Great Fictional Villains: Angelus

Poor David Boreanaz. Allegedly hired for the part of Angel, brooding boyfriend to heroine Buffy Summers, because his good looks charmed female members of Joss Whedon’s production team, the inexperienced actor looked incredibly awkward during the early days of the soon-to-be cult show. Playing a supposedly immortal being, a predatory, angsty vampire with a perspective beyond the comprehension of any ordinary mortal, was always going to be a tall order, and for all his mysterious moping early-period Angel frequently came across as nothing more than A Guy. Just A Guy, with a penchant for billowy coats, an impressively firm jawline and some boundary issues, but not really convincing as one of the most powerful and infamous vampires in the Buffyverse.

Of course, Boreanaz eventually blossomed into the role and became a decent, if never quite Brando-calibre actor, but when he made a shocking return to evil in Buffy’s second season you could be forgiven for having misgivings about his ability to portray an even more far-out character; the inhumanly sadistic Angelus (really nothing more than Angel with his conscience, self-restraint, and drive towards virtue stripped away). It was a pleasant surprise, then, when he ironically turned out to be far better at portraying Angel’s unrepentantly evil persona than his tortured and self-loathing one. His Angelus doesn’t only commit some of the most hateful acts of any villain during the show’s run (more for their emotional impact than their apocalyptic scale); his smirking, menacingly intense performance puts him across as the sort of warped personality capable of committing such enormities.  

Angelus is basically the Ultimate Stalker. In Season Two the temporary loss of his soul curdles his frantic infatuation with Buffy into a murderous obsession, presenting the fledging Slayer with a terrible challenge and a painfully intimate threat; she has to destroy the man she loves, aware that he is being compelled by an inherently evil nature but still shocked by the savage extremes to which he takes their love affair-turned-vendetta. The Mayor may have been cooler, but Angel’s brutal regression to his soulless past was the most personal evil Buffy ever faced, forcing her to battle through her own emotional turmoil as much as Evil Angel’s minions and assassins.

Angelus’ creepy fixation on Buffy added dramatic spice to the plot arc of the Second Season, but it was clear that even without his particular obsession, he was still an all-purpose figure of dread. The average Buffyverse vampire is a brute predator, a creature of violent instincts that has to be put down. Young Liam of Galway’s vampiric persona took this further, standing out through his love of cold-blooded and calculated torture, wracking the minds and bodies of luckless mortals and even his fellow blood-suckers at every opportunity. This implies that the demonic essence that shaped human into vampire only brought out some latent capacity for cruelty and manipulation in the young man; a disturbing notion for modern-day, repentant Angel to deal with.

Buffy was eventually able to defeat Angelus without destroying him. He returned to goodness after having his soul magically restored even as he was cast into a nameless hell. Spat out of the inferno in mysterious circumstances, he ended his dysfunctional relationship with Buffy and struck out for LA, starting his own spin-off show as a professional do-gooder on the mean streets of the City of Angels. The threat of the return of Angelus hung over Angel’s early seasons, a prospect I often secretly looked forward to, as Angelus’ happy-go-lucky approach to mayhem and death had an element of deviant fun missing from Angel’s sulky celibacy and admittedly adorable social awkwardness. Yet even though Angelus did get the occasional brief comeback (before the Dark Side was inevitably subdued by Angel’s firmly-established heroic persona once more) he never topped the sheer viciousness of his earliest appearances.