Hannigan’s penchant for making potentially off-putting lines sound adorable is perhaps her biggest strength as an actor, and it’s part of what landed her a gig as Lily in “How I Met Your Mother” eight years later. Her strength in the role revealed itself as quickly as the pilot, in a scene where Ted (Josh Radnor) is defending himself for not kissing Robin (Coby Smulders) when she was probably giving him the signal to kiss her. “Aww, Ted that’s so sweet,” Lily tells him, “So you chickened out like a little b***h.” It’s a line that should’ve been mean, uncalled for, and deeply judgmental, but thanks to Hannigan’s delivery, it just sounds charming.
You can see plenty of Willow in Lily throughout the early seasons of “HIMYM,” and that goes beyond how both characters probably would’ve been explicitly bisexual if they’d been written today. The things that made Willow so great in season 1 of “Buffy” shine through the most in season 2 of “HIMYM,” when Lily is broken up with Marshall, stuck in a terrible apartment, and forced to make peace with how she’s failed at her life-long dream to be an artist. By all accounts, this is one of the worst periods of Lily’s life, but Hannigan depicts it all with that same unflinching optimism she gave Willow.
Hannigan’s one of the most successful TV actors of her generation, and so much of it comes back to her early audition choice to improve on the script she was given. “It was a funny line, and [creator Joss Whedon] didn’t even know there was a joke there,” Hannigan recalled. “I made the right choice.”