Camden Toy as one of the Gentlemen on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER | design by Optic Nerve / photo courtesy Optic Nerve

HellmouthCon 2026: A BUFFY Celebration at Sunnydale High will be held June 13-14 at Torrance High School in Torrance, California, where Sunnydale High was shot for the first three seasons of the Joss Whedon-created BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. Presented by Fandom Charities Inc. & Hellmouth Events, this is the third consecutive year at the high school venue for Hellmouth Con, which also celebrates all things regarding the BUFFY spinoff ANGEL and a few things FIREFLY.

The guest roster for this year includes actors Amber Benson (Tara on BUFFY), Amy Acker (Fred and Illyria on ANGEL), Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia on BUFFY and ANGEL), Clare Kramer (Glory on BUFFY), Doug Jones (a Gentleman on BUFFY, plus Saru on STAR TREK: DISCOVERY and a host of other high-profile credits), Emma Caulfield (Anya on BUFFY), J. August Richards (Charles Gunn on ANGEL), James C. Leary (Clem on BUFFY), Julie Benz (Darla on BUFFY and ANGEL), Iyari Limon (Kennedy on BUFFY), Larry Bagby (Larry on BUFFY), Mark Lutz (the Groosalugg on ANGEL), and Stephanie Romanov (Lilah on ANGEL), plus behind-the-scenes personnel. For more information on guests and tickets, go to fandomcharities.org/hellmouthcon.

Marsia Powers, founder and president of Fandom Charities and director of Guest and Sponsor relations for HellmouthCon, says that three of this year’s charity beneficiaries are the Al Wooten Youth Center, Rainbow Spaces for LGBTQIA+ Youth, and PanCAN. “We always will be supporting the Al Wooten Youth Center. The money we raise goes to the Ron Glass Memorial Scholarship Fund for kids to be able to go to college. they get a piece of it. We also are raising money [starting in 2025[,for PanCAN, which is the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, in memory of Camden Toy.”

Toy died of pancreatic cancer in 2023. On BUFFY, he played a Gentleman, Gnarl, and the original Ubervamp, and on ANGEL, he played the Nosferatu-like Prince of Lies. Powers describes Toy was “a supporter of Fandom Charities and his fans from Day One.” A memorial panel for him is scheduled at at the 2026 Hellmouth Con.

Powers estimates that, including volunteers and vendors, there were over 1,200 people at HellmouthCon 2025. Fans came from all over the U.S., as well as Canada, Europe, and Australia. So, what was it like?

At Hellmouth Con 2025, there is multi-track programming. Attendees can choose from panels about the show moderated by other fans, such as Release Your Inner Badass, Navigating the Creative Output in Today’s Social Media Landscape, Hellmouth Media Queer Creators Take the Mic, BUFFY Password, and much more.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER – Season 2 DVD | © 20th Century Fox

Alternatively, fans can attend or play mix-and-match with Q&A sessions with BUFFY and ANGEL actors and creative staff, including ANGEL co-creator/writer/producer/director David Greenwalt, comic book artist George Jeanty, James Marsters (Spike on BUFFY and ANGEL), Juliet Landau (Drusilla on BUFFY and ANGEL), Christian Kane (Lindsey on ANGEL), Armin Shimerman (Principal Snyder on BUFFY), D.B. Woodside (Principal Wood on BUFFY), Harry Groener (the Mayor on BUFFY), Keith Szarabajka (Daniel Holtz on ANGEL), Ken Lerner (Principal Flutie on BUFFY), Caulfield, Benson, and Romanov, in addition to numerous others.

Most of the convention guests are also available for photographs, autographs, and “special fan experiences,” where attendees can talk with them in smaller groups at greater length.

There is also an enormous vendor marketplace in the high school gymnasium, where photos, t-shirts, toys and other memorabilia are available for purchase.

A Q&A with Marsters and Landau, moderated by Landau’s husband Deverill Weekes, begins with Marsters asking the audience to stand up so he can record them with his cellphone. The has been reported on extensively elsewhere, but a highlight of this was Landau explaining that in her audition for Drusilla, who Angel had driven mad before turning her, she started talking to the ceiling, which she believes got her the role. Marsters says he was meanwhile preparing for his own audition in the hallway, which he did by going into a Shakespeare soliloquy. Seeing this before actually meeting Marsters, Landau says she was thrown, thinking, “Why is this guy talking to a wall? He’s not auditioning for Drusilla …”

Benson, herself the author of both the DEATH’S DAUGHTER and THE WITCHES OF ECHO PARK franchises, is here to publicly interview writer Raven Belasco about her BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels; Benson narrates the audiobook editions. Belasco says she wanted to create a global world of vampires and for her protagonist, Noosh, “to be a big old nerd, but also to kick ass.” Benson observes that BUFFY is an iconic show that changed how vampires could be shown and written about.

In the evening, there is a concert, with Marsters and Kane taking turns playing songs. These are mostly their own compositions, although Kane also plays “L.A. Song,” written by Greenwalt for Kane’s character Lindsey to perform on ANGEL. Kane gives a shoutout to Greenwalt, who is in the audience.

On Sunday, there are more Q&As and fan panels. Landau runs a trivia contest for the audience of her podcast REVAMPED WITH JULIET LANDAU, with contestants coming in person and on Zoom from all over. Among the prizes are a Blu-ray edition of Landau and Weekes’s narrative feature A PLACE AMONG THE DEAD.

A villains panel with Groener, Kane, Marsters, Romanov, and Szarabajka has the panelists teasing each other and the audience.

Szarabajka stands up for his character Holtz, who kidnapped Angel’s infant son. He questions his billing on the panel. “Angel killed my wife and my infant baby, and turned my daughter, and I’m the villain?”

Kane quips, “You’ve said that twice now. I think you need therapy.”

Marsters contributes, “I find that if I’m acting out of a sense of ‘I’m the hero,’ or ‘I’m the victim,’ I can do anything.”

Romanov observes, “My character was bad, and she’d sold her soul. Why did she sell her soul? Maybe we don’t think about why we’re trying to do good, but we’re trying not to do bad.”

Groener found some good in the Mayor – whose main goal was to become a giant snake demon – when Eliza Dushku’s Faith character arrived in Season 3. “Something changes in him when Faith enters the picture.” He was happy he got to see the maquette of the snake.

Marsters was surprised he wasn’t killed off at some point on BUFFY. “At the start of every season, the producers would say, ‘We have no idea what to do with you.’ Marsters talks about the choices his character Victor makes on the Hulu MARVEL’S RUNAWAYS series, where he gets Earth-saving help from an alien – who unfortunately eats teenagers. “What is the price of your conscience?”

Romanov appreciates this philosophical question. The arc she says she never saw coming was Lilah’s affair with normally righteous Wesley (Alexis Denisof).

Kane reveals that he auditioned for the role of Buffy’s human boyfriend Riley, ultimately played by Marc Blucas, before being cast as Lindsey on ANGEL. He points out that, other than David Boreanaz, “I was the only guy who was in the first episode and the last episode.”

Because the final episode of ANGEL was top secret, Kane adds, “The day ANGEL was canceled, Joss said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ They filmed it two months ahead [of the shooting of the rest of the finale] at four AM. Nobody knew.”

At some point on Sunday, Marsters takes time out of his incredibly crowded convention schedule to talk with ASSIGNMENT X.

Even though Spike was introduced in BUFFY Season 2 Episode 3, “School Hard,” which takes place primarily at the high school, all of his scenes there were indoors.

Therefore, Marsters says with a laugh, “I had never been here before. We had done interiors on the soundstages, but I’d never shot at the high school. And it is more impressive than I thought it would be. It looks great on film. I can really see why both 90210 and BUFFY wanted to shoot here. And apparently [Torrance High School] was able to refurbish their auditorium with the money that BUFFY paid to rent it out.”

Regarding the concert, Marsters says that he and Kane didn’t perform any songs as a duo, because “Christian had just got in from Serbia. So, there was no time, no way to rehearse.”

Doing the concert together, Marsters feels, was “absolutely fabulous. I had played with Christian numerous times on set in our trailers, and that’s fun, but I’d never heard him on a microphone before. It’s a whole different technical thing to sing on a mic, and then live without a mic. And Christian is so good. He’s so subtle, his intonation is so perfect and he moves around notes so cleanly and so quickly. He’s just amazing.”

If Marsters had known while doing BUFFY and ANGEL that he’d still be talking about the shows and Spike over two decades later, would he have done anything differently at the time – maybe taken notes?

“No, I wouldn’t do a thing differently. I suspected that the show was going to last while we were filming, because I am a STAR TREK fan, and I know what it’s like to love a show, even when you know what the dialogue is and when you know what the plot is, and still want to go back to that world. For STAR TREK, I wanted to go back to a world where the human race had learned to stop trying to dominate each other and started to try to support each other and tolerate difference. And that was a real draw. And BUFFY is a world that has someone in it that just doesn’t give up and tries to help. And that’s a good world, too, to go back to.”

This jibes with Powers’s vision for Fandom Charities and for HellmouthCon. “We put on a fantastic event, but because we’re a charity organization, we’re not able to hire a marketing company. So, anyone who knows any company that would like to be involved with sponsorship or getting the word out, it would be wonderful. We still get people who say, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea,’ and we’d love people to be able to say, ‘Not only did I know everything about Fandom Charities and what they do, I knew about the HellmouthCon, and that we were able to be involved with it, and have fun at the same time.’ Because that’s what our goal is – to have fun while doing good works.”

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Article: HELLMOUTHCON 2025 Profile:  Con report, interviews w/BUFFY/ANGEL actor James Marsters, Fandom Charities founder Marsia Powers and more

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