even do a feature film. We will see what happens but who knows what Joss (Whedon) has in store- if he does have something in store...The actress looks fondly on three specific episodes out of the copulr of dozen in which she appeared as Drusilla. "These three I really had the most fun doing, and am most fond of," she explains. ""School Hard", the introuductory episode for Spike and I, was great because it was out first, and we had so much fun exploring these characters for the first time. It was an incredibly creative process. The second one is "Suprise", the 13th episode of Buffy's second season, where my character goes from weak and dying to getting renewed strength, and becomes powerful. That was such a great arc and change, that transformation. We kept referring to the party as my "coming out party"- it made that whole episode really fun." Her final fond memory is of her appearance in Angel's "Reunion". "Julie benz and I teamed up in present day LA," she recalls. "There was some really terrific stuff in there for an actor, getting to play with those things." She doesn't think that there's much she wanted to do with Drusilla that didn't turn up in the scripts at some point. "They gave me great stuff to do," she says. "There definitely always seemed to be a lot of possibilities to be explored. Spike and Drusilla never got back together in the present day, though. I always had some feeling that possibly we might- we'd been together for 200 years. But, of course, Spike fell for Buffy, with all that entailed for the direction of the show. "Too bad, that direction," the actress shrugs. No matter what period the flashbacks took place, Juliet always made sure she did some research about that era. "I always do, no matter what it is that I'm working on," she says. "I love to do research, I really do. You come across stuff, and it gives you ideas- and it puts you in the right world, so I'll always at least look at images. I have a number of books about the teen years, the 1920s and other period books that I can look at for images, and I have books of etiquette and manners from different times." Her dedication to research showed in her recent appearance on the US drama Strong Medicine, in which she played a "schizophrenic character who goes off her medication and is fighting to keep custody of her daughter. I did so much research withtin the week that I had to prepare for the role. I went to the library, got books and videotapes, met a friend of the family who's battled schizophrenia, talked to a doctor at one of the main psychiatric hospitals in Los Angeles for a couple of hours and with a pharmacist about the different medications and the different side effects. Whatever role I'm doing, I have to do that."As well as various guest star roles on TV series during the past season, Juliet also has two films in cinemas. "I have a starring role in Tobe Hooper's new film, The Toolbox Murders," she says. "Tobe is wonderful to work with- he directed the original Poltergeist and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and of course, he's worked with Julie Benz on Taken. He's such a master of that sort of film, and it made my character very different. I also have the film that Henry Jaglan directed, Going Shopping, coming out in the States in August. I just saw a rough cut of that, and it looks great. It's all improvised and I had a great time, although it's interesting that a lot of the stuff I shot is not in the film, which is a shame. The stuff that is there makes an interesting character, definitely different from Drusilla. Like most actors, Juliet is cagey when talking about anything that isn't signed and sealed, although she does reveal that, "I'm waitint to hear on a film right now where I really like the director." However, she's more open about returning to her stage roots. "I'm just involved with a group of people who are starting a theatre company in Los Angeles," she says. "It's a really wonderful group of actors- a lot from the Actor's Studio, and a lot from other places. We're getting together and it's been a theatre full of really talented people. It seems like we're going to come up with a number of new productions in the coming year. We're probably going to do a mixture of new and established material. We're trying to look more for new material, in terms of exciting and really relevant to now, but we're also talking about doing a murder mystery evening, and a play called The Pushcart Peddlers which was one of the first plays that I ever did. Juliet's careers with Mutant Enemy Productions stretches back to the early part of Buffy's second season right the way up to the end of Angel's fifth, making her one of the few people to see the few productions through much of their history. As a regular guest star, she was able to judge how the shows changed, both in terms of their atmosphere and also their methods of production. "The atmosphere has pretty much stayed the same since the beginning,"she points out. "It's a creative environment, which I really love to come back into, and it's fun to work with all those people. I think that has definitely evolved- all good shows do that. They have changed and evolve into something different, just as in life, things happen. I think that's one of the reasons why Buffy and Angel had such longevity. They did take things in different directions than expected. Things like the relationship between Willow and Tara weren't neccessarily thought of at the interception of the show. It definitely kept the shows fresh- right to the very end."