Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Naughtiest Couple Hooked Up In Real Life

By Chris Snellgrove | Published

Beyond all the cool action scenes and creature feature frights, one of the best things about Buffy the Vampire Slayer was all the romantic melodrama with our favorite characters. In their own way, Buffy’s naughtiest couple was Xander and Willow, the childhood besties who only realized their feelings for each other after they both started dating other people. This led to a messy affair that seems like it spilled out into the real world: according to Willow actor Alyson Hannigan, she and Xander actor Nicholas Brendon once hooked up.

Xander And Willow Hook Up For Real

The revelation that this naughty Buffy couple hooked up in real life came when Hannigan appeared on the Bravo TV show Watch What Happens Live. During that show, host Andy Cohen gave the actor a very provocative command: “tell us one Buffy on-set hook-up we did not yet know about.” In response, she provided an equally provocative answer: “I think Nick [Brendon] and I might have kissed once, like off camera.”

For Buffy fans who cheered on Willow and Xander as the show’s naughtiest (and nicest) couple, this tea is understandably surprising. After all, the show made it clear that their characters weren’t meant to be together…not only was Willow later revealed to be a lesbian, but Xander met the love of his life (and almost wife…curse you, season 6) Anya in that same season. Therefore, there aren’t nearly as many fans who wanted these respective actors to hook up as there are, say, fans who wanted to see Sarah Michelle Gellar and her brooding onscreen beau David Boreanaz hook up in real life.

However, few Buffy fans can deny that Hannigan and Brendon’s characters made for a cute couple during their naughty little affair. Part of that came from the show’s whip-smart writing, of course, but part of it came from the actors’ killer chemistry. It sounds like that chemistry led to a kiss and maybe something a bit more: in the interview with Cohen, Hannigan followed up on the bombshell admission of kissing Brendon in real life by breezily declaring, “He might have had a boob or something.”

In the tangled world of Buffy gossip, learning that the show’s unlikeliest onscreen couple had a brief hookup offscreen is relatively wholesome. The gossip is sometimes a bit nastier. For example, during Watch What Happens Live, she told Cohen that her costar and titular hero Sarah Michelle Gellar began hating the show during season 3. She emphasized that this was because Gellar was balancing these acting duties with a burgeoning big-screen career and the pressures of fame, but her words led to years of rumors that Hannigan and Gellar had a nasty and ongoing feud.

Speaking of Buffy couples, while Alyson Hannigan and Nicholas Brendon only hooked up the one time, the How I Met Your Mother actor ended up getting quite serious with another actor from her vampire slaying days. Hannigan eventually married Alexis Denisof, who guest-starred in Buffy as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce before becoming a regular on the spinoff show Angel. From fooling around with her onscreen affair partner to marrying a prim and proper Watcher, it seems like Hannigan emulates Willow in one important way: she’s very seldom naughty.

Source: Us Weekly

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