“I think I felt a bit lost,” Carpenter said when asked about the process of embodying the new Cordelia. “Because the description of Cordelia and the scenes were the world-weary, kind of doom and gloom.” In “Slayers,” Cordy 2.0 spends a good amount of time with a new main timeline slayer named Indira (Laya DeLeon Hayes), who’s a chipper slayer superfan in a post-“Buffy” world that has multiple slayers at once. In contrast, Cordelia is a bit more cynical. “How do I play this embattled slayer, who’s living their purpose and sees it really as the burden that it is — taking on the big bad — and infusing that with the Cordelia from before, which is sassy and witty and pithy and all those superficial things?” Carpenter recalled asking herself. “How do I balance them?”
The actor called the characterization “an interesting dilemma to figure out,” and noted that she “spent a lot of time with Christopher and Amber, stressed, going, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.'” The new show is ambitious, allowing several of its characters to evolve in unexpected ways rather than stay the same — even if the latter option would pander to longtime fans. “I didn’t think it was possible to bring more layers to Cordelia,” Carpenter admitted to Variety, “because I feel like she went through so much in terms of her character arc from beginning to end.”
