By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
In the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hair color serves as an easy way to tell who’s who. For example, out of the show’s initial trio of female characters, leading lady Buffy is a bold blonde, Cordelia is a brashy brunette, and Willow is a reserved redhead. However, Willow actor Alyson Hannigan later revealed that all three ladies originally had the same shade of hair and she jumped at Joss Whedon’s offer to give one member of this tantalizing trio red hair.
Willow Chose Her Hair Color
Whedon hadn’t run any shows before Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he was savvy enough even back then to know that audiences needed easy ways to distinguish characters from one another. According to Buffy star Alyson Hannigan, her Willow character only got her iconic red hair color after Whedon expressed concerns that she, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Charisma Carpenter all had, “kind of the same shade” of brown hair. He asked “Does anyone want to be red,” and Hannigan says that she, “went for it.”
While the Buffy showrunner may not have been thinking this far ahead, giving Willow red hair color was a perfect choice for her character. Culturally speaking, red hair has often been associated with being wild, uninhibited, and even surprisingly violent. In the early seasons of the show, though, Willow was nothing like this, with her character coming across as the archetypal wallflower geek of the series.
Why, then, was the Buffy showrunner’s decision to give Willow a red hair color so perfect? She basically comes out of her shell throughout the course of the series, something foreshadowed by a Season 3 episode where she encountered a vampire version of herself from a different dimension.
That version was a seductive leather mommy who used sex as a weapon, and while entertainingly over-the-top, this incarnation of Willow was much closer to the persistent stereotype of redheads as seductive enchantresses. Willow’s auburn mane made her vampire version’s personality and wardrobe that much more convincing, and her hair color was that much more perfect as her human self slowly became a bit more like her vampire self.
While Buffy the Vampire Slayer never put regular Willow in her vampire version’s domme outfit outside of that one episode, her red hair also helped sell some of her later, vampire-adjacent plot developments. She jokingly tells her girlfriend Tara that she’s “not large with the butch,” but in their relationship dynamic, Tara becomes more of the mousy girl that Willow was in Season 1, and Willow becomes a take-charge witch reveling in her growing power. And those stereotypes about redheads being violent certainly seem borne out when Willow becomes the Big Bad of Season 6 (though in fairness, her hair turns black when she’s fully evil).
Does this mean that Buffy the Vampire Slayer Joss Whedon planned all of these character moments and plot developments when Alyson Hannigan jumped at the chance for red hair color? Of course not. Even the biggest fans of the show can admit that much of this was developed on the fly, which is a large part of why Season 6 was such a hot mess that was barely saved by the musical episodes and Willow’s witchy heel turn. Nonetheless, the red hair ended up being perfect for her character, and it’s only fitting that everything magically worked out when it comes to our favorite onscreen witch.
