Tell us what’s happening to all the other characters in season three
Cordelia Chase is almost 180 degrees a different character than she was. She’s still very blunt, a tad vain and very funny, but she now has these tremendous visions that are literally killing her and she’s become a bit of a superhero herself.
I don’t think she can go back be an actress in commercials and want all these shallow things that she wanted before, so she’s really changing, and I think that Angel will be taking a hard second look at her, a kind of look that he’s never taken before.
There is also a wonderful new character named Fred, played by Amy Acker. At the end of the second season, in the last four episodes, all our characters were transported to this other dimension. A dimension in which Angel could walk in the sun and was a noble warrior, except that when he turned into a vampire, he turned into a hideous terrible beast who wanted to kill everything.
[It was also] a dimension in which Wesley was a great general but had to learn to send men to their death, and in the midst of which Cordelia was a fabulous princess. They all got what they’ve always wanted, but there was a terrible twist to that thing.
Fred was a girl who’d been a grad student in physics and had been sucked in this dimension, [where] all humans are slaves. So she became a runaway, living in a cave, out of her mind and scribbling on the walls. Angel rescued her from this dimension and brought her back, so in year three you’ll be seeing Fred, who's a pretty loony girl [after being] locked away in a cave for five years, but charming, funny, wonderful, [with] a big puppy-love crush on Angel.
Both Wesley and Gunn have feelings towards Fred. Angel may realise he has some feelings for Cordelia but they will probably never get expressed because other things will get in the way. Everybody’s moving on, growing up, their lives getting more complicated, with lots more pain.
Gunn is a character who grew up on the streets and really didn’t have his parents much after 13 or 14. This is a guy who never expected to live past 25. Very early on in the season he’ll be dealing with "How can I be working with a vampire when vampires killed my sister?" He really has to come to grips with "Who am I? Where do I belong and why am I even still alive?"
